Two Paths to Black Power

Back in 1991, Clarence Thomas’s ascension to the Supreme Court got me thinking about a very old dispute in black social theory—WEB DuBois vs. Booker T. Washington. For a century, DuBois was the de facto winner of the argument. Of course it was true that, no matter how much African Americans cultivated their own abilities and worked to uplift themselves, as Washington counseled they should, the Jim Crow regimes of the South were not simply going to hand over political power. That power had to be wrested from whites who did not want to give it up.

In hindsight, it’s a good thing that DuBois won out. Segregation was a political problem that required a political solution. But in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was starting to feel that we had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Washington’s belief in black self-reliance as a remedy for Jim Crow may have been wishful thinking, but as a social imperative in the post-civil rights era, it seemed to me then to be the only way for African Americans to achieve themselves what the civil rights revolution had failed to deliver: true social equality along with equality before the law.

In 1991, I delivered a speech that laid out the contemporary stakes of the older debate. (I’m presenting it below, but you can also find it at AEI.) I didn’t argue for a full-bore return to Washington—his acceptance of segregation was not to his credit. But that was then. Segregation isn’t an issue anymore. If Washington’s proposed path to black power was the wrong one in 1900, it was the right one in 1991. It was the right one in 2001 and 2011 and 2021 as well, and it will be the right one in 2025. Some of us are walking it, but we need to bring more along with us.

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Two Paths to Black Power

September 13, 1991

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. Arguably, at least in our country’s domestic politics, this has proved to be so. Even now, in the last decade of the century, we Americans remain as we have been since the Founding: a nation struggling to confront intractable problems of race. Throughout our history our collective endeavors in this regard have been a principal defining feature of our public life. Viewed through the lens of race we see America at its best, and at its worst. We witness our noblest ideals being put into practice, embodied into legislation, employed to replace oppression with opportunity. But we also see our protracted national failure to live up to those ideals; indeed, we observe how we sometimes made mockery of them.

Our polity has had to face, on an enormous scale, the difficulty of incorporating into the estate of full and equal citizenship the descendants of African slaves. This process, though well advanced, remains incomplete a century-and-a-quarter after Emancipation. A fundamental question is: How shall it best be continued? There is no one answer, of course, but that does not obviate the utility of raising the question. By raising it I mean to stimulate in response not so much a program of action, not a bill of particulars, but rather the elaboration of a public philosophy. I intend to ask not “What shall we do?” but instead, “How should we now think about the matter? What should be our goals? How will we measure success?”

The pronoun “we” has an ambiguous antecedent. Discourse on problems of race may be usefully undertaken by the nation as a whole, as well as by and among black Americans ourselves. Both such public conversations have been ongoing for some time. Contemporary national debates over civil rights policy, affirmative action, multicultural education, voting rights, and recently, an appointment to the Supreme Court, raise directly the question of race. And other issues–crime, welfare policy–indirectly, though powerfully, engage the racial theme.

Among black Americans, of course, public life has been dominated by questions of race. We have endeavored through internal dialogue, sometimes heated, to come to terms with our condition, to wrestle a measure of dignity out of the inherited disability of second-class citizenship, to mount effective protests against a multitude of wrongs, to define ourselves as a people, to make progress as a race. There have always been different schools of thought among blacks on these matters, and that remains the case.

These two levels of deliberation over racial questions–within the national polity as a whole and among blacks ourselves–interact in important and complex ways. What is acceptable and effective to argue in either forum depends on the nature of the discourse taking place in the other.

Thus I stand here before you engaged in two related but distinct conversations, a kind of “doubletalk,” speaking, if you will, “out of both sides of my mouth,” though, one hopes, not “with a forked tongue.” I come as a social scientist and a social critic, a public man, an American, to a national forum offering observations on how “we”–all of us–should approach the race question. But I come as well as a black, speaking to his people about how “we” should endeavor to make progress. This limits what I can communicate without risk of misunderstanding, or worse, by one or the other of my audiences. Because of race both audiences will extend to me a certain license but at the same time, and also because of race, demand a certain fealty. Each will search out my utterances for evidence of disloyalty to cherished values, or confirmation of strongly held convictions. Inevitably, someone will be disappointed.

