![]() ![]() In his masterful history, Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner recounts the experience of the progressives who came to the South as teachers in black schools. Like Chait, 19th-century Northern white reformers coming South after the Civil War expected to find "a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success." Slavery encompassed not just forced labor, but a ban on black literacy, the vending of black children, the regular rape of black women, and the lack of legal standing for black marriage. ![]() There certainly is no era more oppressive for black people than their 250 years of enslavement in this country. It might also produce a warrior spirit and a deep commitment to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you. Oppression might well produce a culture of failure. I think it's bizarre that he doesn't bother to see if his argument is actually true. What about the idea that white supremacy necessarily "bred a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success"? Chait believes that it's "bizarre" to think otherwise. ![]() But it can't actually be demonstrated in the American record, and thus has no applicability. Chait's theory of independent black cultural pathologies sounds reasonable. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison-industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the world's entire incarcerated population.Īnd we do not find an era free of white supremacy in our times either, when the rising number of arrests for marijuana are mostly borne by African-Americans when segregation drives a foreclosure crisis that helped expand the wealth gap when big banks busy themselves baiting black people with "wealth-building seminars" and instead offering "ghetto loans" for "mud people" when studies find that black low-wage applicants with no criminal record "fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison" when, even after controlling for neighborhoods and crime rates, my son finds himself more likely to be stopped and frisked. We certainly do not find such a period during the Roosevelt-Truman era, when this country erected a racist social safety net, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was "like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." Nor do we find it during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when African-Americans-as a matter of federal policy-were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era. Certainly the antebellum period, when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. The "structural conditions" Chait outlines above can be summed up under the phrase "white supremacy." I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be "independent" of white supremacy. The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success. This argument-which Barack Obama embraces-is more sincere, honest, and seductive. The liberal version of the cultural argument points to "a tangle of pathologies" haunting black America born of oppression. The conservative version eliminates white supremacy as a factor and leaves the question of the culture's origin ominously unanswered. This version can never be regarded seriously. There is a conservative and a liberal rendition of this tradition. Arguing that poor black people are not "holding up their end of the bargain," or that they are in need of moral instruction is an old and dubious tradition in America. ![]() I am sorry I did not do it in this instance and will attempt to do so now. I should have spent more time disentangling these two notions, and illuminating their common roots-the notion that black culture is part of the problem. I have tried to do this disentangling in the past. It's good to debate a writer of such clarity-even when that clarity has failed him.Ĭhait argues that I've conflated Paul Ryan's view of black poverty with Barack Obama's. With that in mind, it is a pleasure to engage Chait in the discussion over President Obama, racism, culture, and personal responsibility. This lovely takedown of Robert Johnson is a classic of the genre, one I studied incessantly when I was sharpening my own sword. Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg. ![]()
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