On April 3, John McWhorter delivered a version this speech as the eighth of the 2005-2006 Bradley Lectures. Click here for more information about this speech.

One of the main sources of the stalemate on the race question in America today is that among so many, it is considered a mark of enlightenment to understand that poor black Americans are incapable of playing a significant part in changing their own lives.

Instead, it is thought that external factors--mainly the economy and racism--have determined the fate of poor black Americans and always will. The fancy way of putting this is that black people’s problems are structural, i.e. due to flaws in societal structures. Adherents of the Structural notion are concentrated especially in academia: mastering its tenets is generally thought, in fact, to be a badge of mature insight and moral sophistication.

What especially alarms the Structural crowd is those who lack this purported sophistication, and venture to propose that the black community’s problems are due, at least in significant part, to entrenched behaviors that are not connected to the state of the GNP, how whites feel about blacks, or how level the playing field is. That is, the Structural crowd blanches at the thought that anyone supposes that poor black America’s problems are cultural rather than structural.

They are aware that the Cultural analysis is the more immediately intuitive one, most likely of the man on the street. Therefore, they see all expressions of the Cultural analysis as red meat to the untutored masses, threatening to undo their decades-long attempt to usher the public into what they suppose is precious wisdom only comprehensible via careful tutelage.

This is why Bill Cosby’s grouchy call for poor blacks to take responsibility for themselves was received with such fury by so many in the black punditocracy, even inspiring a book-length disquisition by the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Eric Dyson. Cosby was exemplifying precisely what the Structural crowd consider backwards and unkind--and heaven forbid, in a very public forum where Joe Barstool could hear it.

This is why so often black people appear to be closed to simple differences of opinion on race. To Structural adherents, the Cultural idea is not just a different viewpoint, but a punitive, abusive one, accusing people of responsibility for problems imposed upon them by The Man. To point to culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then, is to assail a struggling black person who already has enough on his plate because of the eternal, grinding depredations of the Structure.

Indeed, the Structural analysis is commonly expressed amidst indignation, name-calling, and rhetorical language. These are signs that the analysis is based not on sober engagement with the full range of relevant facts and a constant commitment to learning new things and assessing them logically, but on emotion. A purported analysis of race and society that is based on emotion has little chance of corresponding more than approximately to reality, and in my research, I have found it impossible to avoid the conclusion so many others have reached: that the Structural analysis has a grain of truth in it and then some, but that in 2006, poor black America’s main problems are cultural.

In my latest book, Winning the Race, I argue that this is important because it points us to different directions in seeking to help poor black America than the Structural notion does. In this speech, however, rather than just rehash the book, I would like to examine a single New York Times newspaper article that nicely exemplifies the philosophical contrast that interests me and founds the argumentation in Winning the Race, including what implications the citizen truly concerned with race should draw from the article and why.  

The article in question appeared on March 20, 2006, and was titled “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn.” It covered the growing numbers of black men in their teens and twenties who remain mostly disconnected from the work force, open endedly regardless of the state of the economy and employment market. These men are what were once called “corner men,” who in black ghettoes before the 1970s were certainly a fixture, but on the margins and in small numbers. Ethnographies like Tally’s Corner by Elliott Liebow and Soulside by Ulf Hannerz carefully covered men who worked only occasionally, were not interested in marriage, perhaps had some substance abuse problems, and were essentially content not going much of anywhere in life. What distinguishes then and now is that in today’s black inner cities, modern reflexes of the corner man are a norm rather than a marginal oddity. To be an able-bodied man who does not work steadily for a living even when work is available is one way of being what, in these communities, is considered a normal person. The question is what made the difference between then and now.

The Times article covers all sides of the issue well enough, but predictably the paragraphs on the first page, most likely to be actually read by most readers of the paper, include one that states, “Especially in the country’s inner cities, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine.”

In our moment, this is a richly coded sentence. The informed reader knows to parse the sentence thusly:

“finishing high school is the exception” = inner-city schools are underfunded and fail to inspire students

“legal work is scarcer than ever” = low-skill factory jobs left inner city areas, such that young black men must turn to selling drugs to make a living

“prison is almost routine” = the criminal justice system is rigged against blacks.

In fact, all three of these issues show that what must be addressed today is not Structure, but Culture.

It is a mantra of the Structural analysis that inner-city schools are so lousy because they struggle along on shoestring budgets while white suburban schools are swimming in cash. The image alone has the power of a Thomas Nast cartoon, and this combined with the influence of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities has imprinted this idea on millions.

