Setting the Record Straight on Deindustrialization

A reply from John McWhorter

Last Sunday, I published a post by TGS correspondent Clifton Roscoe that took issue with John McWhorter’s statements about the effects of deindustrialization on black communities. John has a reply of his own, which you’ll find below.

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Indianapolis, 1975. Source: beltmag.com

Clifton Roscoe says:

I would pay to be a fly on the wall if [John McWhorter] stood before a black audience in Gary, Indiana and tried to convince them that the loss of steel jobs wasn't that big a deal and that culture and government policies are the primary reasons why their town has lost 62% of its population since 1960 and the local poverty rate is over 30%.

But the problem is that I’m sane. Clifton Roscoe is straw-manning my reasoning on deindustrialization. My point is hardly that widespread loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs leaves a community unaffected economically.

Rather, a common argument since the 1970s has been that deindustrialization explains the profound shift in cultural mores in inner-city black communities starting at that time. The idea is not simply that when factories move away, people are more poor. The idea is that when factories move away, men engage in senseless violence on a regular basis, teen births become a norm rather than a rarity, and it becomes ordinary for a young man to tell one of William Julius Wilson’s interviewers that he won’t take a job that requires getting up early and traveling a certain distance, when men of his grandfather’s generation often did exactly that without a question.

Contracting employment opportunities simply do not explain these things. Cultural shifts do. So do welfare programs unconcerned with connecting people with employment, like those white revolutionaries deliberately directed poor black women to starting in 1966.

I know: I sound like I’m blaming. I’m not. The appeal of the deindustrialization idea has always been that it neatly avoids blaming the victim and shows how larger forces—a.k.a. root causes, structural racism—can create less-than-constructive behaviors. But more realistic explanations need not be interpreted as abusive.

The cultural shift started as an attempt to continue The Struggle after the concrete gains of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Black Power was an idea and an attitude that never quite coalesced into a policy. This is common amidst political movements, not a “black” problem. 

To examine what happened in a poor black community in an American city between 1960 and 1975 up-close makes it all but impossible to link what was going on by 1975 to the fact that factory jobs were harder to get. One misses, in fact, any widespread, laser-focused, and aggrieved quest among young black men for work, a sense that they would take whatever work they could get because that’s what adults do. Many will respond that there have been demands for “more jobs” since the late 1960s, and this is true. But the sad thing is these demands have often come amidst more opportunities for work than one might suppose. Community leaders as well as white employers and officials regularly say that there were jobs available that these men too often would not take or keep.

Mr. Roscoe asks: “What would [I or Glenn] have done if they were an unemployed blue-collar worker in a place like Akron, Ohio, local manufacturing plants were closing and/or laying off workers, and a third of the jobs in their industry had disappeared?”   

Tough question, because if I had been there, I would also have been part of a new cultural mood that would have helped determine my choices. I may well have become one of those young men who thought of himself as more of a real man by refusing “chump change” and hustling for cash in ways that skirted or flouted legality. 

But if I were weird me, less inclined to go with the crowd than most are, then what I would have done is not get a gun, start selling drugs for pocket money, and engaging in gangland killings. And if I were a girl, deindustrialization would not lead me to think 15 was a good age to become a mom. I would have done what immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa in those very communities started doing in the 1980s, what Latino immigrants have done in the very same cityscapes since the 1970s, what the many black people have done in those communities who made the best of the worst.

No disrespect intended to Mr. Roscoe, but there is no reason to think I was arguing that the disappearance of factory jobs had no effect on the economic viability of poor black communities. It implies that I have some kind of preset dedication to dumping on poor black people that would cloud my basic reasoning.

As I said on the show, I did a deep dive into Indianapolis twenty years ago, including interviewing a number of people who had been on the scene from the 1960s on, black and white. I am aware of no one who has deep-sixed my observations on this, which I wrote up in a chapter of my book Winning the Race. That book is unforgivably long and justifiably rarely consulted. Maybe no one has deep-sixed it because no one reads it! But I’d like to be a fly on the wall and see anyone read that chapter and come away thinking I’m a mere partisan hack who’d button up if he knew more statistics.

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