This made me nuts. I shouldn’t have listened while I was driving.
I have spent the past five years writing a book about what happened after the demise of bourgeois family in the 70s. The idea was to lay the foundation for revisiting the question of the black family and the role that families could play in revitalizing culture at some point so that I could give it the attention it deserves. This makes me want to drop everything and do it now.
I really think you are on the right track in your observations, Glenn. I think black families suffered first and most from the demise of the ideal of the bourgeois family because of the unintended consequences of social interventions but I also think it’s possible that the migration from South to North played a role. But that doesn’t mean white families are immune. Today they are assuming a similar pattern. It’s 40% out of wedlock births among working class whites. And I’d argue that while white upper middle class families are more stable in terms of their structures, these are not child-centered families. They are therapeutic families that exist to validate rather than to socialize.
They imbue children with the peculiar self-referential outlook on life that characterizes the woke generation. And they aren’t doing well.
Anyway, thank you for pushing back. I’m going to go kneed bread or chew ice or something.
This was one of your weakest guests. Mead indulges in simplistic generalizations and over-broad claims. What concept of individualism will neutralize the vast difference of Norway and Italy within the category "European?" What concept of collectivism neutralizes the difference between China and Brazil? This is cultural generalization at its vaguest and most tenuous. If a 400 year splice of slaves from Africa into the heart of English-American culture and social life does not make Blacks American, then Mead has not meaningful way to conceptualize cultural influence--the very thing that he is trying prescribe, that is, individuality for black Americans. Finally, at a time when we are trying to save America from the hegemony of Wokism, I cannot imagine a worse tactical move than Meads: nagging Black Americans into a normative, smug, precious, and ill-defined ideal of the individual. BTW, I don't know a better and more hardly earned individualism than that exhibited in different ways by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
Glenn Loury and his band of “immaculate” intellectuals (along with Sowell’s army of sycophants who kiss his a$$)—are intellectually dishonest at best in defending the indefensible:
I have an idea that could turn the tide -- and Thomas Sowell is key to it. But Glenn would rather protect Sowell's manufactured image than actually do something that would make it authentic.
He's a protecting a lie no matter how you slice it.
You're profiting off the chaos and partly causing it. The following links explain it all -- along with my idea that's unlike anything ever done:
There has been a breakdown of long standing within the black community.
Teen age pregnancy with mother and grandmother unable to cope with parenting. And what it is that these frail family settings other than infested areas of the city they live ‘inside’ the world of drugs, aimlessness, crime and violence.
There is nothing and no one to emulate.
Until there are small charter schools located with communities, not one, but multiple schools, education will fail as the public schools are not equipped to teach ‘handicapped’ children en masse. Black children who cannot read, who are significantly behind in language development, information processing and this concept formation will fail from Kindergarten through the years of mandatory schooling.
It’s useless to speak of the need to ‘get a good education’ when the disparities created by poverty exist.
I dislike the term ‘elite.’ It is insulting. It begets nothing but antagonism.
Too significant a part of black lives exist in despair. The dialogue is endless. The Intellectuals stroke their beards pressing cause and effect and so what?
What does this society need to do to save the next generation and the next and the third and perhaps a fourth to treat poor children for who they are and they are as handicapped as the physically handicapped and the mentally challenged. We do not ask such children to run races or to attempt calculus. And I am not proposing- repeat not proposing that we educate the children of ghettos as ‘trainable’ for limited education and entry level work performance only.
I am asking for change in how we educate, how we house, how we attend to black communities unable to help themselves.
It is not Biden’s equity. It is not Progressive rage, lame and fury.
It is a willingness to harness a portion of America’s trillions to build new communities Safe settings, guaranteed work opportunities, together with a demand for the civilities - the rules of order all communities need within the overarching society in which we all live.
Albert Murray would surely have a lot of pointed things to say about this debate-- and very much, if I am reading him right, on your side and against Mead's. The Omni-Americans makes bracing, timely reading in defense, and indeed celebration, of black individualism as an integral part of American individualism.
What I think is missing from this conversation is the fact that cultural dimensions like "individualism" or "collectivism" are fluid, not fixed. As any researcher in the field of intercultural communication/conflict can explain, as we navigate our daily life we often slide along the individualist/collectivist spectrum with the way we were raised often being our preferred location on that spectrum. Furthermore, to imply that one is individualistic or collectivistic simply because of their ancestry is something of a stretch. To wit, compare Italy and Spain using the Hofstede Insights tool (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/). Italy appears more individualistic compared to Spain but I guarantee you someone from Parma would have a very different take on this compared to someone from Sicily--despite being the same country.
