The Price of an Unpopular Argument
with John McWhorter
If you want to see “the race debate” unfold, you have no shortage of outlets to turn to. Thousands of hours of new race-related content pop up every day on cable news, talk radio, podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube. If you’re tired of hearing partisan left-right talking head punditry, the digital democratization of the media has made pretty much any point of view on race in America—from the benign to the malignant—available to you, if you do a little digging.
On The Glenn Show, I often say things that I nevertheless categorize as “unsayable.” But I haven’t been booted off Twitter (at least not yet). I haven’t been fired or jailed for anything I’ve said. People have gotten mad and said disparaging things about me in public, but that’s their right. So why does it feel like there are certain things “one can’t say” about race?
Violating the progressive line on race can have less easily definable social and professional costs than a Twitter ban or the FBI knocking on your door. As John McWhorter points out in the following excerpt from our recent live event at the Comedy Cellar, simply stating the facts about crime and racial disparities can lead people to look askance at you or cut you off entirely, to regard you as politically untrustworthy or disreputable. To insist, as I do below, that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is a scandal can invite the same response.
There is every reason in the world to ignore an unpopular argument. After all, if you evaluate it and find it convincing, you’re faced with a difficult choice: Adopt it and become unpopular yourself or repress it and live with the dishonesty. Unfortunately, there are far more incentives for the latter than the former. No one wants to lose a friend or alienate a relative over politics. But when the unpopular argument proves to be the correct one, the social benefits to the individual may come at the expense of those—black single mothers and their children, for example—who simply cannot afford to fall any further behind.
The irony is that if everybody agreed to evaluate these arguments on their merits rather than seeking to avoid social opprobrium, we wouldn’t have this particular problem in the first place. It wouldn’t solve every problem, but at the very least it would free some people from living in bad faith.
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JOHN MCWHORTER: The reason for this disproportion in black crime is racism. Didn't you know that? I mean, when I see a disproportion between white and black people in behavior or achievement, what I see is racism. Last time I checked, that was the wisest way for an enlightened person to think about these things that rises above all the possible biases that we might have. And so these young men are doing these things because we live in a racist society where they have no choice. Didn't you know that? Just trying to remind you of the truth.
GLENN LOURY: I don't take any pleasure in broaching this issue. I'm just trying to be faithful to the forum and to what it is that we do when we talk.
You realize I'm kidding.
No, that's complete bullshit. I mean, come on. That's bullshit. You took a pistol and fired it out the window of your car driving past the gang rival and ended up killing a little six-year-old sitting on our auntie's lap because of racism? Nobody believes that.
He didn't have a dad. He didn't have a dad.
Oh, and that's due to racism?
Don't shoot that gun out the window.
The fact his father was irresponsible and wouldn't take care of his own children is due to racism? Come on. Nobody believes that.
The war on drugs was instituted partly because of racism, and that's probably what sent his dad up the river.
Okay. I mean, I have heard that argument, but it's just complete BS, man. Come on. I don't know, you guys can tell us—we can take some questions at the end—whether or not this is crazy. I don't think anybody believes it.
And now here we hit this point, but I think it's an important point. Omar. Omar does this. It's this character that we've created. Is Omar evil for shooting that gun out the window, or has Omar grown up watching people do that and thinks it's the only way to prove his masculinity? And now I'm not kidding. In Omar's head, that's all he knows. I can't hate Omar. I just think it's a shame that Omar has grown up somewhere where that's a norm.
I don't hate him. I'm mad as hell at him, and I'm prepared to judge his behavior as contemptible. And there well may be reasons why he has behaved in that way and I'm not sure your story exhausts the list of what those reasons might be. But if we can't hold people accountable for their behavior, we have no civilization, at the end of the day. If we can't make judgments.
Omar fires his pistol, the bullet goes through the brain of that six-year-old, she's now dead. That was an evil act. That's a that's a misshapen human being who committed that act. That act has to be judged. And the fact that his dad abandoned him? Everybody's got a story. The racist guy that walked into that market in Buffalo and murdered those people has a story. I'm not gonna let that story obscure my clarity about the evilness of that act. Likewise, Omar.
There is, well, a lot of things bother me. But one thing that bothers me a lot is that—and this is a non-black thing. This is me caricaturing white people a little bit, and I'm sorry. But the idea that if you are an educated white person, you're supposed to see these obvious discrepancies, these obvious evils, and the clear, strong tendency for things like this to be black American men. Some Latinos, essentially no Asians, a trickle of whites do these sorts of things, for example, in New York every year. Any idiot can see it. The fact that the educated white person looks over your shoulder and shakes their head and thinks, “Well ...” And you know they're thinking it's racism of some kind, and everybody knows that doesn't make sense, but you can't address it. And then you move on and you start talking about Breaking Bad or something like that. You can't address it.
