This book is depressing because it is so persuasive. There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. Wax identifies the illusion that mars American thinking on this subject as the myth of reverse causation—that if racism was the cause of a problem, then eliminating racism will solve it. If only this were true. But it isn’t true: racism can set in motion cultural patterns that take on a life of their own.
Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience—and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”
Wax is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.
A typical take on race has no room for stories such as this one. In 1987, a rich philanthropist in Philadelphia “adopted” 112 inner-city sixth-graders, most of them from broken homes. He guaranteed them a fully-funded education through college if the kids would refrain from drugs, unwed parenthood, and crime. He even provided tutors, workshops, after-school programs, summer programs, and counselors when trouble arose. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Thirteen years later, of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen were felons; the forty-five girls had sixty-three total children, and more than half had their babies before the age of eighteen. Crucially, this was not surprising: The reason was culture. These children had been nurtured in communities with different norms than those that reign in Scarsdale.
What this means, Wax points out, is that scrupulous recountings of the historical reasons for black problems are of no significant use in finding solutions.
It's important to note that The New Republic, from which the quote above is excerpted, is not a conservative magazine.
The high school I teach at has a majority population considered "economically disadvantaged" and "at-risk" for dropping out of school. Ten years ago a program was started that guaranteed a fully paid for college education at a 4-year university, including room and board, and books and supplies, as long as these students maintain certain requirements during their 4 years in high school.
ReplyDeleteTo date, only 1 student has graduated from college from my high school with the help of this program.
This article hit the nail on the head. Culture is the reason. Throwing a lot of money at the situation is NOT the solution.
This demonstrates that we can throw money at "education" in the form of higher pay, technology or merit based assessments for teachers, but unless there is something in a child's life that makes it clear that an education is the way out of poverty, nothing will change. Right now we are looking at the fifth or sixth generation of children who were born to single mothers, often themselves a child of a single mother. The stats bear out. For every brilliant kid who makes it through college despite bearing a child, ten more never graduate and are content to wait for society to pay them just to exist. That kind of warehousing for the mentally ill and disabled was outlawed. So why would anyone think similarly incarcerating poor minorities in ghettos under the grace of giving them federal handouts was a good idea?
ReplyDeleteIf your culture is holding you back, time for a new culture.
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