It is interesting, however, how seldom Structural adherents bring up actual examples of where extra money has been pumped into an inner-city school and it bore results. In that light, as it happens, in New Jersey, the Abbott v. Burke State Supreme Court case actually required what the Structural crowd think will be the solution to the public school crisis. Since 1998, poor school districts throughout New Jersey have been funded at the same rates as plush suburban ones and often at higher ones, with provisions for health care, after-school and summer programs, and technological upgrades--and not just in one city or county, but throughout the state.

Eight years later, only professional boosters are happy with the results. After decades of steeping in bureaucratic mire and poor superintendance by undertrained and underenthusiastic teachers and administrators, money could do little to make these schools any better. In addition, the Abbott requirements ran up confusingly against those enforced by an earlier state takeover of the schools in three major cities, and then again in 2002 against those of No Child Left Behind. The Abbott schools have been wholly unable to match the standards enforced by NCLB, even though before 2002 it was considered a hopeful sign that reading and math scores were up somewhat for smaller children (but not older ones).

The argument can go on forever as to whether underfunding was what made these schools fail in the first place, although I would stress the transformation of education schools’ philosophies and changes in the student population due to inner-city breakdown. But even if underfunding was the--or a--cause, it is plain that today, after decades of mismanagement, these schools will not be turned around by giving them more money.

These schools are mired in a culture of mediocrity larger than any one person. Most people working in these systems know that something is terribly wrong, and yet many of the very same people are part of the problem: this is nature of corporate entities. Under ordinary conditions people prefer to keep doing what they always have, and see small efforts at change as enough in terms of reform, typically assuming that these will bear fruit in some unspecified future and unconcerned as to how long this may take. What changes a culture is not funding: the funding ends up being translated into more failure. What changes a culture, what makes a culture commit itself to change now, is, for example, fear of its own demise. Not pretty--but also true.

At least it is when it comes to failing public schools. The data are in, really: when public school administrators see that if their schools do not improve, then their students--especially the better ones--will use vouchers and transfer out, then the schools improve, and quickly. Jay Greene and Marcus Roberts of the Manhattan Institute have shown, for example, that in Florida, schools have improved neatly according to how much they were threatened by vouchers. Those already seeing students take off improved more than those threatened with the prospect; meanwhile, schools that were lousy but just missed being placed on the voucher-threat list did not improve. Two studies by others have found the same result. Then, Greene as well as Caroline Hoxby have found similar things in Milwaukee. It also bears mentioning that Greene readily admits in his study of Washington, D.C., that there has been no such result after one year--Greene is a rigorous and empirical scholar, not a “right-wing ideologue.”

There are those who are somehow unmoved by findings like these. Quite commonly a conversation with them about vouchers veers immediately into a complaint that vouchers would leave special-education students overconcentrated in the public schools, burdening the teachers there. Let us allow that this would not be ideal. It nevertheless remains stunning to me that for so many, the teachers dealing with special ed kids is a more important issue than the vouchered students learning how to read and do math across town, at last doing real learning in decent schools.

These are people who fashion themselves as concerned about the black American condition--and yet for them, the idea of black kids getting a good education elicits a genuflective kind of acknowledgment but only that, hardly exciting them as much as issues such as gaining the vote for black felons or calling for reparations for slavery (presumably to be used partly in new renditions of New Jersey’s Abbott experiment?).

The reason is that the Structural position is an emotional one, and as such, is maintained even in the face of logic. I suspect that when evaluating proposals for helping people, logic will be more useful than whether the solution is emotionally satisfying to people of a certain politics.

Next is the idea that the unemployment crisis among young black men is due to the relocation of low-skill manufacturing jobs--which once anchored black communities--to the distant suburbs or overseas. This idea has been most effectively placed in the thinking American’s consciousness by Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson’s work, and is now assumed on op-ed pages and taught in universities, where it goes under the names deindustrialization and spatial mismatch (i.e. between men and jobs). This is another Structural argument: black men were done in by broad societal currents they were unable to resist.

However, studies addressing this generally look at a single city, noting that 1) the factories moved away, and that 2) there is an unemployment crisis. Suddenly, however, vigilance as to the difference between correlation and cause goes out the window, so deep-seated is the commitment to the Structural over the Cultural (i.e. it is not that the men will not work, but that society prevents them from doing so).