To be a black person in that situation, and to be the kind of black person who does not pretend to think that it's racism, is so uncomfortable. I always think to myself, especially if they don't know me and they [don’t] know my positions, do they think that I think it's racism and that therefore I can't engage with reality? But then I think to myself, this is a birthday party or something. I don't wanna talk about this. And so we move on, and we talk about Hacks and, you know, whatever else, because we're finished watching Breaking Bad.
And it really is a drag. I wish we could have more productive conversations about this. For example, why does Omar do it? I wish there were an honest level we could all talk on. But we can't. That's the nature of being at certain gatherings to me.
Yeah.
And if I'm with a lot of my family, it's easier. Because a lot of them feel more like you than I do. It's when you're at that, frankly, mostly white Park Slope birthday party where it has to be a fake conversation, and everybody keeps looking over my shoulder. I'm always wondering, what's back there? It certainly isn't the truth. And so it's very uncomfortable.
Well, I was just gonna remark, there's a class dimension to this. I mean, you're in Park Slope and that cocktail party, or whatever, is what it is.
I'm almost never in Park Slope. But, yeah, that setting.
But if you're in a church basement in a hardcore inner city neighborhood where a lot of people have lost their kids to this kind of thing, I think the conversation is going to be different. I once interviewed Mr. C and his acolytes of the Rose Street Community Center in Baltimore. He's a black guy, an older guy who has devoted his life to trying to help young people deal with the situations and avoid the temptations and whatnot. “They got jobs over at Johns Hopkins. They're hiring people. You guys ought to go over there. Let's pray this morning before we set out on a day that is fraught with all kind of temptation and all kind of stuff.”
He's in every city.
Yeah, you got a guy like that in every city. And you talk to him. Now, his cohorts have lost, you know, my sister, my son, my father killed by gun violence in the city, killed by people wielding guns in the city and so on. And I asked him. I said, “Are you mad? Because I'm mad.” And they equivocated a little bit. They didn't wanna just say, straight up, they were angry. They didn't want to just point a finger. Because there but for the grace of God go I.
I mean, one guy told a story about how he wanted to go get revenge, because his sister had been murdered and he thought he knew who had done it. And he thought that the police officer who gave him a clue as to who had done it was baiting him to try to encourage him to go and commit the crime so that the police officer could then come around and arrest him for committing the crime, he thought. He hated the cops, but he also hated the guy that killed his sister, and he was on the horns of a dilemma. So I mean, there's a kind of ambiguity, a kind of mixed feelings of my anger and your sadness, a kind of resignation. This is the hand we've been dealt. But also a sense that this is not right. Because it's not right!
It's not right. And actually Ian [Rowe]'s book is about using family and education and focus on entrepreneurship. He has an acronym.
And religion, John.
I just gave you FEE, and I was leaving out the R.
The R is for “religion,” John.
I was gonna get to it at the end. I was gonna make it FEER. And so it's family, religion—you see, I read this book very quickly, but it was very good—education, and entrepreneurship. And the idea is it … It's funny. You and I apparently, if you look on the Twitter, we deny that racism exists or a certain kind of person says we underplay it. But the truth is we know it exists, and so does Ian. The idea is, what do you do despite it? It's always gonna rain. There will always be germs. We can get past it.
And there seems to be this idea that if you're black American, and it's after about 1960, there's something unique that's happened in human history. Human history starts probably somewhere in East Africa about 300,000 years ago, depending on what you call a human being. All sorts of things have happened. People have spread all over the world, and there's been the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution and television and Blu-ray and all these things.
And now here we are, and black Americans are the only people who can't overcome, who need a complete overhaul of general conditions before we can do any better than okay. That is such a depressing message. But the idea seems to be that racism's just too much. We have no agency. Ian's book is called Agency, da da, da, da. But it's called Agency. I don't remember the subtitle. But he thinks that we have agency. And yet, you can be sure as shit that there are gonna be reviews of that book where he's accused of being this patronizing black conservative who's telling us to pull ourselves up by these things called bootstraps that I actually don't know what they are. I think that is such a shame that somebody says, “Here's what you can do despite it.” And they're told, “You are just a conservative. Be gone. We're gonna sit here and cry together.” I don't get it.