But not to worry! My dilemma, though real, is not acute. I only mention it to draw attention to a subtlety affecting our national deliberations on racial matters, about which I shall have more to say in due course.

The just completed process of nominating and confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court called general attention to a debate about public philosophy ongoing among black Americans. The fact is that Thomas, a black of humble origins and an avowed conservative, met with vehement opposition from much of the black leadership, as well as from other quarters. The racial aspect of the appointment–that Thomas has replaced on the Court the only other black ever to serve there–is of crucial importance to understanding the vehemence of some of the opposition. Indeed, the entire affair illustrates how powerfully the two levels of deliberation about racial matters referred to above can interact with each other, on both sides of the political divide. The attack on Thomas would have been crippled from the start without a sufficient measure of black authorization. And his nomination would surely have been defeated absent massive support for him among Southern blacks, which authorized some key votes cast on his behalf by Democratic senators.

The replacement of Thurgood Marshall by Clarence Thomas well may prove to be an event of enormous significance for race relations in our nation–only time will tell. It is clear already that the debate which the nomination engendered among blacks has taken on historic proportion. It is a debate pitting advocates of the liberal civil rights approach, for decades now the established orthodoxy among respectable exponents of black opinion, against advocates of a philosophy for black American advancement based on direct empowerment of the poor, relying significantly on self-help, and dubious about the ability of government programs to resolve the deepest problems of the black poor.

The conflict between Thomas’s black supporters and his critics recalls the epochal struggle over public ideas among blacks which raged at the turn of the century between the followers, respectively, of Booker T. Washington and of W. E. B. Du Bois. Washington was a conservative advocate of a philosophy of self-help, Du Bois was a radical exponent of a strategy of protest and agitation for reform. While he lived, Washington’s view was the orthodoxy. He expended considerable energies to ensure that this was so, using his great influence among whites to cut off his critics from sources of financial support. In the end the ideas of the Du Bois camp nevertheless prevailed, leading to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and providing the impetus for the decades-long legal struggle which culminated in the Brown decision.

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Though no doubt an oversimplification, it is possible to see Justices Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall as direct intellectual descendants of these two great black protagonists of nearly a century ago. Of course, the Du Bois-Marshall view is today’s orthodoxy. It is an orthodoxy defended fiercely by the civil rights establishment from the criticism of radical dissidents like Thomas, just as Washington defended his, and with similar methods. But there are signs that a new era is dawning, and that, in the contemporary struggle over the ideas which will inform efforts to improve the black condition into the twenty-first century, the principles laid down by Booker T. Washington will be rediscovered, and play an important role. I intend here to urge that this be so.

What are those principles? They are, fundamentally, an understanding about how blacks should respond to the great philosophical and political problems created by our history of degradation, and the fact of our unequal citizenship. At the programmatic level Washington believed the response should be, in the main, to concentrate on the development of blacks’ capacities to exploit such opportunity as already lay at hand, and to rely on the expectation that, as such development was seen to proceed, we could come into a stronger position to make a successful claim for the full rights of citizenship. He saw two factors preventing blacks from enjoying the status in American society which was our due: actual defects of character as manifest in patterns of behavior and ways of living to be observed among the black masses; and the racist attitudes of whites. He believed that blacks had both an opportunity and a duty to address the former difficulty and that, in so doing, we would go a long way toward overcoming the latter. He preached a litany of self-improvement; he emphasized the Protestant virtues of thrift, industry, cleanliness, chastity, orderliness; he urged, above all else that we blacks make ourselves useful–to our families, our neighbors, and our fellow citizens.

All of this sounds quaint today. But this programmatic focus on self-help was actually not very controversial at the time. What stimulated opposition was his rejection of mass political agitation as a strategy. Washington thought the active pursuit of civil rights to be premature and dangerous for blacks. “Brains, property, and character for the Negro will settle the question of civil rights,” he said. “The best course to pursue in regard to the civil rights bill in the South is to let it alone. Let it alone and it will settle itself.” Again, “It is the duty of the Negro to deport himself modestly in regard to political claims, depending upon the slow but sure influences that proceed from the possession of property, intelligence, and high character for the full recognition of his political rights.” Surely this was madness! It was an unmanly acquiescence in our own oppression! It invited the delighted contempt of whites whose lives were made so much easier by being “let off the hook” in this way!

