Condemning the "Riff-Raff"

with John McWhorter

Is it okay to rob someone at gunpoint? Is it okay to burglarize your neighbor’s home? It it okay to fire a weapon out a car window? Clearly the answers are, respectively, “No, no, and no.” Anyone, any “thug,” who engages in such behavior should be viewed as what they are: a threat to the community. If they get caught by the police, they may face legal consequences and incarceration. But all too often in inner city black communities, they’re met with disproportionately mild rebukes from the very people whose well-being they threaten.

As I say below, echoing the late great Stanley Crouch, imagine that such behavior put one beyond the pale as a sexual partner. Imagine if “thugs” just couldn’t get laid. In such an instance, lack of sex would send a strong, clear social signal about what kind of behavior is acceptable to the community and what kind is not. It would stigmatize anyone who violated the community’s standards in a way that mere words cannot. When crime committed by young black men is met with the response, “No, they shouldn’t do that, but they’re not really responsible for their actions because of historical oppression and systemic racism,” the signal gets distorted. The line between the acceptable and the unacceptable gets blurred.

I don’t mean to suggest that withholding sex is the best way to send the right signal. It’s probably not a realistic strategy. The point is that, without strong social disincentives against criminal behavior, excuse-making and hand-waving about racism tacitly condones the behavior it pretends to condemn. As I say in the following excerpt from my recent subscriber-only Q&A session with John, that’s simply not good enough. The line between right-living and wrong-living not only needs to be drawn, it needs to be enforced. And the only ones who can properly enforce it are now, too often, the ones who allow free passage from one side of that line to the other.

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This is an excerpt from a subscriber-only Q&A session. To see the full episode and get access to much more content and other benefits, click below to become a subscriber.

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GLENN LOURY: This question comes from someone whose initials are GJR. GJR writes,

My question is about the sharp divergence between how mainstream white and black communities tend to regard their own riff-raff. Now, we can get bogged down in a discussion about whether it's elitist or ungenerous to regard part of a community as riff-raff. But come on, there are respectable, reputable people of all ethnicities, and then there are the deadbeats and the criminals. The difference between these two types is much greater than the difference between the races.

It seems like upwardly mobile, good black citizens are to be forever saddled with the riff-raff of their communities, certainly more so than whites. White people have always seemed more inclined to write off their lower cohort as “trash,” et cetera, while black people seem to be more duty bound to theirs. It is admirable, no doubt, to try to uplift the lesser among us, and I can see clear historical reasons why black Americans might feel this obligation.

But I wonder if it is not, in the end, an albatross to have your community forever saddled with a bunch of losers. I leave other ethnicities out of the discussion only out of ignorance. I don't have any sense of how they regard their own ne'er-do-wells. One advantage to writing off your riff-raff is that it creates social pressure to not be like those people. Nobody wants to be looked down on. Another advantage, especially if there is a socially acceptable epithet involved, is that it instantly distances you from the other bad group.

So that's the question. I guess maybe there are two questions there for us. One, is the premise correct? Are there in fact these differences between the races and the inclination to condemn, disavow, and isolate the so-called riff-raff? And then the other is, if there are such differences, then why are blacks less inclined to do so? What do you think?

JOHN MCWHORTER: A few decades ago, somebody white who I think was a guy, I think he was in the sports industry. We could look it up and you might remember who it was. Somebody said the problem with the black community is that there's no shame in failure. And his head rolled immediately.

I don't remember that.

See I think it was in the ‘80s, ‘90s at the latest. But somebody said that. And I remember at the time thinking—and I've always thought since then—that is a very broad-brush thing to say, but there's a little bit of truth in it in that the enlightened black view is that black people are working against a certain rising tide, that black people work with a general obstacle of racism, be it personal or systemic, and that therefore if a black person fails, if a black person is “riff-raff,” you can't see it the same way as you would see white riff-raff because of the obstacles that black people face.

And of course, there are those obstacles, and you can argue that there are differences. But what it does mean is that, especially today, I think less before the sixties, but especially today, there is a tacit sense that black riff-raff are not to be dismissed as facilely as a white suburbanite would dismiss the kind of white riff-raff you saw on a TV show like Breaking Bad or you know, the people who are addicted to meth, et cetera. There is an element there. The idea is that we face more obstacles and therefore if a person fails, to an extent, it has to be understood.

So I would say that yes, there's a sense in the black community that if somebody is a riff-raff, as you put it, it's not ideal, but there's much less of an impulse to condemn that person as just a disaster, to consider that person unsuitable for any kind of romantic attachment, to keep that person hidden than there might be in many white communities. Yes, there's something to that. What do you think?

I think about Bill Cosby. This is before he became the Bill Cosby of infamy. This is when he was merely the Bill Cosby of the Pound Cake Speech. This was a speech given at an event, I think, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down legal segregation, in which Cosby lamented that too many—and these are paraphrases—kids are having kids, you know, when they're 16 years old, they're running around with their pants hanging half off their behinds, they're failing in school, they're messing up by getting involved in crime and whatnot. And he was basically saying, come on, people. And in fact, he and Alvin Poussaint authored a book of that title, Come On, People.

