Black rage is not the cause of black problems

For some reason, John McWhorter is suddenly getting a lot of shine again -- he's had op-eds appear in both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last two weeks. And it's puzzling to me, because the things he has been saying are so bizarre ideologically and incorrect textually, that I find it hard to understand why the editors of either paper saw fit to publish his tripe and lend it any legitimacy whatsoever. The Times piece was so absurd as to be laughable, in its simplistic attempt to use John H. Johnson's passing as a platform for a call for black people to aspire to be like white people, whom he posited as normal.

However, the Post piece masquerades as scholarship and pretends rigor, so it deserves more extensive comment.

The first and most obvious flaw of his piece is to start out with a false premise, one to which he can then draw a faulty contrast to the Watts riots of 1965. He refers to "the polite sleeve-tugging and forms of nonviolent protest typical of the earlier civil rights generation." This is nothing short of fantastical. First of all, nonviolent direct action in the Deep South was born as a tactic in a region where Blacks suffered nothing less than state-sponsored terror, where Bull Connor famously had an armored tank for his local police department and anyone who participated in civil rights labored under the shadow of violent reprisal. The protests of the earlier civil rights era were borne of a strategy of shaming the federal government into extending equal protection to all its citizens and promoting human rights -- a strategy that not only had largely run its course by 1965, but had been shown to be wildly ineffective outside the South.

McWhorter can't understand the Watts riots because he misunderstands the civil rights movement. Yes, the NAACP had been struggling for years and had achieved stunning judicial victories. Yet they had not been able to get so much as an anti-lynching law passed until the people took to the streets and began to demand their human rights. Sure, in the civil rights marches, black frustration with American apartheid found a focus -- yet instead of puzzling out the lack of focus in urban riots, McWhorter chooses to make spurious assertions that black rage was somehow misplaced.

McWhorter puzzles over the idea that Black folks "had been dealing with the short end of the stick for almost 400 years. If black American history from the early 1600s to 2005 could be condensed to 24 hours, then these riots took place at 10 p.m. Why not before?"

We hadn't?

Gabriel?

Denmark Vesey?

Nat Turner?

The Maroon communities of South Carolina and Georgia?

The Seminole Wars?

Lacking this context, he is free to go off on a tangent where he does no less than assert that the inspiration for black rebellion was...white people!

That's so laughable I'll leave it where it is. Utter foolishness.

But then he flows on to more historical inaccuracy and nonsense, quoting Bayard Rustin in a speech to SNCC in 1963 about the need for an overall social reform plan, and then ignoring the Freedom Summer that they organized in 1964, their work in Lowndes County, Alabama, and the Meredith March against Fear in 1965 that registered over 5000 voters deep in the heart of Mississippi. He overstates the impact of welfare rights organizations...ignores the impact of black middle-class flight and corporate careerism on black communities...discounts the effects of de-industrialization...and refuses to even attempt to examine the underlying reasons that poor black people have rioted in this country, whether Watts in 1965, Miami in 1980, or LA in 1992.

I could go on...but idiocy makes me tired. More later.