So, anyway, thought Washington’s critics. Writing from Boston in 1901 William Monroe Trotter, the first black elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, denounced Washington as a traitor to the race and called for “a black Patrick Henry to arise” who would “save his people from the stigma of cowardice . . . rouse them from their lethargy . . . inspire (them) with the spirit of those immortal words: ‘Give me liberty or give me death.'” Two years later Trotter got his wish as Du Bois, in his famous essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” offered a forceful rebuttal:

On the whole, the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro’s position; second, industrial and common school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions . . . and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive, and strive mightily, to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded but, rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope to great success.

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticized. His doctrine has intended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

One can see many themes with contemporary relevance in this classic dispute of black American political thought. Of course, Washington’s was a different time than our own. The quality of black citizenship is now dramatically improved, due largely to the efforts of advocates working in the tradition of the NAACP. Moreover, given the political and economic forces which combined to limit economic development throughout the South in the first half of this century, and ultimately which encouraged massive migrations of blacks out of the region, one may doubt that Washington’s strategy would have “worked,” in the sense of negating the effects of these structural factors, even if it had been assiduously followed.

So I intend here no revisionist reassessment of the historical effects of these two schools of thought on the evolution of the black condition. It is important that I not be misunderstood to suggest that history has somehow proven Booker T. Washington to have been right and W. E. B. Du Bois to have been wrong, in their debate about what blacks should have done ninety years ago. My claim is more modest: given the way in which our history has evolved, and looking candidly at the current problems which confront our people, I claim that the animating spirit and underlying premises of Mr. Washington’s philosophy now offer a sounder guide to the future for blacks than do those which are reflected in the world view of his critics.

Herbert Storing pointed to this conclusion when, over a quarter-century ago he made a defense of Washington’s position. I would like to quote a passage from Storing’s fine essay:

Yet when the harsh words have been said, when the blame is assigned, when many rights have been granted and are actually enjoyed, Washington’s soft, tough words still speak. Opportunities are limited. How well have we used those that are open? Rights are still curtailed. Have we prepared to exercise those we have? The Negro is blamed for too much American crime. Are we nevertheless responsible for too much of it? The Negro is less than completely free. Do we know what freedom is? The Negro is a second-class citizen. Are we fit for first-class citizenship? The Negro can find deficiencies, in these respects and countless others, in every phase of American life, but his own deficiencies are not one whit removed by pointing out those of others. The Negro can serve himself as he can serve his country only by learning, and thereby teaching, the lesson that Theodore Roosevelt said was “more essential than any other for this country to learn, . . . that the enjoyment of rights should be made conditional upon the performance of duty.”

These are harsh, unpalatable words to the modern political ear, carefully attuned as it is to the possibility of giving offense. Such words were politically incorrect, even in 1963! And I surely do not maintain by repeating them here that there is any question of blacks being “fit for first-class citizenship?” But it is fair to ask now about opportunities unexploited, about rights unexercised, about whether we are too much responsible for what ails our urban centers, about duty, and obligation. It is fair to inquire, with the many cries for “Freedom Now!” ringing out from angry, defiant protests on behalf of racial justice across the land, whether we have a clear conception of what this “freedom thing” really is, of what being free and responsible participants in this democratic polity actually requires of us. It is, I think, necessary to question what it takes for one to stand truly equal among one’s fellows; to explore the limits of a rights-oriented approach to the problem of inequality between racially distinct populations in our contemporary national life; to deal with issues of dignity, shame, personal responsibility, character, and values.

