(crossposted from US of J)
In the City Journal, Myron Magnet argues that among a large number of African-Americans, we’re seeing the “awakening” of black conservatism and the rejection of the traditional “victim” paradigm. Unfortunately, his essay is filled to the brim hoary cliche’s, misrepresentations, and faulty assumptions, and eventually collapses under the weight of its abject ignorance. In fact, looking over the essay, there’s enough material here to fill a week’s worth of blog posts. And there’s a good chance that I’ll return to the essay later in the week. But for now, I want to take issue with Magnet’s brief foray into black history:
In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain stuck in that era to this day. “Very few new ideas are allowed into this stifling echo chamber,” Williams reports. Despite startling African-American progress in the intervening half-century, “the official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders” but must “be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized.” Dissent, and you’re an “Uncle Tom and a sellout.”
This is basically a fairly typical conservative critique, coupled with the myth of the “black golden age,” a time (prior to an expanded welfare state, of course) where all black people were little replicas of the author’s biases. In this case, these mythical black people were the embodiment of everything good, until social policies and black power sent us a dozen steps backwards.
Except, if you’ve read any black literature from the 1920s onwards, you get a pretty decent picture of segregated black life in the United States, and you see that many of the problems present in the black community now were present back then. Ann Petry’s The Street, for example, features as a main character a single woman who eventually abandons her child to the streets. Sound familiar at all? Likewise, Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, is filled with scenes showing the deprivation with which many African-Americans lived their lives.
I’m willing to agree that the problems within the black community have gotten worse in the past twenty years, but that has less to do with any “toxic orthodoxy” among black leaders, and everything to do with the fact that even after the reforms of the 1960s, many African-Americans (particularly those in the cities) were only marginally connected to the social, political, and economic fabric of this country. When crack reared its ugly head in the early 1980s, it took advantage of those frayed bonds, and irreparably damaged countless communities.
If you’re looking to do something about the condition of the black community, the first step is to be honest about our history and circumstances. There was never a golden age, and for too many black people, things have always been pretty shitty. Moreover, it wasn’t some nebulous group of civil rights leaders who “ruined” black America, it was that pesky legacy of racism and discrimination that did it. Reckon fully with that, and maybe you’ll be able to make a useful contribution to the dialogue.
Update: Commenter Aaron notes that the problems Magnet describes aren’t particular to the black community:
One of the things conspicuously missing from a lot of these analyses is that, other than the lesser presence of creative naming (although I have seen some examples of that), the same culture of crime, poverty, and academic underachievement exists in many impoverished white communities. If the solution truly is, “All you have to do is cast off a worldview premised upon “the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized”, why is that the case?