Well, you're preaching to the choir on that one, man. I mean, I think it makes a mockery of the very idea of freedom. And it makes a kind of joke out of the notion of equality. Freedom to do what? Freedom to live responsibly and to take responsibility for the consequences of your choices. Equality in what sense? Equality in the sense that I have earned your respect. You don't give it to me because I'm a bellyacher. You don't give it to me because, again, my ancestors were violated. You give it to me because you respect what it is I've done with the freedom that characterizes my life.
So all of this bellyaching, excuse-making, and so forth—and this is just me—and, you know, I almost want to apologize, because I realize how out of step this kind of sentiment is in the day of racial reckoning and post-George Floyd enlightenment. But I think it's a path to a kind of permanent second-class citizenship not by law but by the consequence of the failure to actually seize the possibilities of your own freedom.
I mean, for example, seven in ten babies born to an African American woman in this country [are] born to a woman without a husband. How's that healthy? How does that lay the groundwork for a prosperous and flourishing subsequent generation? We don't need fathers? No, no, no. I can't say that, because, well, the feminists won't let me say it. You feminists won't let me say it because it lionizes fatherhood and the family, because it's 1950s? Yeah, I'm in my 70s. I was born in 1948. I actually think the nuclear family is a mainstay in the foundation of our civilization. I think some of this violence that you're seeing amongst these young men is a consequence of the collapse of the institution of the family.
I think that's something to be lamented. I think it's something that a free people, a free, self-respecting African American people, could direct our attention to. Not the government, not reparations, but we seizing the imperatives of our own freedom. That's what I think. But given that the tenor of the times is exactly the opposite of what I'm saying, I'm in despair. I don't think the future holds much prospect of an improvement in this situation.
I'm a law student in south Florida. In my constitutional law class, the teacher was banging on about the disproportionate numbers of persons in jail along color lines as evidence of institutional racism. I am sensitive to past discrimination and injustice against African Americans, and others, in this country. But I refuse to accept the 'disproportionate outcome is evidence of racism' narrative (i.e. CRT, generally). I offered a statistic, from the beloved CDC, about death data -- in 2018, suicide was top 5 among prime-aged white men; homicide was top 5 among prime-aged black men. This statistic always struck me as interesting and absolutely devastating, because our prime-aged American men are either killing each other or killing themselves, and either scenario is deeply problematic and derivative of violence or depression or hopelessness. A fellow student, an African American man, proceeded to accuse me of "perpetuating a racist narrative" and this is why "CRT is so important to teach in schools." Others chimed in. I was berated and accused in front of the entire class about my ignorant racism. I don't say this for a pity party, but to give an example of how difficult it is to inject even objective data into the woke narrative, data that anyone is free to interpret as they wish. My accused purpose of giving that statistic was to perpetuate the racist narrative that black men are "more" violent, thus explaining their disproportionate numbers of incarceration. That was not even in my mind when I gave that number. The violence amongst our men -- killing self or others -- was my point, and further, you can't incarcerate a dead person.
I tend to see many fraught social and policy issues somewhat differently than nearly all of my friends, because I am, virtually alone among them, the son of a single mother and I grew up with mostly just sad and somewhat traumatic memories of my dad, whom I never saw past age ten when he made a half-hearted kidnapping attempt of my sister and me, in the midst of a custody battle he was not prepared or qualified to actually win, but which he (understandably) couldn’t let go.
Because my mother prioritized us going to a good school district, we both had much less than nearly every other family there, and we had exposure to plenty of kids who were almost incapable of causing serious trouble and were being prepared to apply to top colleges. This was 30-40 years ago, so college prep wasn’t quite the cutthroat mania it is now. But I truly didn’t know any other kids who didn’t have a dad. I didn’t even know of more than a couple kids whose parents had divorced but it was barely noticeable (each parent having somehow seamlessly found a more suitable spouse and quickly restored a functioning and financially comfortable two-parent unit).
My point is, my mom was a great if of course imperfect single mom. She could have hardly loved us or cared about us more. She put us ahead of any later-life career ambitions let alone dating, which having been so burned once, clearly scared her. But expecting her to play two complementary parental roles while eventually also working full time, was not fair or reasonable. So we got the “mom” role. And basically nothing of the dad role.
