By Khalil G. Muhammad
Washington Post
Sunday, December 9, 2007; B03
Recently I showed my college students a YouTube clip of Bill Cosby's
and Alvin Poussaint's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." After
hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace their parenting
responsibilities, many of the students said they wished their parents
had followed his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had
done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol, and run afoul of the
law. These problems, they agreed, might have been avoided with more
supervision at home.
They might have been the perfect audience for a Cosby town-hall lecture
on the dangers of self-destructive values in black America. They might
also have been perfect illustrations of the growing "values gap"
between poor and middle-class blacks described in a widely cited recent
Pew Research Center poll.
Except almost all my students are white.
Cosby and the recent Pew study are the latest in a long finger-wagging
tradition of instructing poor blacks to lift themselves up by their
bootstraps and reject pathologically "black" values. Today, rap culture
is usually presented as Exhibit A, but strains of the same argument
have cropped up for more than a century. If blacks would just get their
act together, this old story goes, all the social inequalities between
them and the rest of society would disappear.
In its coverage of the Pew report findings, National Public Radio asked
whether some blacks were lagging behind because they were choosing not
to become "closer to whites in their values." Unfortunately, this line
of questioning reinforces one of the most persistent myths in America,
that white is always right. The myth reflects an enduring double
standard based on "white" and "black" explanations for social problems.
And it assumes that "white" culture is the gold standard for judging
everyone, despite its competing ideologies, its contradictions and its
flaws, including racism.
The masquerade began over a hundred years ago. Shortly after the end of
slavery, sociologists and demographers began presenting research on
black failure and struggle as "indisputable" proof of black
inferiority. One of the first studies was released in 1896, when the
leading race-relations demographer of the period, Frederick L. Hoffman,
analyzed census data showing that blacks were doing worse than whites
in mortality, health, employment, education and crime. The problem was
not racism, he argued, but "race traits and tendencies."
To him, the civil rights acts of the 1860s and 1870s had leveled the
playing field. Blacks should be left to compete against whites on their
own and face the inevitable. The black man, he wrote, "has usually but
one avenue out of his dilemma -- the road to prison or to an early
grave."
At the same time, when explaining rising rates of crime, suicide and
mental-health problems among whites, Hoffman blamed industrialization
and the strains of "modern life." He called for a reordering of the
nation's economic priorities. Hoffman's study coincided with -- and
provided justification for -- the Supreme Court's notorious Plessy v.
Ferguson decision, which legalized segregation.
As segregation took hold, there was a powerful need to minimize the
role of racism as a factor in explaining racial disparities. The
"Cosby" role at the start of Jim Crow was first played by Booker T.
Washington. Counseling blacks to conquer their inferiority, he
repudiated civil rights activism in favor of self-help and moral
regeneration.
Many whites loved Washington, and his ideas were echoed by liberal
social scientists such as the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who
instructed black people to stop sympathizing "with their own criminals"
and "accept without whining patheticism and corroding self-pity [their]
present situation, prejudice and all."
But when Hall turned his focus on whites, his research on adolescent
psychology directly influenced national efforts to protect them from
the ravages of industrial capitalism. Drawing on his work, the
child-welfare activist Jane Addams established Hull House in Chicago at
first to help immigrant families adjust to American life, and later to
save thousands of Chicago's white youth from lives of crime, violence
and drug abuse attributed to "modern city conditions." But black
children were not generally welcome at Hull House. Addams claimed that
similar problems among black youth were due to the race's "belated"
moral development, manifested in poor parenting and a lack of "social
restraint."
The pioneering black social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois challenged this
first generation of white liberals and social scientists, including
Hoffman, on the flawed assumptions and racial double standards in their
studies and in their practices. But when Du Bois tried to argue that
pathology knows no color, he was ignored, criticized and dismissed by
his white peers as an angry black man with, as one sociologist put it,
a "chip on his shoulder."
Du Bois's frustrations led him to leave academia for a life of
anti-racist activism. In 1910, the year he became director of research
and publicity for the NAACP, he warned that "whiteness" was becoming
the new basis of the nation's consciousness. "Are we not coming more
and more day by day to making the statement, 'I am white,' the one
fundamental tenet of our practical morality?" he asked.
In today's era of hip-hop, Du Bois's warning still goes unheeded. If
rap music is so bad, why are white kids its major consumers? And by
what value system should we judge the large media companies that
publish and distribute hip-hop -- or, really, gangsta rap, its most
popular and sinister cousin?
Were "white values" on display two years ago when the federal
government failed to adequately respond to one of the greatest natural
disasters in American history?
If lower-class "black" values are so distinct from those of the rest of
America, particularly the "white values" supposedly now embraced by
middle- and upper-class blacks, why, according to the Pew report, do
less than a third of white Americans graduate from college? Are legions
of whites similarly devaluing higher education? Are they "acting black"?
If lower-class black values are so peculiar, why do whites report the
same or higher levels of illegal drug use as blacks, as numerous
studies show?
What of underperforming white schoolchildren in rural America, the
Great Plains, Appalachia or the Deep South? Are they "acting black"
because they can't compete with their upwardly mobile suburban
counterparts?
Today's liberals still empathize with America's invisible white working
poor, who they warn are being "nickel and dimed" to the point of near
homelessness. But why the empathy? Isn't their poverty really a
function of their choosing to embrace their hidden blackness?
Du Bois's scholarship and activism helped pave the way for the modern
civil rights movement, which helped exorcize the ghost of America's Jim
Crow past. That he was right about racism but that we still continue to
accept the same flawed thinking about race and social problems suggests
a powerful and enduring paradox.
If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of black vs.
white values, then we need to explain what exactly white values are.
When we do, we'll find that whiteness is an inadequate standard by
which to judge good black people vs. bad ones.
As my students would tell you, the real white world is as pathological,
as respectable and as diverse as the black one.
kgmuhamm@indiana.edu
Khalil G. Muhammad is an assistant professor of history at Indiana
University and the author of the forthcoming "The Condemnation of
Blackness: Ideas about Race and Crime in the Making of Modern Urban
America. "
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