Q&A: Waving the Magic Wand of Race Thinking

with John McWhorter

Do some individuals hold prejudiced, even abhorrently racist views toward black people. Of course. Are there even some organizations devoted to perpetuating those views? Yes. But the question is, what influence those views, individuals, and organizations have on public life in America? I think the answer is “as close to none as we’re ever likely to get.” Racial stigmas still exist, in which people are treated in unfair ways due to race-based judgments about their character. But I can’t quite buy the idea that those judgments amount to a systematic expression of white supremacy. As I’ve argued in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, those stigmas are often the result of superficially rational—even though ultimately mistaken—inferences.

Yet, even today, if you want progressives to listen to what you have to say, opening with the line “racism is a thing of the past” can be a nonstarter. The fact is that, even more than the real deeds of actual racists, it is their continued, quasi-religious belief in the determinative power of racism which animates the political and social discourse of progressives on race. Thus, ironically, “antiracism” and its currency with the identitarian left does more to keep overt racism in play as a social force than overt racism itself does.

This paradoxical condition may explain why, when John and I attempted, in our latest Q&A session, to talk about which prevalent belief about race we would eliminate if we had the power to do so, we kind of talked around the question. I’m less concerned about beliefs about race than I am about meta-beliefs, beliefs about beliefs about race. Our intersubjective experience of race—what we think about what others think—now exerts far more influence than a handful of ignoramuses in white sheets ever could. That social dynamic seems quite difficult to dislodge, especially when antiracism is so useful as a political cudgel. Hopefully getting rid of it won’t take, as our reader suggests, a kind of magic.

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GLENN LOURY: This is from Aaron.

I recently finished reading Late Admissions. For me, it was like reading a great novel and being highly entertaining, interesting and full of insights and wisdom among other virtues.

Thanks, Aaron.

I highly recommend it to anyone reading or listening. On page 411, Glenn writes, “Of course racism still exists. Of course there was unfairness. But to regard those unfortunate facts of modern life as the very essence of Blackness was to profoundly misconstrue what it means to live free. Black American identity was forged in an attempt to overcome racism and to achieve the incompletely realized ideals of the nation that made us. To cling to the very prejudice that we were always meant to transcend, to make it the sine qua non of black selfhood, was a horrific error. Never mind that regarding the residual unfairness of American race thinking as an all-encompassing white supremacy was sheer hyperbole. Unfairness needn't define us.”

I'm interested in what you both believe may fall under the category of “the residual unfairness of American race thinking.” You have regularly critiqued efforts of those claiming to act as antiracists. But I'm wondering, as people that are both smarter than me and have thought about these issues more than me, what, in the year 2024, you believe are the continuing signs of racism or racial injustice in American society. And what, if anything, could be done to improve things?

I've heard you both dismiss the folly of attempting to completely purify the hearts and minds of all citizens of any thoughts or feelings that may reflect any sort of racial bias or racism, as many of the loudest voices during the racial reckoning seem to be claiming to attempt to do. I agree with your critiques of these efforts as I understood them. However, as nothing more than an interesting thought experiment, were you to have a magic wand that only worked to change the beliefs of American citizens on race, what do you believe to be the most prevalent beliefs you would target for change? And why?

So that's a challenging question, Aaron. And thanks for the kind words about my book, available at all your booksellers now in audio, Kindle, and hardcover. I appreciate those kind words, but also thanks for quoting that passage from my book, which I genuinely do believe, that definition of selfhood as rooted in our victimization is a life denying posture that is unbecoming of us. We actually owe more to our ancestors who fought to make it possible for us to enjoy equal citizenship in this great republic than this resigned embrace of this notion that we're somehow always going to be at the back of the bus.