She was a truly good-hearted, take-people-as-they-come, empathetic liberal. But she was also clearly personally demoralized and defeated. She didn’t have a good grasp of the role of agency and incentives in her own life and didn’t know how to teach it to us. We had no other family other than her very elderly parents and she had few friends. But was surrounded by comfortable to affluent two-parent families showing off where they vacationed and their idealized family lives. So I also saw a lot of the personal misery, bitterness, self-pity, and resignation. It took me a really long time to realize in my own life - and see clearly in policymaking - that endless handouts (however paltry) detached from any goals or requirements often didn’t do the recipient any favors. After an upbringing that’d already been chaotic and unstable and full of real trauma (though of a degree less-awful than experienced by many) it was especially important we be taught to see the relationship between consistent effort - perseverance - and results. That even if it wasn’t 1:1 and foolproof, the positive results bore out over time. We were instead afraid of an unpredictable world in which basics we’d counted on as little kids could go badly wrong or disappear. We didn’t know how to invest in ourselves in an often capricious world.
All of the people I know who came from those stable, at worst comfortable two-parent families and upbringings like theirs?
I can’t say a word about the value of having two parents or come close to suggesting that 70% of kids being born to single moms is really not helping. Not without being accused of victim-blaming, with the particular implication I am piling on already historically abused and still currently oppressed and marginalized black moms trying to do their best. It doesn’t matter that I’m referring to Appalachian single moms and families, too (a region in which two of my grandparents grew up as the kids of sharecroppers and ended their schooling with third and fourth grade educations) and to the burdens and challenges of single parenting, in general, especially in environments in which there are few role models and few stable and relatable two-parent partnerships. These friends quickly begin to get angry. It really is as if low-income, single-parent black families (never mind the rest) are to them a class of sacred victims. To even suggest different priorities and choices are possible and worth aspiring to, at the individual, family, and community levels is add intolerably cruel (and clueless!) insult to injury. Everything these families and communities are doing is (as long as they are black) the best they could possibly be doing and to expect otherwise is not only mean but something approaching a Republican talking point. I’m using “dog whistles” and trafficking in cruel and politically cynical GOP tropes which rely on stereotyping and rhetorically bludgeoning - even today - world history’s greatest victims.
What’s the solution? Probably, to them, something like Build Back Better, on steroids, just as a start. Throw money at it.
We’re all Democrats, btw. These friends (and I’ve lost some in large part due to not going along with all the expected lines about Republicans and racism being to blame for every last individual or community malady) basically act like implementing the entirety of the DNC platform at once is the best solution we can hope for. They indulge in a bizarre anachronistic navel-gazing about the evils of slavery as the somehow never sufficiently acknowledged problem of American life, as if it were the dominant current social question.
I’ve tried saying things like: do you think I believe that everyone can and must stay married? Do you think I blame my mom? No, I’m saying from firsthand experience that growing up without a dad isn’t easy for anyone. Parenting alone isn’t easy for anyone. Whatever we can do to value and encourage stable family formation so that kids have that balance, that yin and yang of compassion and discipline, is simply a way of valuing and respecting all of our fellow citizens enough to say: what’s good for us is good for all of us. Of course I think same sex couples count, too. The quality of the people and their character matters far more than whether each parent models some antiquated very gendered Ozzie and Harriett role. But if teaching incentives and personal responsibility, and the value of delaying gratification to plan and reach more meaningful, long-term goals is good for middle class suburban families, Asian, Latino, black, white, why can’t it be good for kids growing up in depressed rural or urban areas, whatever their race? Do the latter kids need some additional resources and support? Quite likely, yes. But it has to be effective, community-based resources and support that helps teach and reward good habits. I suppose a more positive tack is to introduce friends with this mindset to the work Robert Woodson has been doing.
Personally, I feel fortunate my own mother’s priorities and sacrifices led me a physically safe school district (the humiliations of occasional bullying aside) and one where my classmates were prepared and motivated and mostly excited to learn. It hurt feeling so much less than. Having financial worries and struggles others didn’t have. It hurt having no idea what to say when kids and adults asked me what my dad did. I was angry and confused enough. If I’d been exposed to a different neighborhood and peer group and hadn’t had a positive role model or outlet to help direct me, I could’ve gotten in serious trouble. So I get the impulse not to pile on people in hard circumstances. But what actually works? What actually helps? If we aren’t focused on that, we’re reduced to a sincere but useless sympathy which at its worst excuses or even panders to behavior and attitudes we know are destructive. Those aren’t attitudes these friends would ever inculcate in their kids. It’s not victim-blaming to want clearly more disadvantaged kids to be able to benefit from good models and habits, too.