The Burden of Self-Knowledge

with John McWhorter

The question of lagging black academic performance is often treated as an empirical one. What accounts for dispiriting test results in lower income black communities? Is it a lack of economic resources and social capital? Is it inherited cognitive ability? The empirical causal question is important, but it is not the most urgent problem we now face. Because to truly answer that question, African Americans must first be willing to find out who they really are, and they must be willing to risk discovering that they are not yet who they want to be.

I know whereof I speak. There have been moments in my life where I stepped up to a challenge and failed. I’ve experienced paralyzing doubts about my own abilities. I’ve found myself in positions where I felt patronized, as though allowances had to be made for my perceived shortcomings. In that, I am no different from anyone else, white, black, or any other color. We all face adversity of one kind or another; we’re all mired in a struggle, if not for bare survival, then to define for ourselves what it means to be alive, to know ourselves. That’s the human condition.

To turn away from that struggle is to turn away from your own humanity. What I fear is not that black Americans will fail to measure up. I fear that we’ll never know if they do, because they will not confront the struggle head on. The burden African Americans now carry is the burden of proving to themselves that they can confront the struggle on its own terms and say honestly that they did not back down, whatever the outcome. I have faith that, when that day comes, we’ll prove our mettle. But we cannot afford to delay the confrontation any longer.

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GLENN LOURY: But I want to step back a little bit, because I want to distinguish between this argument, the causal argument. We have differences in performance on the test. What are the rudimentary bases of these? Is it some kind of genetic thing going on? Is the cultural thing going on? The causal argument. And we could argue about that all day.

But there's a difference between that and the philosophical, existential—I keep wanting to use that word again, because I'm thinking about the existentialists. I'm thinking about the idea of living up to the possibilities of your freedom, about being honest with yourself about life, and the idea that you don't know for sure about the inferiority question, about the question, okay, they're doing less well on the test. How do you know it's because they're not just, on average, less intelligent?

You don't believe it. I don't believe it. You don't wanna believe it. But you don't know. The temptation to run from the inescapable necessity of demonstrating your competence, both to others and to yourself, by embracing this narrative of historical victimization. You think you get an exemption. I'm gonna trump your performance card with my moral claim, my claim of anti-racism, in this case. The equity move that you're critiquing is, in a way, a try to play that card, that card that [says] the historical mistreatment of my people therefore entitles me to be exempt from your enforcing of a certain standard of judgment.

And I think there's no way around that dilemma, the dilemma of having to demonstrate your competency. If I were to say, on a banner or a bumper sticker, black people have something to prove: that we're not more criminal, that we don't neglect our children, that we're just as smart as anybody else. We have the burden of dispelling the suppositions about us that some people are inclined to arrive at based upon what they see in the world. That's respectability politics. They have a name for it, the idea that you would even take that up. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but one of the things that terrifies me about getting rid of the test is it concedes. It calls the whole thing off when we haven't actually done the job yet.

Yep, that's exactly it.

And that's not equality, man. That is so far from equal dignity, from a sense of equal standing, from being able to look people in the eye and feel confident within yourself that you're their peers. That's horrible.

It is. And you know, we need to respond to a certain kind of person who hears this. You imagine a black and white picture. They've got their arms crossed, and they're looking down at us. “You're criticizing the culture.” No, folks. You have to be more nuanced than that. What Glenn and I are doing is not saying black people are no good. That's not it. If I say that a black family, and I'm being specific, a black American family is less likely to make it seem like it is absolutely the measure of the human that you try your best on that test, and we really want you to do well on it, if that is less present in a black American household than in, for example, an immigrant South Asian household, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with black people. I'm not pointing a finger and frowning.

And there are all sorts of reasons why it might be. It's partly a matter of class. It's partly a matter of what black America inherited from the countercultural mood of the 1960s, which was begun by white people. It's all sorts of things that I've honestly written about partly in the Times and then in my two books, Losing the Race and Winning the Race. It's not about blaming in anger, it's just saying that the reason is not racism.