It's a good book, unfortunately.

It's a call to black people to pull up their socks, to pull up their pants, to stand up straight with their shoulders back, to take care of their children, to get busy. You're not living up to your end of the deal. Another quote from Cosby to the black lower classes: “You're not living up to your end of the deal.” He envisioned a mother with an infant sitting in a highchair with a bottle of Coke watching TV all day. So you're feeding the kid sugar, and you got the kid in front of the TV as your babysitter, instead of building the kid's vocabulary and then teaching them their colors and shapes. You're being a bad parent. Bad parent, bad citizen, bad neighbor, whatever. Come on, people.

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And he went around—this is Bill Cosby—he went around the country renting out theaters. We should do this, John. Renting out movie theaters and drawing audiences in the thousands to hear him hold forth in this spirit. Of black people, largely of black people, who came out and cheered him. You know Michael Eric Dyson actually wrote a book about … you know, I can't remember the title.

Literally called Is Bill Cosby Right? Yeah.

Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? I think that was the subtitle of that book. Ta-Nehisi Coates in part became famous because of a long piece that he did, didn't he, for The Atlantic about the Bill Cosby phenomenon.

That was the first iconic Ta-Nehesi piece.

And he became, Bill Cosby did, persona non grata in many progressive black political circles because of his, I don't know what, washing dirty linen in public or because of his appeal to respectability politics. I mean, part of why people don't do this is this, I think, nonsensical dislike of the idea that you would solicit the respect of others by comporting yourself in a way that was respectable, that you would be concerned about what white people thought about your community and endeavor to present an anti-defamation front, such that you would foster a good impression of your community in the minds of others rather than have them think what they will. “Blaming the victim.”

This is ... I'm just going down a list. You don't want to be Bill Cosby. You saw what happened to him. I mean, that is, you don't want to be the guy who stands out and says this because a ton of bricks will fall on you. You don't wanna seem to be catering to the opinion of others. You don't want to care too much about what they think about you, because that seems like you're ... I don't know what.

We have to earn equal respect? It should be our due. People should think well of black people regardless of what it is that they see before their lying eyes. Partly that, partly you don't want to blame the victim. Yes, they're miscreants, but it's not their fault. “I'm depraved because I'm deprived.” That's that line from West Side Story.

And you know, these—and I could go into a long rant about this—these thugs, these vicious, mindless almost inhumane criminals who are killing kids, firing their pistols out of the windows, et cetera deserve condemnation. They deserve sanction. They should not get anybody's respect. They should be called out, et cetera, et cetera. I feel that very strongly. But if I use the word “thug” in reference to black criminals, carjackers, rapists, murderers, gang bangers, if I use the word “thug,” I'm gonna have to have a fight with a lot of people, including the one I'm married to, who will say that is a racist trope. As if thuggery didn't actually represent a real thing in the world that manifested itself, on occasion, too frequently amongst African American communities.

So I don't know. Those are my thoughts. I believe people are reluctant for the reasons that I've articulated, many black people, to go down that road. They don't want to be echoing the same condemnations that they hear when they turn on Tucker Carlson at night. They don't want to be that guy. But I agree with the questioner that there are consequences to the withholding of this kind of internal sanction. Suppose a woman would refuse to sleep with a man who behaved in certain anti-social ways.

Stanley Crouch used to say this.

Yeah, suppose you just couldn't get no pussy if you were a thug.

Mm-hmm. You know that would solve it in a week.

Instead the hip hop moguls, who I'm who I'm sure get plenty of pussy, make a living out of thumping their chest and parading around in the most thuggish regalia with the snarl and the lyric that celebrates, et cetera. And, you know, I'm in my 70s everybody. Write me off if you will. That's what I think. But I think there are consequences. There are consequences for kids who … You set standards in your community. What constitutes an ideal member of our community? What is success? What do we look up to? What do we valorize? And to the extent that you're slow to condemn the riff-raff, you're sending a not-especially-good signal to the youth, it seems to me.

Yep. It can't help but be part of why ... I don't know. I don't wanna become the kind of person you were just describing. But all of the gang banging murders every summer in, say, Chicago or Philadelphia or New York. And no, there's no equivalent thing happening with less fortunate white kids. It's a black thing. And part of why that happens is because of a general sense, tacit but therefore pernicious, that it's different if black people do such things.

And I think those boys internalize that message. It's not something anybody says directly, but you internalize that there's something black and almost authentic about that kind of behavior, and that it has to be understood partly because of how the cops treat black [people]. It's a kind of acting out, et cetera. The idea being that we are fundamentally oppressed. Yeah, it's an issue. Within the black community, that kind of behavior is not viewed the same way as it would be viewed among Hasids, put it that way. And yeah, it would be better if it were.

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