Individualism and African American History

with Larry Mead

When we speak of “African American culture” or “black culture,” what are we really talking about? Are they merely terms of convenience used to designate certain aspects of American culture that happen to originate with black people? Or do those terms signify some deeper, even essential, difference from the rest of American culture?

My friend Larry Mead argues that the differences between African American culture and mainstream US culture are profound. In his view, the cultural differences that distinguish African Americans from much of the rest of the US population have lead to the current raft of social problems we see in places like Chicago. In Larry’s account, these problems originate in the failure of black communities to assimilate to the “individualist” culture that European immigrants brought with them to the US.

I find it difficult to cleanly delineate African American culture. African Americans are, after all, Americans. Whatever is specific to “our” culture, I argue, is produced by our embeddedness in US culture and history. I elaborate on this position below, as you’ll see. As always, I’m curious to know what you think. (And you can watch the whole conversation here.)

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LARRY MEAD: Yeah, the Scotch-Irish, also the Southern whites who founded the slavery plantations in the South, the Puritans who went to New England, the quiet Quakers who went to Pennsylvania. These are all subgroups among the English, chiefly. And they were all individualists in my terms. They had differences among themselves, but they differed far more radically with the Native Americans, as well as with slavery.

And the other important groups to remember are the immigrants that came from Europe in the later nineteenth century, early twentieth century, chiefly from Eastern and Southern Europe. Those people assimilated much more readily than the non-Western groups, I think, because they were coming from Europe. So they already had a fair amount of that individualist temperament coming in.

And we therefore look back on that, we think immigration poses no problem. But it does today, because now the immigrants are coming from the non-Western world, especially from Latin America and Asia. Those countries are not like the West. They're not Western. And the people who come from there—and I've seen this in my own students—have serious difficulties adjusting to an individualist society.

So the black struggle is not really different from their struggle. Blacks have been here longer, that's true. But much of that time, they were not actually forced to assimilate. And it's only when they came North that we start to see a struggle with individualist America. And many have made that transition. I mean, I greatly admire blacks who've become individualists. That is really hard. That taking on the burdens of freedom is difficult. It involves responsibilities, especially inner responsibilities, that you don't have in the non-Western world.

GLENN LOURY: How would you react to this, Larry? So you have Emancipation, that's 1863. The end of the war, 1865. Reconstruction, which collapses in the Hayes-Tilden compromise, and so forth. The rise of Jim Crow and whatnot. Now here you have an emancipated population of formerly enslaved persons.

My sense of the matter is that that 75 years after 1865 to 1940 to the threshold of the Second World War witnesses a remarkable development in the formerly enslaved population. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but literacy rates rising dramatically in this population after Emancipation to the turn of the twentieth. Institutions being formed, the Booker T. Washington kind of assertive, responsibility-taking self-development that springs forth. And, you know, schools, learning, acquiring property, starting businesses.

They do this under segregation, of necessity, because they are foreclosed from being able to access mainstream institutions on anything like an equal basis. This is the population closest to the origin condition of African Americans. And it is, it seems to me, very substantially individualist in the way in which it seizes the burden of freedom. This population doesn't languish. Indeed, this population, through its institutions like the church, is able to mount a political movement for civil rights and so on.

It seems to me—again, I'm asking you to react to this—it's only later in the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first century, that the evidence that you can offer for a failure to bear the burdens of freedom on the part of African Americans is most graphic and compelling. I would have thought that that population of freedmen starting in 1865 and going ahead for three quarters of a century did indeed seize the burdens of freedom. So then how does it get to be ...

Because they're the elite. They're not typical of a group as a whole. Most blacks, even in that era, are still within the South under Jim Crow. They don't really deal with freedom. The groups you're describing—and I absolutely admire them—what they did was extraordinary. They basically took onboard individualism and made it their own. And they did it in ways distinctive to them.

One of the things that we haven't mentioned, but to me is really crucial, is even under slavery, black arts achievements, the artistic and cultural achievements of blacks, begin to have a decisive influence on the rest of America. And that occurs right up to the present.

The cultural influence of blacks in this sense, especially the arts, music, other things that they contribute to culture, are absolutely distinctive. They're very, very different from the culture of the European population. If we want to see what America would be like without them, we look at Canada or Australia. You see a country with a great virtues, but they're not culturally very important. Whereas, because of the black impact, American culture is much, much richer as a whole. And that temperament that generates that culture, I think, reflects the non-Western world.

But the point is the leadership that you're referring to is taking onboard the burden of freedom, absolutely. But unfortunately it isn't true for the group as a whole. And it's when the group as a whole comes North that you don't really see a full assimilation and individualism. It's when they come to the Northern cities that you start to see the collapse. And also because of civil rights, the whole society becomes more tolerant of aberrant behavior like [inaudible], crime, and so on. Those are the things are occurring increasingly also among whites, but not nearly so much because the tradition of self-command is so much stronger. So blacks fall apart after civil rights rather than before. This is what's wrong about the standard academic account, which is that oppression is the reason for black social problems.

Yeah, we agree about that.

It's really freedom that's the problem. So actually, one way to characterize what has to happen now is that the less-assimilated part of black America should start to do what the leaders told them to do a hundred years ago.

We're in substantial agreement, Larry. But what I'm chafing at is this—it almost feels essentialist to me—attribution of the cultural patterns that you are putting your finger on on European versus non-European points of origin. The transformation that you just got through describing amongst African Americans is is something that's happening here, and it seems to me to be contingent upon … You say oppression is not the ur-text from which we will derive all conclusion. I agree, I agree. But oppression is not irrelevant—certainly not historical oppression—to some of the patterns that we've observed.

And I also want to argue that the larger intellectual framework, the excuse-making for African American failure, in deficiency, coming from liberal elites. I'm talking about white elites. Or the relative neglect of well-proven patterns of value in attitude about family, about sexuality, and so on, which again, I see as driven largely by forces outside—European forces, I might underscore—outside of the African American community and the debilitating effects of welfare dependency.

This is policy. This is politics. This is a Democrat and Republican Party fighting it out about how to shape the larger social compact, but creating circumstances where the incentives for people to live lives of individualism and responsibility are undercut by law. African Americans are not making the law in the country. The law is made by those larger political forces that are at work.

I would agree with that.

Glorification of rap music. I mean, I could go on in this vein. Rap music looks like it's an African American thing. But in fact most of those DVDs and streaming services are being sold to white teenagers who are going through their own rites of passage in life, generating a demand for a cultural product, which, when it does redound back into the African American community, reinforces the worst tendencies of irresponsibility, of living a life that's undignified, that sexual licentiousness, and so forth and so on. I would not attribute those things solely, or even mainly, to the non-European origins of the African American population made right here in America and made mostly by European Americans, I would say.

I think that's right. I agree with that, but it never took as deeply among the European population. They didn't in fact abandon the structure in the way ...

Right.

And that is true. You're right, what you're saying. But the elites in fact have become more conservative culturally, in the last couple of decades. They are the ones who are the most firmly married, the most conformist to traditional values and so on. And they therefore have escaped the damage that occurred among blacks. I totally agree.

So the problem now is to restore the elements of structure which black society was acquiring in the early twentieth century and get them back on the road towards assimilation, which you're quite right to say was occurring quite successfully in the early twentieth century. And that development was occurring under Jim Crow. And that's because the elements that were assimilating were mostly in the North, they were outside Jim Crow.