The necessity of raising such matters is clear from the tenor of our contemporary national (non)discourse on issues of race. As everyone knows there is tremendous cultural struggle ongoing in our national politics, manifest in disputes over abortion, capital punishment, gun control, crime, welfare, affirmative action, gay rights, school prayer, and many other issues. Many of these issues have a subtle racial dimension. This cultural tension is believed to exert a profound influence on presidential politics; to account for the severe disadvantage of the Democratic Party in national elections in the South and West, and among white voters; and to be implicated in the reaction of ethnic working-class voters in the cities against racially progressive policies like housing integration, busing, quotas in municipal employment and contracting, and the like. This tension is clear in the political career of a David Duke, whose populism focuses voter anger on a “permanent welfare underclass” and urges the legitimacy of defending “our American Christian values” against the threat posed by those who do not hold them. The fifteen year-old year welfare mother (guess what color) has become a constant referent in this populist’s rhetoric.

Here then is the crux of my argument: further progress toward the attainment of equality for black Americans, broadly and correctly understood, depends most crucially at this juncture on the acknowledgment and rectification of the dysfunctional behaviors which plague black communities, and which so offend and threaten others. Do this, and much else will follow. It is more important to address this matter effectively than it is to agitate for additional rights. Indeed, success in such agitation has become contingent upon effective reform efforts mounted from within the black community.

When speaking of “further progress” I do not mean the passage of another civil rights bill. Such a bill may or may not be necessary, but it is beyond doubt that its passage will not significantly alter the quality of life, or equality of standing, of those blacks whose condition bespeaks the incompleteness of the process of incorporating the descendants of African slaves into the estate of full and equal American citizenship. The equality toward which I seek progress is one of respect, of standing in the eyes of one’s political peers, of worthiness as subjects of national concern. Such progress will without doubt require public action as well as self-help. Healthcare for the poor, education in the inner city, job training for welfare mothers, discipline for criminally offending youths, funding for improvement of community infrastructure, for housing, nutrition for infants, drug treatment for recovering addicts–all of these things and more require the provision of public funds, and are essential to the progress I seek. But one’s ability to persuade one’s fellow citizens to tax themselves so as to provide the services needed depends upon how “deserving” the beneficiaries are perceived to be. This in turn is dependent upon how they comport themselves. And such comportment is not a matter which public policy alone can effectively address.

The point on which Mr. Washington was clear, and his critics I think were not, is that progress such as this must be earned, it cannot be demanded. He understood that when the effect of past oppression is to leave a people in a diminished state, the attainment of true equality with the former oppressor cannot rely overly much on the generosity of the other, but must ultimately derive from an elevation of the self above the state of diminishment. It is of no moment that historic wrongs may have caused current deprivation, for justice is not the issue here. The issues are dignity, respect, and self-respect–all of which are preconditions for true equality between any peoples. The classic interplay between the aggrieved black and the guilty white, in which the former demands and the latter conveys a recognition of historic injustice, is not an exchange among equals. Neither, one suspects, is it a stable exchange. Eventually it may shade into something else, something less noble–into patronage, into a situation where the guilty one comes to have contempt for the claimant, and the claimant comes to feel shame, and its natural accompaniment, rage, at his impotence.

Thus Booker T. Washington argued: “It is a mistake to assume that the Negro, who had been a slave for 250 years, gained his freedom by the signing, on a certain date, of a certain paper by the president of the United States. It is a mistake to assume that one man can, in any true sense, give freedom to another. Freedom, in the larger and higher sense, every man must gain for himself.” This, I insist, is not an “unmanly” or “acquiescent” or “race-traitorous” sentiment. Quite the contrary, this is the candid exhortation of a leader who has understood a hard truth about the condition of his people: to look their emancipator squarely in the eye, they must first raise themselves from their current level. Nor is this the rhetoric of an apologist for the crimes of others. Rather, it is the unapologetic embrace of responsibility for one’s own freedom. Consider the fact that, unlike Du Bois and his followers, Washington lived out his life in the South, among the poor blacks of his time; that he built from nothing, and in the midst of white reactionaries, a permanent, lasting institution which, to this day, helps to meet the needs and expand the opportunities of his people.