If we accept that we are not fixed on the individualist/collectivist spectrum, that opens the door to negotiation and flexibility which is exactly what those who study intercultural conflict recommend. It *is* possible to meet in the middle.
Lots of my Black peers have successfully embraced liberty and enterprise. I’m at a loss about the part of my culture that finds it difficult to embrace “individualist,” whatever that is.
Liberty? Property? As Mr Loury said, even under legal oppression Blacks embraced “individualism”; the Tulsa massacre was a tragic example of how some folks responded to that embrace.
Associating individualism with Europe makes sense. But particular countries in Europe stand out from the rest - England, Scotland, Holland. Former colonies of Spain and France lacked the individualism that led their colonials to develop strong, free institutions and governments. I think Protestant/Catholic religious difference explains much of this cultural difference.
I am skeptical of any story that says that black culture has been problematic for 150 years or more. It seems, as Glenn says, that between emancipation and the great northern migration, black culture was pretty impressive. Marriages were strong. Religious affiliation was high.
I may be missing something, but I don't see signs of blacks in the early 20th century having the Redneck culture that Thomas Sowell thinks that they acquired from Appalachian whites. If an honor culture is present among ghetto blacks today, it seems to me to have taken hold only after World War II.
I suspect that it was the northern migration itself that was the breaking point. Lots of populations have had difficulty moving from small rural communities to large anonymous cities. Older people bring folkways that their children find backward and embarrassing, so that young people become rebellious and unmoored. On top of this generic challenge, blacks in the north until 1965 were confronted with segregation that, while not as explicit as Jim Crow, was just about as severe in relation to housing, schools, and high-status employment. The lack of decent-paying jobs available to black males made it difficult for them to provide for families.
I am speculating that the weaknesses in black marital stability and black community norms emerged in 1940s and 1950s. That is too late for some stories and yet perhaps too early for the story that blames welfare and other policies of white elites, as Loury wishes to do.
There is much poetry and little science in this claim about 'missing' individualism. I want to bring everyone's attention to America's classical music AKA Jazz, which emerged about 100 years ago and became a world music much loved and assimilated in many countries, including mother Africa. If you take this opportunity to read a history of Jazz (which in many aspects is a parallel history of African-Americans), you will see very clear and powerful examples of individualism. Without the benefit of classical training, read and listen to Art Tatum; listen to Charlie Parker who learned his chops in competitive jam sessions as a teenager. The list goes on and one is struck at how competitive jazz music was amongst black musicians. This phenomenon refutes the thesis that individualism is missing and I won't even touch sports as many of you know about Muhammad Ali. If you don't see individualism in that leader, you are missing something or perhaps assuming that this value only emerged in the English enlightenment (e.g. John Stuart Mill).
Hmmm.... last week Glenn, you pointed out Thomas Sowell's idea that today's black 'bad behavior' (Black Rednecks) is derived from the Scots-Irish Culture. This week, blacks are now 'tribal people' and have a hard time being 'individuals'. Mead's hypothesis is all over the place and mainly fails because 'European culture' is incredibly diverse, country to country in Europe. Moreover, Mead never mentions all the utopian collectivist groups that have developed, many petering out over the last hundred years, ie, Shakers, The Oneida Colony, the Amish, etc. Clearly, your mission seems to do some soul searching as to dysfunctional aspects of black culture. Have you ever considered that succeeding in today's culture is as simple as - stay in school, graduate, get a job, get married and don't have children before you are married. Following this simple formula, most people manage not to be poor, love a good and decent life and yes, even thrive.
Glenn you were stellar in your defense of facts and history but this was actually the first time I found a guest so nauseating that I had to switch off. This notion that individuality is somehow a uniquely white or European value is so confusing, the first time I came across this notion was in the whiteness document published by the National African American Museum of History & Culture. The individual in any community is the "primary unit" to use their language surely just as cell or atom would be a further breakdown but to an unrecognizable degree. European history is actually full of examples where "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" The myriad of conflicts for at least 2000 years make it clear there ar issues where the individual was replaced by the notion of the population as a whole; standing against Nazism, Liberation of Europe, UK and US anti slavery campaigns throughout the world, human rights, anti apartheid, feeding and clothing the poor and refugees the world over and environmental concerns are just the ones which immediately spring to mind which contradict this notion that European culture is somehow unable to see beyond the individual.
This made me nuts. I shouldn’t have listened while I was driving.