But I will say this: There is a problem with one corner of black culture where I would have to have a judgment, and that is much academic and journalistic black culture, where I don't think that people in that world understand how unique it is that they have this watch cry that somebody says that we're not good at something, and your response is, “Why should we have to prove it?” rather than proving it. That notion that it's a valid answer to say, “Why should we have to prove it? You must be a racist,” and to really think that that's a mic drop. That's weird. I'll bet it's relatively unprecedented in human history.

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That's a black thing, but not just a black thing. It's a specific thing. It's an educated, enlightened post-1966 black thing. And yeah, I've got some judgments on that, just like you guys have judgments on me. I think you need to stop that. If you can't prove it, then you have no right to resent people for supposing that you can't do it. And the fact that we were brought here as slaves doesn't change that, nor does Jim Crow, nor does redlining. None of those things change that basic fact. I'm sorry. Except, you know, I'm not sorry. That is something that our educated class needs to face up to. Glenn, I agree with you, completely.

I'm trying to think now on the top of my head about what the genesis might be. And you know what I'm thinking about? I'm thinking about E. Franklin Frazier's book Black Bourgeoisie. This is, I don't know what, maybe 1953 or something like that. It was published initially in French. He couldn't get it published in English, initially. It was published originally in Paris. This is the great sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier.

And the thing that I remember most vividly from the book that he's inveighing against is phony, pompous, pretend status manufactured by the black elites as a kind of parallel to the real status, which was reflected in the structures of the larger society. The contempt, the thinly veiled contempt that he has for the phony status-seeking faux grandeur, which is not real achievement, but it's a kind of mimicking of the white world's real achievement with these parallel Negro elite organizations and activities, from the sororities and the fraternities, the way that the historically black colleges are run, the classical [themes], the cotillions, and the secret societies, and it being a mirror image of real status that was built on actual wealth and control over the apparatus of the society.

You're black, and so you had your separate black sphere in which you could create these status distinctions among black people. It would often be a dodge over actual competition with your peers who were not black. But is that a period piece, that sentiment? You say the class of intellectuals and journalists and writers who are black and who would exempt themselves from the necessity of demonstrating competency simply by playing this card—you think that's still a contemporary issue?

I think that what Frazier was writing about was a different world in many ways. So, for example, I'm not sure how many people are having cotillions, so to speak, and that tone was a lot of what he was writing about. He was writing about a certain kind of person in a still-segregated America where a certain sliver of black people felt value in things like learning Greek and having cotillions and all these formal clubs. They thought they were showing, yes, we're as good as all of the rest of you. But you could say that all of it was kind of a hollow show.

The new people doing this, though, I think it's not so much that they're saying that they shouldn't have to show their competence. It's that they're saying it on behalf of other black people, which I think that black bourgeoisie then often were less concerned with. They're saying that black people in general should be able to be mediocre, that that's part of people being allowed to be human. Or that we shouldn't have to prove it unless we feel like it. It is racist to tell us that we're not good at something, because that's insulting. And yeah, that's rather simplistic thinking.

And then with them themselves, I think they wouldn't say that they shouldn't have to prove anything, but because most of them ... is this safe to say? Yeah. Most of them, even today, tend to limit themselves to only writing about race issues. And so they don't feel themselves as in competition with white writers because they're writing about different things. They're interviewing different people.

I've heard pretty recently that at one media organ that I will not name—and it's not the New York Times—the editor has had trouble getting black writers to write about something other than race. He's asked them to, and they say, no, what I want to do is this. And there's a value to it. But if you ask me, it's a little 1970, as if nobody else would write about these things if black people didn't. That's not as true as it used to be, but it does mean that you probably don't feel like you're in competition with white journalists. You feel like you're in competition with other black ones, but that's a very different feeling. But no, I take your point. I definitely take your point.

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