Nor is Washington’s sentiment anachronistic, appropriate to the second generation after slavery, but irrelevant today. For the basic thrust of today’s civil rights posture looks to the “signing, on a certain date, of a certain paper by the president,” or by a federal judge, to deliver freedom to blacks. In so doing, rights advocates avoid the necessary hard work of facilitating internal reform for their people, which would help to reverse the diminishing effect of past violations of rights. They seek to lay responsibility for the hard realities of contemporary ghetto life on the shoulders of whites, citing the fact that whites have not treated blacks as justice would require. They argue as Du Bois did: “If they accuse Negro women of lewdness and Negro men of monstrous crimes, what are they doing but advertising to the world the shameless lewdness of those Southern men who brought millions of mulattos into the world? . . . Suppose today Negroes do steal; who was it that for centuries made stealing a virtue by stealing their labor?” But this argument concedes far too much dignity for the sake of an appeal for sympathy. Can we really expect whites to agree that black “lewdness” or criminality is but a derivative consequence of white’s depraved condition, for which whites, nor blacks, are ultimately responsible? Do we really believe it ourselves?

Today’s orthodoxy is to denounce as “racist” the revulsion of ordinary people at ways of life among blacks which offend and threaten them, and at policies which strike them as basically unfair. If whites express fear of crime in central cities, crime committed disproportionately by blacks, and if politicians exploit these fears, then the problem is defined as the racist exploitation of ungrounded stereotypes. If whites reject racial preferences as unfair to them, and if politicians campaign on such an issue, then the problem is construed as a lack of restraint by unscrupulous candidates who are willing to use divisive tactics to achieve their ends. Today’s orthodoxy holds in contempt the need to express concern for and acknowledge the legitimacy of the sensibilities of whites, when they run up against the presumed interest of blacks. What Washington understood, and what remains as true today as it is difficult to say out loud, is that cultivating the sensibilities of whites is directly in the interest of blacks. Because we live in a democracy we bear the burden of persuading our fellows of the worth of our claims upon them.

Following today’s orthodoxy, some liberal social psychologists actually measure latent racism by the extent to which whites who have affirmed their belief in principles of racial equality nevertheless express opposition to busing or affirmative action! They take the expression of those policy preferences as evidence that their white subjects subconsciously harbor unacceptable ethical values. The political version of this bit of social science wish-fulfillment has brought on the current crisis in black and liberal politics. Let us stipulate that the Willie Horton ad should not have been run. What then do we say about the fact that it worked so well? Let us assume that the “white hands” ad of Jesse Helms was inappropriate. What are we to make of the fact that it had such an impact?

The orthodox answer is that these phenomena give further evidence of the fundamentally racist character of the American polity. Rights advocates hope to banish such tactics from the political arena through moral suasion. They hope for unilateral Republican disarmament, as if Republican restraint in appealing to whites’ concerns will somehow cause those concerns to disappear. This is the answer of people who simply do not take American voters seriously. The voters responding to Helms, or Bush, or even Duke, are not usefully thought of as racist. Some of them are, but that’s besides the point. These are voters with legitimate, vital concerns to which an effective politics must given answers, not lectures on racial etiquette.

Washington readily accepted the constraint that progress for blacks depended upon being sensitive to the concerns of whites. Indeed, every black leader of any influence has had to work within such a constraint. It is only in our time that we see advanced the notion that “authentic” black leadership should be unencumbered by the need to assuage white opinion. Only in our time do we draw electoral district lines so that black representatives may be assured of election without the inconvenience of having to solicit white votes. This is not to say that such gerrymandering is always wrong. I am merely observing that there is a fundamental trade-off involved here: majority black districts raise the likelihood of the black candidate’s success while lowering the probability that his election will bring along white support for his program.

Recall that the central feature of the old civil rights activism was its aim to persuade. Dr. King and his followers engaged in open protests on behalf of clear principles of social justice. They were not exemplars of Washington’s aversion to civil rights agitation, quite the contrary. But they sought by their actions of nonviolent civil disobedience to compel the affirmation of common principles by their fellow citizens, relying on the humanity and decency of the vast majority of Americans, and thereby showing respect for the moral integrity of their fellows. They always appealed to someone’s moral sensibility–if not their immediate foes, then white onlookers who tacitly accepted segregation, and also even to blacks ourselves whose complicity made the system easier to sustain.