But presumably, to conclusively address the issue one would check to see whether there were cities where factory jobs did not move away and see if, as expected, no unemployment crisis emerged.

In fact, in cities where the factories did not move away, black communities developed the same unemployment crisis as in other cities. For example, Indianapolis is a city where factory jobs either stayed put or moved just very slightly further away, and where a few moved five to ten miles out, new ones were built much closer in. Yet by the 1990s Indianapolis was home to the same kinds of commissions typical in other cities, of citizens concerned about a teen black male culture in which something had gone terribly wrong, one thing being an unawareness of job opportunities and, as such, rampant unemployment.

This suggests, quite simply, that factory relocation was not the cause of the unemployment crisis, which squares with the intuitive objection just about anyone might have on some level to the whole idea: are manufacturing jobs the only, or even close to the only, jobs available to men without college degrees? Academic analysts repeatedly come to the same conclusion again and again, showing that at best, factory relocation accounted for about a third only of the unemployment problem (i.e. although the researchers refrain from putting it in so many words, if the factories had stayed in place, there would still be a serious unemployment problem). Results of this kind have come from Harry Holzer and Wayne Vroman, James H. Johnson and Melvin P. Oliver, and especially a recent study by John Foster-Bey, who examines data from eight cities and shows that black low-skill workers are affected less than whites by factory relocation, and never by very much.

Again, the main factor here is cultural. The crucial contrast is between low-skill black workers commuting nintety minutes away to the River Rouge Ford plant in Detroit in the twenties, and young black men interviewed by Wilson and his assistants in the 1980s casually saying that getting to a job exactly that far away would require getting up too early, especially in the winter when it would be dark (a typical kind of comment in Wilson’s and others’ work on such men, despite the scholars’ constructive intent and left-leaning politics).

The typical Structural riposte is that these men do not work because white employers are biased against them and prefer to hire Latino immigrants, considering them to work harder. In fact, all indications are that this is precisely true--but the Structural fan’s assumption that this is based on mere “stereotyping” (i.e. that the racist aspect of the Structure senselessly bars black men from employment) is false. A rich array of studies all make it ringingly clear that black men of this demographic often have an edgy demeanor and response to conflict as a “code of the streets.” The researchers often mark this as necessary in an often threatening environment--okay. But it is still a liability in a job, especially one that involves interacting with the public, and in these studies, interviews with employers make it hard to see them as “racists” for preferring Latinos. In work by Joleen Kirschenmann and Kathryn Neckerman, J. Henry Braddock and James M. McPartland, Harry Holzer, Philip Moss, and Chris Tilly, and Katherine Neckerman, we meet employers who say that they made a serious effort to hire such black men in the past, only to find that their attitudes made them difficult employees. Importantly, the employers often note that the problem starts with the men’s environments--they are not ignorant bigots. The problem is, then, once again, a cultural one.

Here, for example, Alford Young, a University of Michigan sociologist joint-appointed in the Black Studies program (i.e. no “evil conservative”!) says of the men of this demographic that he has studied: “They often say they will take whatever they can get, but a sentence or two later say that certain wages are wholly unacceptable. This seemingly contradictory talk is consistent with their statements about problems with certain past work experiences, such as the fast food industry, where some men eventually find jobs but abandon them (if not be dismissed) as soon as problems or tensions arise.”

It also appears that a major reason such men refrain from serious work is that since welfare reform in 1996, they have been pursued more aggressively for child support payments, which often eat up so much of their earnings that they start to wonder what the point of working is. A real problem--but again, this cannot be traced to Structure. Surely, after all, if employment prospects for black men have been so very bleak, then certainly we would expect them to make fewer babies and not more!

The Structural adherent often claims that poor women have all of these babies so young because they want something to love since life is so hopeless otherwise. But this depicts black people as ahistorical. Saddled with ample despair decades ago amidst institutionalized racism nationwide, young black women did not have children out-of-wedlock to remotely the extent they have since the 1970s. For example, in the 1920s, in black Chicago it was considered a problem that 15 percent of babies had no father. By the 1990s, the illegitimacy rate in the black community was 75 percent--and this was not just a matter of the sexual revolution, which made that figure just 25 percent among whites.

