Are Blacks Biased Against Braininess?

It's a safe bet that a new book by John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Berkeley, will make him a hero to the black-bashing crowd. Black, smart and only 34, McWhorter is being touted by his publisher as a maverick "more angry than Stephen Carter, more pragmatic and compassionate than Shelby Steele, more forward-looking than Stanley Crouch." McWhorter says he's uncomfortable being associated with authors acclaimed by white conservatives and slammed by many blacks--but, hey, it goes with the territory. If you're a self-described "proper-talking black guy who's had all the advantages," you've got to expect other blacks to be outraged when you claim that being a "culturally authentic" African American dooms you to being a dunce.

That's the thesis of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America--that the lagging academic performance of African-American students isn't caused by the residual effects of prejudice or poor schools but by a "cult of anti-intellectualism" that has infected black America from the ghetto to the middle class. Black students, including those at elite universities, he says, "are really disinclined to think that hard" about subjects other than their own victimization. This dubious insight came to McWhorter in the days before California's Proposition 209 outlawed the use of race in admissions. After noticing that "the black students were the worst students on campus," he concluded they were held back by three "defeatist thought patterns":

--the Cult of Victimology, which leads blacks to blame their problems on racism;

--the Cult of Separatism, which makes blacks think that whatever whites do, they should do the opposite; and

--the Cult of Anti-Intellectualism, which holds that scholastic excellence is a white thing.

These tendencies are legacies of segregation and the denial of equal educational opportunities, McWhorter says. But today such attitudes have taken on a life of their own, and their destructive effects are worsened by racial preferences, which allow "black people [to] get the very best things doing less of a job than everybody else." Because black students' grades and scores on standardized tests were the lowest of any group at Berkeley, McWhorter says, many whites and Asian Americans figured that "blacks are just plain dumb."

Like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, McWhorter did not discover that racial preferences are the ruination of black folks until he had benefited from them. He writes that because his race was one of the factors that got him a doctoral fellowship at Stanford, "I was never able to be as proud of getting into Stanford as my [nonblack] classmates could be." But he didn't turn down the fellowship. Instead, he wants to spare future generations of blacks such anguish by immediately abolishing affirmative action, thereby bestowing on them "the gift" of competing as equals.