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Dr. King was a leader of both black and white Americans. His stature in each community depended upon his influence on the other. The dramatic public confrontations he and others in the movement engineered were viewed by multiple audiences–white and black–with each being aware that the others were watching. By the morally persuasive nature of his appeals, King mobilized the conscience of the white majority. In doing so, he also convinced many blacks that there was realistic hope, at long last, that their essential interests would be accommodated. King thus confronted the most critical task any leader faces when seeking to promote racial harmony: assuring the ‘good people’ on each side of the racial divide that their counterparts on the other side do, in fact, exist. He sought to create a dynamic within which growing numbers of Americans could embrace a strategy of reconciliation among decent people of both races.

It is a telling commentary on the moral confusion of today’s orthodoxy that so many young blacks see in Malcolm X and Martin Luther King legitimate polarity of philosophic alternatives. Yet on this point–that the interest of blacks, properly understood, are inescapably intertwined with the concerns and sensibilities of whites–Malcolm provides very poor guidance. Still, it is to the radicalism of Malcolm X that the afrocentrist, rejectionist rabble-rousers like Al Sharpton look for inspiration. And it is precisely because the civil rights establishment itself has lost sight of the need to take whites’ fears and revulsion seriously that they are willing and able to remain speechless in the wake of the excesses of Sharpton, Farrakhan, Jeffries, et al.

Thus, what do we see in response to the Central Park jogger episode? We see incredible public displays of contempt for white opinion, in defense of the indefensible, and all with the tacit, if not explicit, support of much of mainstream black opinion. What do we see in Crown Heights? We see murderously rampaging mobs of black youths, openly incited by Sharpton and others, who then gain status and prestige as brokers of the peace. Leaders like Sharpton are the natural consequence of the abandonment by more respectable black advocates of that cardinal principle which Washington understood so well. The message sent out is that blacks are openly contemptuous of white opinion, seeking not to persuade, but to cajole and to frighten. Although Sharpton leads marches through white neighborhoods, as did King, the Italians of Bensonhurst and the Jews of Brooklyn are mere stage extras in a political drama within the black community itself. Sharpton wants blacks to see whites at their most primitive and racist. And if he creates occasions for whites to see blacks at their most atavistic and violent, this suits his purposes as well. The apparently intended effect of such “leadership” is to ensure that the people of bad will in both races will find each other, the better to keep conflict alive.

The truth is that whites do not need to be shown how to fear black youths in the cities; instead, they need to be taught how to respect them. This means that effective, persuasive black leadership must project to these whites the image of a disciplined, respectable black demeanor. That such comportment is not inconsistent with protest for redress of grievance is a great legacy of the civil rights movement. But it is not only disciplined protest that is required. Discipline, orderliness, and virtue in every aspect of life contribute to the goal of creating an aura of respectability and worthiness. Such an aura is a valuable political asset.

My point here is that racial oppression tangibly diminishes its victims, in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Thus, the construction of new public identities, and simultaneously the promotion of self-respect, are crucial tasks facing those burdened with a history of oppression. If this cannot be done there can be no recovery from past victimization. A leading civil rights advocate teaches the exhortation: “I am somebody.” True enough, but the crucial question is: “so what?” Because I am somebody I will not accept unequal rights. Because I am somebody, I will waste no opportunity to better myself. Because I am somebody, I will respect my body by not polluting it with drugs or promiscuous sex. Because I am somebody–in my home, in my community, in my nation–I will comport myself responsibly, I will be accountable, I will be available to serve others as well as myself. It is the doing of these fine things, not the saying of any fine words, which teaches oneself, and others, that one is somebody.