If anything “systemic” created this revolution in childbearing, it was a systemic reform that was aimed at the betterment of blacks. Starting in 1966, the National Welfare Rights Organization, the brainchild of a black chemist and two white social work professors, recruited mostly black poor women and incited rallies nationwide calling for blacks to sign up for welfare. Meanwhile, they got the welfare rules relaxed so that women could get welfare even if the father of their children was able-bodied but unemployed--and even living with the mother. Here was the kind of welfare that took care of children forever, absolving the father of taking care of his own offspring. It was precisely at this time that it became rare for poor black people who made children to get married (even as late as the early 60s two-parent families were the norm even in the poorest black areas), a norm for teenage girls to get pregnant, a norm for unskilled women to have multiple children by multiple fathers, and so on. Structural folks give no plausible way that the GNP or whitey’s racism could have created this change at this time.

Their idea was to get so many people on the rolls that it would bankrupt the social service system and gain all Americans a guaranteed income. That never happened, but a profound transformation of the black community did. From only 1966 to 1970, living open-endedly on welfare became considered normal in black communities, whereas until then it had been considered, as elsewhere, a shameful and temporary condition.

Thus while in 1966, about 450,000 people were on welfare nationwide, almost double that were on it just four years later. In the mid-60s, only 30 percent of the people technically eligible for welfare were on it; by 1971, 90 percent were. Nor was this effort aimed at the The Poor in a race-blind sense: packing the welfare rolls was considered good riot insurance in the era of the Long, Hot Summers. In Indiana only eighteen out of ninety-two counties had any significant numbers of black people. From 1964 to 1972, welfare recipiency tripled in just eleven of ninety-two counties. Of this eleven, no fewer than ten were among those eighteen counties with heavy black populations--while there were thirty counties in which whites lived in poverty where welfare stayed right where it had always been.

All of this means that the reason these unemployed men owe child support, often for more than one child, is because of a systemic transformation that was thought to be to his recent ancestors’ benefit, which itself created a new culture in which men like him could make babies very early in life without considering the consequences, simply because this was what was normal in their neighborhood. In the 1920s, there could be no culture of babies making babies--for the simple reason that there existed no government program poised to pay for the children’s upkeep indefinitely. Nor did this kind of welfare exist in the 30s, 40s, 50s, or even early 60s. Once it did, the culture changed--but not because of anything even Structural fans would recognize as racism.

In this light, Hurricane Katrina is thought by the Structure crowd to have revealed that America does not care about black people. In fact, what Katrina revealed to us was a people just learning how to make the best of themselves nine years after Welfare Reform. This was a community that the transformation of welfare in the late 60s had ruined as elsewhere, and nine years after 1996, predictably, most members of such communities were getting by in low-end jobs. Spending decades having been seduced onto the welfare rolls, it is not surprising that today the people are not stock brokers and lab chemists. Leftist bloggers and commentators appear especially offended that anyone might suppose that the Katrina victims were mostly on welfare in 2005, and they are correct that they mostly were not: since 1996, it has been harder to get on welfare and it has had a five-year cap. However, while in 2002 6,696 families in New Orleans were on welfare, just twelve years before, 27,774 had been. Black New Orleans was still grappling with the results of this aspect of its past when the flood hit.

In any case, racism and the downsides of capitalism did not create the  twenty-six-year-old mother on welfare with four children and no job skills. The issue was cultural. The cultural trait was not “black American” since black America has only known this trait for the past four decades. The fact remains, however, that the issue is not Structural. It is Cultural.

Finally, the Structural crowd is especially dedicated to arguing that the criminal-justice system is biased against black men. Once again, though, to place Structure over Culture here only makes sense if one is driven less by compassion than one’s own psychological comfort.

For one thing, the particular Structural explanation most often aired, that the longer sentences for crack than for powdered cocaine are racist because blacks are more likely to use crack, does not hold water. The Congressional Black Caucus was solidly behind this law when it was being passed, with some members even hoping for harsher sentences for crack: they were simply concerned with what had become a scourge in black neighborhoods. And in any case, there were two studies in 1993 that came to similar conclusions that the “racist” analysis of this law was inaccurate. One showed that there was no perceptible racial bias in these sentencings when previous criminal record, amount of the drug found, and weapons possession were taken into consideration. Another one by the (left-leaning) National Academy of Sciences showed that there was, at best, a slight contribution by racism.

In the meantime, we could even allow that there are subtle racial biases overall in the justice system, as some studies have indicated. The question, however, is why one would be more interested in this than in the indisputable fact that way too many young black men find it normal to drift into interacting with that system in the first place. No one of any stripe denies this--even the Structural adherent knows that a principal problem in poor black communities is that too many men turn to crime. The racial bias involved may make for longer sentences for some, but is this the primary tragedy here? Any unbiased observer would consider so many men’s going the wrong way at all as the main problem.

