Dan Erwin

John McWhorter on the Black Detour

“The Goal of the civil-rights movement was opportunity—not a post-racial society.” So John McWhorter reminds his readers in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Was WSJ a strategic placement?

To say that John McWhorter is outside the Black and White consensus is, to put it mildly, a gross understatement. But McWhorter is absolutely correct about his interpretation and commitment to a different minority objective than we’re currently dealing with.

John McWhorter, the well-known Columbia University professor in linguistics and American Studies writes for the New Republic, Time magazine and occasionally the NYTimes.  This being the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington and King’s I have a dream speech, McWhorter addresses the issue with phenomenal, even unique insight. Intriguingly, WSJ opens this article to any and all readers—without a subscription. I hope it’s read widely.

Following a brief discussion of the context, McWhorter sets up the article with unmistakable clarity, arguing that over the past 50 years black thinkers and leaders have taken up a “quixotic psycho-social experiment.” It is a detour all about moral sentiment rather than active engagement in helping people who need it. The distracting notion that America needs a “conversation” about race, argues McWhorter, is fundamentally “passive” because it “assumes that what black people need most is for white people to think better of them and more about them.” Indeed, “the only reason why ideas like “institutional racism” and a “conversation about race seem more compelling is because they are more morally dramatic. Drama (he insists) is not what will make a difference in black lives,” nor in the lives of any of the poverty stricken.

Neither Al Sharpton nor Clarence Thomas
If you read McWhorter closely—and I urge you to do that—you’ll notice that he is not on the left or the right, but taking an alternative stance. In short, how white people “feel” about blacks has nothing to do with the task at hand.

Reading McWhorter through King and my own biblical lens, he makes perfect sense. Neither the prophets nor Jesus defined righteousness or compassion through feelings or even morality. Indeed, you could say that the Old and New Testaments are not especially interested in personal or self-centered morality as we understand it today. They are interested instead in active compassion built upon righteousness and distributive justice, not in racism that can be “revealed only by psychological experiments and statistical studies.” 

Righteousness in the biblical texts is a behavior which identifies people who live generatively in the community both to sustain and enhance the community’s well-being. They are not greedy or self-sufficient, but show special attentiveness to the poor and needy. By their presence and their actions, they lend stability to the community. As the prophets use the term, it has both economic and political dimensions. Similarly, the biblical texts use the term justice, not in a punitive sense, but as distributive. So the bible talks about that justice in terms of the available quantities of goods, the actual process by which goods are to be distributed and the allocation of the goods to all members of the community. Thus being “compassionate,” as I noted above, is not about a psychological or feeling-based morality, but about distributive justice to the entire community. Just and righteous are about doing what is right. And when MLKing preached about letting “justice roll down,” he’s talking about distributive justice.

So as McWhorter concludes, “how white people feel about us has nothing to do with that task (compassion and distributive justice). Only by facing that reality will we truly honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Picture by flickr.com

Not the Smartest Kids on the Block

Those of us with the will, the educational insight and the financial wherewithal to make certain our children are well educated will celebrate Amanda Ripley’s new book, The smartest kids in the world: and how they got there. I’ve waited for someone to tell the truth about education and the American culture and family, and Ripley does precisely that. 

But first, a story from a few days ago
Sadly, an interaction with a resident family in my apartment is typical--and instructive. The family, young and with obvious financial resources, has a couple toddlers and has decided to buy their first home. They indicated that they’d looked at the market and decided not to buy in our older suburb, St Anthony, but move a half-mile into the next suburb, New Brighton, where they found a newer house they preferred. I couldn’t resist. I asked whether they’d checked out the distinctions between the two school systems and they nodded. The New Brighton school system, by Minnesota standards though once fairly good, has been going downhill for years, and is merely an adequate suburban system now. Our daughters graduated from it and went on to the most exclusive colleges in the nation and have all succeeded very well in their vocations. But my wife, who served as a reserve teacher for years, learned to her chagrin about the St Anthony system after we’d settled in New Brighton. It’s easily one of the finest in the metropolitan area and is in a community that will maintain a high standard. Why, I wanted to ask (but didn’t), would you buy a home in a second class school system, that’s obviously on downward skids when you can send your kids to an outstanding system?

What's the Real Skinny on Detroit?

He’s quite right: Stephan Richter, that is. As a Michigan native, with grade school and high school bridging the nineteen-forties and fifties, I’ve read too much on the bankruptcy of my beloved Detroit. But Richter, unique in his analysis, gets it. The right wing crazies blame the unions and the lefties are more cautious and far less open. A few suggest it was auto management. Richter takes a different stance and is just about there. He forgot one issue, but, still, it’s implicit in his argument.

Though my wife and I left Detroit on a calculated basis in 1958, that was more about graduate school, family and our own inability to loosen some frustrating middle class clutches. But over the years we forgot the occasional family problems and celebrated the sheer delight of growing up in Detroit in the ‘40s and ‘50s. God, we had everything. It was truly the Paris of America.

The High Performers Are Not the Best Mentors

Recent research into role model and mentor selection reveals that the best choices are counter-intuitive. You’d think that a top expert or an exceptional performer would make for the best role model or coach. That, however, is patently false—and it could hurt you.

Both role models and mentors can be so far removed from your day-to-day work that they are of little value to you. Instead, you want folk who have recently walked in your shoes and can give you relevant, practical, concrete insight into your work.

Second-best makes a better role model
Alina Tugend of the New York Times summarized several studies on role models and reported on a number of problems with using exceptional performers as role models. As she writes, we Americans tend to fetishize the guy who’s number one—certain that that if we do what he or she does, we’ll be successful. But the research doesn’t support that.

Two profs from the University of Warwick (U.K.), Chengwei Liu and Jerker Denrell, drew their conclusions from simulated data. They studied how average skill levels differ with the number of successes achieved. They found, surprisingly, that workers who achieved exceptional success had an average skill level lower than those with fewer successes. Typically, the most impressive over the long term are the moderately successful rather than the exceptional performer.

Why do the exceptional performers have less skill than the moderately successful? In short, luck—those chance events outside the control of individuals. Furthermore, those at the pinnacle of their field may have taken huge risks—risks which are dangerous to imitate. Indeed, exposure to “illustrious” models often causes us to think we’re not at all like that.

Dan Is On Vacation

My silence this week means that I'm on family vacation in the beautiful lake country around Nisswa, MN. I'll be back to my blog on Tuesday or Wednesday next week.

Best to all.