But how is this to be done? One must operate at two levels– playing the “inside game” and the “outside game”. The outside game aims to secure one’s rights by petitioning for redress of grievance. Washington thought this could wait. He may have been tragically wrong, but we have since made up for his omission. Even here, as I have argued, one must proceed carefully, wary not to move in violation of clear public norms. Non-violence was the key factor in securing the ultimate success of the revolt against Jim Crow that eventually came to the South. Perhaps paradoxically, non-violence was the more dignified, the more “manly” course, as well as the more publicly acceptable one. This is where Malcolm X and his followers in the urban centers of today have gotten it so badly wrong. Kant defined enlightenment as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” Though blacks’ tutelage has not been entirely self-incurred, the link between liberation and enlightenment is just as real for us. Non-violent protest expresses the great insight and paradox of the Kantian moral view: the disobedient realizes his own freedom by accepting the constraints of universal moral laws, by maintaining civility under strong provocation even when others do not. For the discipline non-violence demands provides irrefutable evidence of the humanity of the protester, despite the oppressor’s best effort to perpetuate the myth of racial inferiority–it establishes that the protester is somebody in a way that violent protest never can.

The philosophy of self-help, of good old fashioned “uplift,” applies this principle to the “inside game” of moral reform within the black community. Working diligently to overcome the profound pathology to be found in some quarters of contemporary black life establishes what too often is only asserted–that we are indeed a great people struggling under terrible odds to overcome the effects of profound historic wrongs. The doing of such work is the means by which we can gain freedom in its “larger and higher sense.” Because we are free human agents we are obligated to strive to reverse the debilitating patterns of social life which limit our progress. We are rightly judged by the extent to which we meet this responsibility. The liberal exchange, in which the victimized blacks insist upon relief from guilt-ridden whites, often points away from this necessity to be engaged in our own improvement. It leads to a perverse “exhibitionism of non-achievement” by blacks (e.g., the remorseful rectification of statistics showing that more black men are in prison than in colleges.) It is as if the fact of our failure to meet certain standards or to surmount a certain obstacle must of necessity constitute evidence of a social or political failing by the larger society. Even when whites accept this exchange, one harbors the disquieting suspicion that they don’t really believe in it–that they suspect the non-achievement has another, less respectable but never spoken, explanation.

The “inside game” is critical because much of what needs doing, in the nature of the case, cannot be done by outsiders. Only an overly simplistic socioeconomic determinism insists on finding the explanation for all manner of self-destructive and dysfunctional behavior now rampant in some black populations in the fact of our historic victimization, or, on the other side of the aisle, in the incentive provisions of certain government transfer programs. How is it that other disadvantaged communities have a way of overcoming such assaults and temptations? It is to take the black poor less seriously than they deserve to assume that, unless white people somewhere change what they are doing, poor blacks must live as many are now living. I do not underestimate the difficulty of the task, nor do I expect change to come overnight, but I nevertheless believe–I must believe–that the levels of gang violence, drug abuse, family instability, sexual promiscuity, sloth, indifference to responsibility, etc., can, through concerted effort at the propagation of alternative values, be changed. In any case, through religious, civic and voluntary efforts of all sorts, we must try. It is not a matter to be seen exclusively along racial lines, but race is an important factor. It is not an effort which can be guided by a single program or strategy. Instead, a thousand points of light, of salt and of light, shall be needed.

This internal effort to reform the ways in which people live is not a task for the state in our liberal society. Rather it is one for what Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus have called “mediating institutions.” Mutually concerned persons who trust one another enough to be able to exchange criticism constructively, establish codes of personal conduct, and enforce social sanction against what they judge as undesirable behavior, can create and enforce communal norms that lie beyond the capacity of the state effectively to promulgate. The coercive resources of the state, though great, are not especially subtle. And, of course, their application is rightly limited by constitutional protection of individuals’ rights. But no one has a right to good standing among his fellows. We must strive through the “inside game” to create conditions in the communities of greatest concern where such status rewards may be denied those whose behavior violates reasonable norms of right conduct.

Moreover, the “inside game” of self-help is critical to securing the sympathetic support of the rest of the political community. It is essential to establishing in the minds of whites what is true, which is that the bulk of poor blacks are deserving of the help that they so desperately need. Making the effort to help yourself clearly conveys this message. This is why I do not believe that the movement toward reform of welfare programs which focuses on placing some onus of responsibility on recipients threatens blacks. Quite the contrary, such developments are a God-send, for they help to defuse a potentially damaging stigma associated with the historically unavoidable fact of the disproportionate dependency of blacks on state-funded transfers. Moreover, such a movement shows respect for the recipients, by according them the expectation that they are capable of meeting commonly held norms about how people should conduct their lives. All of this further illustrates a point already made, that self-help is not a substitute for government provision; rather it is an essential compliment of such provision, ensuring that the state-funded assistance is more effective and that it is seen by the political majorities which must approve of it as legitimate.