There is something almost curious in people seeing too many black men in jail and being more interested in decrying sentencing discrepancies than in trying to make sure their own young men do not go near the flame of criminality at all so that they are not ensnared by those discrepancies. It is almost as if these people accept that their young men will flirt with criminality as a right of passage--perhaps the idea being that their doing so is a sophisticated “revolutionary” gesture against the evil Structure? Are these people trying to cast reality as an early ‘70s blaxploitation flick? I cannot say I know. But those who are most interested in the bias issue find this so urgent because they seek the thrill of once more revealing the racist rot at the heart of all whites and under American society as a whole, etc., etc. But this is a mere emotional score.

A more empirical approach shows that we are dealing with a Cultural issue. For example, in the Times article, Harvard Education and social policy professor Gary Orfield says of the more than 50 percent of men of this age group who do not finish high school, “We’re pumping out boys with no alternative” but to sell drugs. But then in the very next paragraph we learn that Latinos actually drop out at higher rates than black men--but are much less likely to be unemployed or drift into crime. The undereducated blacks and Latinos in question exist under the same “system,” the same “Structure.” What determines the difference in their behaviors is not the GNP, but culture.

Not long after the Times article appeared, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote an editorial piece for the same newspaper in which he showed himself as that rare breed: a career social scientist who is not afraid to let what any human being’s natural perceptual abilities show them, which is that cultural patterns can thrive independently of larger societal factors, because this is the way human beings are--and that this is as true for descendants of African slaves in the United States as for, well, all other human groups on earth.

Patterson noted how in an interview study of men of this kind, when they were asked why they did not work:

Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the “cool-pose culture” of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America’s largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

Note that Patterson knows that mainstream culture plays a part here: to note that a problem is cultural is not to propose that there is some mysterious gene in black Americans that causes this behavior (or one that expresses itself only in males!) or that a cultural pattern kicks in for no reason at all. I would add that the white counterculture served as an enabler for this pose’s takeover, in giving an ear to black radicalism and bringing it into the mainstream in the late 60s.

But the problem remains--a cultural one that truly oppressed low-skill blacks did not know before the ‘60s. In the summer of 2005, I was struck by accounts of the shooting murder of a twenty-nine-year-old black man at a Saturday night street barbecue. The man was an aspiring rapper, and was shot by rival rappers. This man, as it happened, was a father of four--but more precisely, he had four children by three women and lived with none of them. And yet, he only worked part-time. Nevertheless, interviews with family and friends showed that this was not thought of as especially abnormal and certainly not wrong. He was even a great father in terms of how he interacted with his children. But he felt no responsibility for paying for their upkeep. Really, one might expect that at the very least, a father of four might work forty hours a week. Yet in his community, this guy was, of all things, normal. Even newspaper headlines fostered this, regularly announcing the shooting of a “Brooklyn father” as if he were a pipe-smoking insurance agent married to a woman who had given birth to all of the kids.

That man, and what he and his nearest and dearest have come to think of as normal, is the problem we are faced with. To describe him is not to evoke a “stereotype,” as the Structural types often claim when faced with uncomfortable yet quotidian cases like this man. He is not a “stereotype”--he is a sadly common reality. There is now an entire literature by leftist academics covering his type as a national problem. He is in the work of William Julius Wilson, Ronald Mincy, Harry Holzer, John Foster-Bey, and others who would be surprised to be called “stereotypers.” Let’s get real and start facing the real problems.

And what this means is that instead of sagely retreading the same old factoids about factory relocation and bias in the criminal-justice system, it is time to address the simple fact that an awful lot of these guys do not want to work, do not know how to find work that they could do, or do not know how to keep work when they find it. What the problem is today is an aspect of what they are like, not what “society” is like. In other words, we must be strong enough to address their culture.

Sure, we might wish that in this country, where so often the government has deliberately manipulated the market in order to subsidize particular industries, that around 1970 there had been a massive effort to entice manufacturers to stay near city centers via tax credits and the like, in order to maintain a job base for uneducated inner city residents. But that did not happen. The chances that significant numbers of such jobs will be brought back to inner city communities is vanishingly slight, and if it happened it would be a painfully slow process. The ship has sailed.