I have spent the past five years writing a book about what happened after the demise of bourgeois family in the 70s. The idea was to lay the foundation for revisiting the question of the black family and the role that families could play in revitalizing culture at some point so that I could give it the attention it deserves. This makes me want to drop everything and do it now.
I really think you are on the right track in your observations, Glenn. I think black families suffered first and most from the demise of the ideal of the bourgeois family because of the unintended consequences of social interventions but I also think it’s possible that the migration from South to North played a role. But that doesn’t mean white families are immune. Today they are assuming a similar pattern. It’s 40% out of wedlock births among working class whites. And I’d argue that while white upper middle class families are more stable in terms of their structures, these are not child-centered families. They are therapeutic families that exist to validate rather than to socialize.
They imbue children with the peculiar self-referential outlook on life that characterizes the woke generation. And they aren’t doing well.
Anyway, thank you for pushing back. I’m going to go kneed bread or chew ice or something.
This was one of your weakest guests. Mead indulges in simplistic generalizations and over-broad claims. What concept of individualism will neutralize the vast difference of Norway and Italy within the category "European?" What concept of collectivism neutralizes the difference between China and Brazil? This is cultural generalization at its vaguest and most tenuous. If a 400 year splice of slaves from Africa into the heart of English-American culture and social life does not make Blacks American, then Mead has not meaningful way to conceptualize cultural influence--the very thing that he is trying prescribe, that is, individuality for black Americans. Finally, at a time when we are trying to save America from the hegemony of Wokism, I cannot imagine a worse tactical move than Meads: nagging Black Americans into a normative, smug, precious, and ill-defined ideal of the individual. BTW, I don't know a better and more hardly earned individualism than that exhibited in different ways by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
Thomas Sowell is a fraud—and I have demonstrably and repeatedly proven it.
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2021/07/05/call-sign-maverick/
Glenn Loury and his band of “immaculate” intellectuals (along with Sowell’s army of sycophants who kiss his a$$)—are intellectually dishonest at best in defending the indefensible:
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2021/07/11/what-a-fool-believes-he-sees/
I have an idea that could turn the tide -- and Thomas Sowell is key to it. But Glenn would rather protect Sowell's manufactured image than actually do something that would make it authentic.
He's a protecting a lie no matter how you slice it.
You're profiting off the chaos and partly causing it. The following links explain it all -- along with my idea that's unlike anything ever done:
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2021/07/02/two-sides-of-the-same-counterfeit-coin-part-12-a/
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2021/07/10/two-sides-of-the-same-counterfeit-coin-part-12-b/
There has been a breakdown of long standing within the black community.
Teen age pregnancy with mother and grandmother unable to cope with parenting. And what it is that these frail family settings other than infested areas of the city they live ‘inside’ the world of drugs, aimlessness, crime and violence.
There is nothing and no one to emulate.
Until there are small charter schools located with communities, not one, but multiple schools, education will fail as the public schools are not equipped to teach ‘handicapped’ children en masse. Black children who cannot read, who are significantly behind in language development, information processing and this concept formation will fail from Kindergarten through the years of mandatory schooling.
It’s useless to speak of the need to ‘get a good education’ when the disparities created by poverty exist.
I dislike the term ‘elite.’ It is insulting. It begets nothing but antagonism.
Too significant a part of black lives exist in despair. The dialogue is endless. The Intellectuals stroke their beards pressing cause and effect and so what?
What does this society need to do to save the next generation and the next and the third and perhaps a fourth to treat poor children for who they are and they are as handicapped as the physically handicapped and the mentally challenged. We do not ask such children to run races or to attempt calculus. And I am not proposing- repeat not proposing that we educate the children of ghettos as ‘trainable’ for limited education and entry level work performance only.
I am asking for change in how we educate, how we house, how we attend to black communities unable to help themselves.
It is not Biden’s equity. It is not Progressive rage, lame and fury.
It is a willingness to harness a portion of America’s trillions to build new communities Safe settings, guaranteed work opportunities, together with a demand for the civilities - the rules of order all communities need within the overarching society in which we all live.
Albert Murray would surely have a lot of pointed things to say about this debate-- and very much, if I am reading him right, on your side and against Mead's. The Omni-Americans makes bracing, timely reading in defense, and indeed celebration, of black individualism as an integral part of American individualism.
What I think is missing from this conversation is the fact that cultural dimensions like "individualism" or "collectivism" are fluid, not fixed. As any researcher in the field of intercultural communication/conflict can explain, as we navigate our daily life we often slide along the individualist/collectivist spectrum with the way we were raised often being our preferred location on that spectrum. Furthermore, to imply that one is individualistic or collectivistic simply because of their ancestry is something of a stretch. To wit, compare Italy and Spain using the Hofstede Insights tool (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/). Italy appears more individualistic compared to Spain but I guarantee you someone from Parma would have a very different take on this compared to someone from Sicily--despite being the same country.