Now, I concede that this argument has been speculative. I cannot prove my case; it is not based on scientific data; it is, I admit, woefully politically incorrect. I am also aware that its reception will be influenced by the multiple audience problem. Some reading or hearing this message will object that it gives aid and comfort to the political right. They will question my motives for having presented it in this forum. They will doubt my commitment to the cause of racial progress. I know that a public man can, figuratively speaking of course, get himself lynched for loose talk as this.

Nevertheless, I believe it is of crucial importance to our nation that those of us who hold such convictions be willing to express them. We do not need a one-note politics from the Afro-American community. It is not all about anger, or about our historical victimization, or about what whites owe blacks, about reparations, about America’s failure to live up to her creed. It is in part about that but it is not only that. This is a great nation, a great people; and our national ideals to which blacks are every bit as much heir as anyone, are literally the envy of the world. The opportunities of this great land, which continue to beckon to peoples the world over, are the birthright of black Americans. Yet too many of us lag behind others in exploiting this opportunity. We must empower ourselves to more aggressively seize this opportunity, so that we can fulfill what, in my belief, God has ordained for us to do in this land.

Can it really be seriously maintained that no legitimate black spokesman may enunciate views such as these without having fatally violated some norm of political loyalty? I hold that this effort, sophisticated and well advanced, to defend a bankrupt civil rights orthodoxy by discrediting the expression of these views is sheer, self-destructive folly. Are blacks truly better-off by this kind of thinking barred from American politics? Do the ideas of Booker T. Washington, as I have tried to elaborate them here, really have no place in the councils of the Supreme Court? Are such ideas, whether they are labelled “conservative” or otherwise, obviously unauthentic, not genuinely “black?” Must we conclude that blacks espousing such ideas are a “discredit to their race?” That clearly was the message of the well coordinated, nearly successful campaign to destroy Clarence Thomas’s aspirations for higher office. Some black politicians and intellectuals still seek to discredit him, to deny his voice the weight that it deserves to command among our people, and in the national dialogue.

Should these defensive and essentially conservative reactions of the civil rights advocates prevail, it will not be only a few outspoken individuals, or even only the black American political community, who will be the losers. This is not about a Clarence Thomas or a Glenn Loury or any other black critic of today’s orthodoxy. What ultimately is at stake in our halting efforts to widen the national dialogue on racial matters is the determination of whether we Americans are going to fall apart, fighting with and picking at each other for the next two generations, or whether we are going to find some way to pull ourselves together and go forward into the twenty-first century as a strong, world competitive, multi-ethic nation. This is about whether we can develop and sustain sufficient ties across the many boundaries that separate us as to enable us to cooperate in our mutual interest.

It is not only criticism of black thinking that is needed, of course. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have distinguished themselves with national leadership on this issue. But, because of the relationship between permissible expression in national discourse, and in the subnational discourse which takes place among blacks, a broadening of debate among blacks may encourage white politicians and intellectuals to speak with candor on this issue.

Advocates of a new public philosophy for black Americans, men like Clarence Thomas, are drawing on an old wisdom, well-suited for our times. To advocate self-help, to argue that affirmative action cannot be a long-run solution to the racial inequality problem, to suggest that some of what is transpiring in black communities reflects a spiritual malaise, to note that fundamental change will require that individual lives be transformed in ways that governments are ill-suited to do, to urge that we must look to how black men and women are relating to each other, how parents are bringing up their children, that we have to ask ourselves what values inform the behavior of our youth–to do these things is not to take a partisan position or vent some neoconservative ideological screed. Rather, to take this radically dissident line of departure from the orthodoxy of this day is to speak what, for many blacks, is a truth inherited from our ancestors; a truth we know as a result of our awareness of our history coming out of slavery; a truth reflected in the ambiguous but great legacy of Booker T. Washington.

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