Last Friday, I had John McWhorter back on the stream to pick up some of the threads we dropped on his last appearance. Perhaps inevitably, when talking about the nation’s recent 250th birthday, our thoughts turned to the place of African Americans in our nation’s history, where we have come from, and where we are headed now.
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Followers of this newsletter won’t be surprised to hear that, when taking the long view, John and I are both a little disappointed by the problems that continue to plague Black America. We don’t mean racism and prejudice—though, of course, those problems still exist. Rather, what we have in mind are some of the pervasive cultural attitudes exhibited not only by those who are still struggling, but also many of those who are doing quite well.
John points out that a black victimhood narrative emergent in the mid-1960s remains with us, despite our gains. Some of the reaction to the plight of Karmelo Anthony—the black youngster convicted and sentenced to serve 35 years in prison for murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf—is a case in point. There is no excuse for what Anthony did. Yet we hear critics complaining that systemic racism and racial trauma ought to be seen as, in effect, mitigating circumstances.
That’s a grave mistake. The fact is that right and wrong are right and wrong, no matter your race, creed, or color. If we accept that Anthony’s race in any way accounts for why he did what he did then we would also have to accept that, whatever its ultimate source, this tendency toward brutality and violence is an indelible part of the African American character. You can’t have one argument without the other. John and I reject both.
Even so, I cannot go as far as John does in lamenting the persistence into the twenty-first century of racial identity as such. Martin Luther King’s dream, that his children would “be judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is admirable. But what King is calling for in that famous phrase is for judgment on an individual basis, rather than via recourse to vulgar stereotypes. I agree wholeheartedly. I insist, however, that such a “colorblind” vision need not preclude an embrace of racial identity in itself. That is, King’s “dream” need not foreclose the use of race as a category of self-understanding, or as the grounding for the intergenerational transmission of tradition.
Indeed, I worry that the renewed calls for colorblindness we hear echoing across our political culture these days, and even for the eventual end of racial identity tout court, risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For there are good reasons to maintain and promote the cognizance of race as an historical and lived phenomenon. Thus, total commitment to a colorblindness norm inhibits mobilizing collective actions and effective self-help initiatives among black people. While it is true that outmoded and racialized victimhood narratives do far more harm than good, it is also true that many racially identifying institutions, like the black church, still have the ability to do more good than harm.
In the coming chapter of American history, we’ll be far better off strengthening the influence of such nourishing and responsible mediating black American institutions than by abandoning them in the name of an abstract principle. If that means a cognizance of race persists, as a positive site of identification rather than an excuse for bad behavior, then so much the better.
As my late friend, the great Robert Woodson, was fond of pointing out, black people have agency and we should use it. Once, of necessity, we built our own institutions, economies, and healthy communities. While the days of racial segregation are long past, we black Americans still have that capacity for collective action within us and can bring it to fruition once more, if only we can muster the will.