The impulse to recite the Factories-Moved-Away saga when black unemployment comes up may seem informed and even compassionate, but it is, in fact, dismissive and unfeeling. One is reciting something that happened and cannot be reversed, and if this is all one has to say--or even most of what one has to say--then one is stating that nothing can be done and that we owe nothing to poor blacks except to articulately complain about what happened to them thirty years ago. We must do better than that.

For example, a recent study by Demetra Smith Nightingale and Elaine Sorensen presents a number of low-skill jobs available to people without college degrees that we can direct low-skill black men toward. Rather than falling for the seductiveness of William Julius Wilson’s title When Work Disappears, why not discuss how we can bring the men covered by the Times article into being sound technicians, mechanics, building inspectors, repairmen, mail carriers, or even (yes!) commercial fishermen? Note that in America of 2006 these are jobs we associate with immigrants--living thoroughly decent lives and providing for families. This is what our young black men who are not on their way to college should be doing.

Or, shouldn’t we be mildly obsessed with observing, fostering, and even starting up community organizations designed to work with such men “one by one, from the inside out,” as Brown University economist Glenn Loury titled an early book? The government, for instance, has since 1998 funded the Workforce Investment Act, which includes Youth Opportunity (YO) centers that teach disadvantaged folks how to make their way into serious employment. From 1998 to 2004, YOs served 50,000 people--nice, but hardly enough given that the number of men of this kind likely numbers at least two million. We need more YOs and a greater awareness that they exist. YOs also should stress on-the-job training more. But above all, YOs must be on the radar screen for all people concerned with black uplift. Citing Jonathan Kozol lifts up nothing.

Then there are an increasing number of organizations funded by corporations and other donors, such as Boston’s Year Up, which ushers young black and brown people into back-office work, meanwhile helping them reach their goals of opening small businesses like nail salons and nightclubs. After five years, 90 nintely of their graduates are working. Importantly, Year Up expels those who refuse to shape up, unlike many government programs that take all comers and thus set no standards. This is increasingly true of philanthropy-funded organizations of this kind, whose funders are increasingly interested not only in the gesture of giving, but whether their giving lent results.

There will remain of the Structural persuasion those who can only hear what they often term “black bashing” in any analysis that addresses culture. Ironically, it is their position that is a “black bashing” one. A culture that cannot criticize itself does not grow, and in fact does not even like itself very much. We watch fundamentalist Arabs pronouncing death sentences upon Muslims who criticize Islam, and we see crude, insecure medievals. Well?

No one, after all, is of the opinion that black Americans are the only people of the world with negative cultural traits. Rather, in admitting that there are self-perpetuating negative tics in the black community, we affirm its humanity, since all cultures have such tics. Those who devote careers to fashioning a fragile conception of black Americans as culturally determined solely by economics and racism are dehumanizing us, selling a portrait of blacks as the most passive humans in the history of our species. This perception of black people is--and I mean this precisely--racist.

Albanians indulge in blood feuds. Middle-aged women in many Southeast Asian cultures go into a kind of trance called latah in which they perform lewd gestures and utterances at the command of those around them, and then mysteriously “snap out of it.” Clearly this is not a human universal, and thus not a response to “society”--one woman copies it from another. It is cultural. Since the Columbine murders, white teenage boys in the United States are occasionally given to expressing adolescent frustration by bringing guns to school and shooting some people. Again, this is hardly the only possible response to teen angst, and the trend is clearly a matter of copying the first case. It is a cultural trait, unconnected to the economy, and living now on its own steam.

Since the late 1960s, a cultural trait has arisen in a large segment of the black male population that sees no shame in not working for a living. We should try to eliminate that cultural trait. Railing at Structural factors will not assist in that effort, and thus must be relegated to the margins. Helping people in the here and now will be, for many of us, more important than investigating the distant possibility of utopian revisions of the fiber of American society.

The idea that when we see a people acting in self-destructive ways, the reason for those actions must be abstract “structural” factors, begins as a form of enlightenment--an advance over ignorant Social Darwinism. But it has transmogrified into a static, postural rhetoric of marginal import to helping people help themselves. There is a further form of enlightenment that must be accepted. With full awareness of the dangers of stereotyping, and with full awareness that negative cultural traits can begin as a response to oppression, we will openly acknowledge that behaviors can live beyond their original stimulus. Able to dwell in this fact without hesitation, we will realize that we can try to correct a cultural trait of a group--including descendants of African slaves in the U.S.--while remaining concerned and empathic citizens.

John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.