If we accept that we are not fixed on the individualist/collectivist spectrum, that opens the door to negotiation and flexibility which is exactly what those who study intercultural conflict recommend. It *is* possible to meet in the middle.
Lots of my Black peers have successfully embraced liberty and enterprise. I’m at a loss about the part of my culture that finds it difficult to embrace “individualist,” whatever that is.
Liberty? Property? As Mr Loury said, even under legal oppression Blacks embraced “individualism”; the Tulsa massacre was a tragic example of how some folks responded to that embrace.
Associating individualism with Europe makes sense. But particular countries in Europe stand out from the rest - England, Scotland, Holland. Former colonies of Spain and France lacked the individualism that led their colonials to develop strong, free institutions and governments. I think Protestant/Catholic religious difference explains much of this cultural difference.
I am skeptical of any story that says that black culture has been problematic for 150 years or more. It seems, as Glenn says, that between emancipation and the great northern migration, black culture was pretty impressive. Marriages were strong. Religious affiliation was high.
I may be missing something, but I don't see signs of blacks in the early 20th century having the Redneck culture that Thomas Sowell thinks that they acquired from Appalachian whites. If an honor culture is present among ghetto blacks today, it seems to me to have taken hold only after World War II.
I suspect that it was the northern migration itself that was the breaking point. Lots of populations have had difficulty moving from small rural communities to large anonymous cities. Older people bring folkways that their children find backward and embarrassing, so that young people become rebellious and unmoored. On top of this generic challenge, blacks in the north until 1965 were confronted with segregation that, while not as explicit as Jim Crow, was just about as severe in relation to housing, schools, and high-status employment. The lack of decent-paying jobs available to black males made it difficult for them to provide for families.
I am speculating that the weaknesses in black marital stability and black community norms emerged in 1940s and 1950s. That is too late for some stories and yet perhaps too early for the story that blames welfare and other policies of white elites, as Loury wishes to do.
There is much poetry and little science in this claim about 'missing' individualism. I want to bring everyone's attention to America's classical music AKA Jazz, which emerged about 100 years ago and became a world music much loved and assimilated in many countries, including mother Africa. If you take this opportunity to read a history of Jazz (which in many aspects is a parallel history of African-Americans), you will see very clear and powerful examples of individualism. Without the benefit of classical training, read and listen to Art Tatum; listen to Charlie Parker who learned his chops in competitive jam sessions as a teenager. The list goes on and one is struck at how competitive jazz music was amongst black musicians. This phenomenon refutes the thesis that individualism is missing and I won't even touch sports as many of you know about Muhammad Ali. If you don't see individualism in that leader, you are missing something or perhaps assuming that this value only emerged in the English enlightenment (e.g. John Stuart Mill).
Hmmm.... last week Glenn, you pointed out Thomas Sowell's idea that today's black 'bad behavior' (Black Rednecks) is derived from the Scots-Irish Culture. This week, blacks are now 'tribal people' and have a hard time being 'individuals'. Mead's hypothesis is all over the place and mainly fails because 'European culture' is incredibly diverse, country to country in Europe. Moreover, Mead never mentions all the utopian collectivist groups that have developed, many petering out over the last hundred years, ie, Shakers, The Oneida Colony, the Amish, etc. Clearly, your mission seems to do some soul searching as to dysfunctional aspects of black culture. Have you ever considered that succeeding in today's culture is as simple as - stay in school, graduate, get a job, get married and don't have children before you are married. Following this simple formula, most people manage not to be poor, love a good and decent life and yes, even thrive.
Glenn you were stellar in your defense of facts and history but this was actually the first time I found a guest so nauseating that I had to switch off. This notion that individuality is somehow a uniquely white or European value is so confusing, the first time I came across this notion was in the whiteness document published by the National African American Museum of History & Culture. The individual in any community is the "primary unit" to use their language surely just as cell or atom would be a further breakdown but to an unrecognizable degree. European history is actually full of examples where "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" The myriad of conflicts for at least 2000 years make it clear there ar issues where the individual was replaced by the notion of the population as a whole; standing against Nazism, Liberation of Europe, UK and US anti slavery campaigns throughout the world, human rights, anti apartheid, feeding and clothing the poor and refugees the world over and environmental concerns are just the ones which immediately spring to mind which contradict this notion that European culture is somehow unable to see beyond the individual.