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I take as a challenge your calling upon me and John to delineate the residual unfairnesses, such as they are. And I could cite chapter and verse about the audit studies, about who gets called back when they go in looking for a job. And I could talk about the disproportionate incidents of incarceration and criminal penalty on people, even though there are issues of disparate criminal behavior as well. I could talk about the cops and those incidents which are notorious and much discussed, but which John and I are quick to say are not characteristic of the day-to-day interaction between African Americans and police officers, but I could talk about that.

But it's true that it's a reflex to a certain degree in the face of disparities to say there is, of course, residual unfairness. How can I go to talk about black responsibility or African American opportunity or black American failure and inadequate response to opportunity if I don't acknowledge at the outset, of course, there still exists racism? How can I not try to deflate the critique that's going to come, which is going to say, “Oh, are you saying there's no more racism?”

If I start out saying there's no racism, I have a hard time persuading my audience to take me seriously about anything else I have to say. People are going to say and experience—and the surveys show this—when you ask African Americans whether or not they think they're being treated entirely fair in the workplace or whatever, they're going to say in substantial numbers, many of them, that they have their issues.

Some of those issues are in their heads. Some of those issues are inflated relative to what's actually going on. Some of those issues are real issues. The stigma of race—I make a point out of that in my 2002 book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. The lingering social meanings of race that have negative connotations in the minds of many people.

I could cite the intermarriage rates, which are relatively low, comparing across ethnic groups African Americans marrying with European and Asian Americans, relatively low compared to white Americans marrying with European and Asian Americans. That kind of thing. I could point out that adoption agencies have a much harder time placing infants looking for homes who are of African American heritage than they do of European American kids. I could point out the in vitro fertilization clinics that harvest the eggs of donating women and then make them available to couples for in vitro fertilization. They have a market for those eggs, and the market for caucasian-featured eggs, women's eggs, comes in at a much higher price than the market, et cetera.

I could go down a litany of of disparities. But I accept the premise of the question, that in the year 2024, it's not so easy to identify the processes of explicit discrimination that are adverse to African Americans. Much more easy is to identify processes that may be formally neutral but that have the consequence of disparately affecting in an adverse way African Americans.

As many people have argued, it's not so clear that all of those processes are morally problematic simply because they have a disparate consequence when applied. For example, the use of standardized testing in college admissions: I don't think that's racist. The enforcements of laws against violent criminal behavior, which have disparate incidents: I don't think that's racist, et cetera. I'm sorry if that sounds like I'm trying to have it both ways. Race still remains important. But I am in part posturing when I invoke the fact of ongoing unfairness, posturing in order to sustain credibility with an audience that I want to take me seriously when I say it's time for African Americans to stand up straight with our shoulders back.

You have anything you want to say about that question, John?

JOHN MCWHORTER: Actually, I was just going to say that the factoid for me that—it's not a factoid, it's an observation that cuts across all of that—is if, say, a Gunnar Myrdal came and looked at the United States today and was not primed to think about racism—he was thinking about something else—that person, in all of his brilliance and concern, would very likely not notice that there was a racism problem at all. Not in terms of face-to-face interactions, but also not in terms of where black people are in society and for what reasons, especially given the history, if the history were the same.

Probably wouldn't notice. And you could let him know things like that, the white mother's eggs have a higher price value, et cetera. He would see those things as subtle and unfortunate, but he would be mystified if those things were used to bolster a view that racism is what black life is all about, utterly mystified.

And that matters because that was not the case 50 years ago. And 50 years ago is now not 1945. 50 years ago was 1974. There were color TVs. And yet Gunnar Myrdal would have certainly noticed it then. It would have taken him a few days. So that's just something that I always think about.

I want the audience to know that Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, 80 years ago published his two-volume masterwork, An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and American Democracy, I think, is the subtitle. An American Dilemma is the title. He chronicled the status of the Negro, of black people in American society, politics, economics, social life circa 1940. And I agree with you that he would be astounded, were he to be able to survey the landscape of American society less than a century later after what had happened. He didn't see it coming, not by a long shot. So I definitely think that's worth understanding.

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