Jeremiah Wright is ... the Chicago clergyman whom Obama credits for inspiring his own religious awakening in his twenties, who served as Obama’s pastor for two decades, who officiated at his wedding and baptized his two daughters, and who prayed with him and his wife Michelle just moments before Obama announced his run for the presidency in February 2007. Just as Obama has striven to present himself as the face of racial and political reconciliation in our time, Wright has emerged as his Janus-face—the face of a black America that rejects such reconciliation and regards it as tantamount to surrender.
It is universally acknowledged, even by the candidate’s most passionate supporters, that Wright’s sudden notoriety has posed a threat to Obama’s political ambitions. Less frequently voiced is the reason. Wright’s long-term proximity to Obama, and Obama’s lengthy initial refusal to separate himself from Wright—by offering the revealing excuse that to disown Wright would be akin to disowning the entire black community—has thrown a harsh light on another set of realities in America. Even as whites’ attitudes toward blacks have undergone a sea change, a sizable number of blacks remain suspicious of and defiantly hostile to their fellow citizens and the government of the United States.
A single statistic tells the tale. As against the 10 percent or fewer of American whites who hold negative views of blacks, the same mid-1990’s survey of intergroup attitudes cited above registered over three-quarters of blacks holding negative views of whites. To be sure, not all studies report such negative findings; nor do pollsters try, at least directly, to measure black attitudes toward whites as frequently as they do the reverse. But the handful of surveys that have indirectly probed black attitudes reveals a depressing and, as we shall see, indicative pattern.
To what can such hostility be attributed? It is true that, despite enormous gains, social and economic disparities between blacks and whites continue to exist—as Obama did not hesitate to point out at length in his March 18 speech in Philadelphia. Education is still one of the most important determinants of economic success for all Americans, and more so today than in the past. Even though blacks have considerably narrowed the education-achievement gap, they still lag far behind whites in college degrees earned (17 percent of blacks versus one third of whites). Worse, many black children attend abysmal public schools in inner cities across the nation.
But institutional racism explains little if any of this. Nor, despite what many critics claim, is the problem traceable to a lack of funding for predominantly black urban schools as opposed to the predominantly white schools of the suburbs. A recent General Accountability Office study found no consistent pattern of underfunded city schools. Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis, for example, spend more to educate their mostly black and Latino student populations than do the surrounding suburbs with their largely white student populations. Perhaps the most glaring example of the disconnection between funding levels and achievement is the school system of Washington, D.C., which spends more than $15,000 annually per pupil—almost twice the national average—but produces among the lowest achievement scores of any school system in the country.
As in education, so in other areas of social and economic life: the real culprit behind most of the disparities between whites and blacks is not lingering racism or the lack of spending on social programs but the decline of the black family. Over 40 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, warned that
the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class, the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. . . . So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.
Instead of embracing Moynihan’s call to set as a national goal “the establishment of a stable Negro family structure,” however, civil-rights leaders, social scientists, and government bureaucrats attacked the Moynihan report and vilified its author. Any hope that Moynihan’s sober assessment would lead to changes in government policy evaporated, not to be revived until the welfare reform of the mid-90’s.
When the Moynihan report was written, 25 percent of black children were being born out of wedlock—a shocking figure at the time. By 1980, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for blacks had more than doubled. It now stands at an astounding 70 percent. Marriage rates for blacks have also fallen to perilous levels; only 32 percent are currently married and living with their spouse. Today, the overwhelming majority of black children will spend most of their lives being raised by single mothers—or increasingly, like Barack Obama, by their grandparents.
High rates of single female-headed households, in turn, lead to much higher poverty rates for blacks: 37 percent for female-headed families, as compared with just 8 percent for two-parent families. And children raised in female-headed households are more likely to drop out of school, to get into trouble with the law, and to become single parents themselves.
Obama’s Philadelphia speech was a perfect opportunity for him to address this obstinate reality, which, in order to provide a fuller picture, must be placed alongside the progressive march of so many blacks into the bastions of the American middle class. Here was an especially opportune moment to talk about the consequences of black family breakdown, a subject Obama could have discussed with the compelling authority of one who himself experienced abandonment by his father but had refused to follow the same path and had become a model husband and father. He had even written about the issue with rare candor in his book, The Audacity of Hope (2006), acknowledging that the breakdown of the black family “reflects a casualness toward sex and child-rearing among black men that renders black children more vulnerable—and for which there is simply no excuse.”
But instead of repeating this thoughtful assessment in Philadelphia, the candidate offered up only pious nostrums, linking the erosion of black families to “a lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that come from not being able to provide for one’s family,” before going on to blame a lack of parks, policemen walking the beat, garbage collection, and building-code enforcement—in brief, government policy—for helping to “create a cycle of violence, blight, and neglect.” His formulation conspicuously avoided the issue of behavior—like dropping out of school and having children out of wedlock—that virtually guarantees the continuation of the cycle of poverty.
Nor was Obama any more candid on the issue of black crime. To the contrary, he played the race card. In the same passage of his speech in which he said he could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than he could disown the black community, he went on to say, stunningly, that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown his white grandmother—“a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Obama’s invocation of his grandmother did more than set up a false moral equivalence between a minister preaching hatred from the pulpit and an elderly white woman voicing her fears privately to her grandson. It grotesquely caricatured an actual incident about which he had written in the past, an incident that had quite rationally contributed to his grandmother’s fears. In his memoir Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama described what happened when, waiting for a bus to take her to work, his grandmother had been accosted by a young black man who aggressively demanded money. “I gave him a dollar and he kept asking,” Obama quotes his grandmother telling him. “If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.”
Obama’s grandmother is hardly alone in fearing young black men who behave aggressively or whose dress and demeanor suggest they are part of the underclass. Jesse Jackson famously remarked in 1993 that “there is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” In 1999, Stephen A. Holmes, a black New York Times reporter, recounted his own feelings as a New York City taxi driver who worked nights while attending college:
My sense of tolerance and racial solidarity was tested every time a casually dressed young black man, especially one in sneakers, tried to hail my cab. Most times, I drove right by. I sometimes wondered about their reaction, but I kept thinking that if I guessed wrong, I could pay for my mistake with my life.
Holmes’s fear was based not on mere “stereotyping” but on his own experience, in this case the experience of being robbed twice by young black men. As he wrote, “The nexus of race, crime, and stereotyping raises difficult questions that are often ignored.” Indeed it does raise such questions, and they are indeed often ignored, most recently and conspicuously by Barack Obama.
In 2003, according to Department of Justice statistics, 21 of every 1,000 black males aged eighteen and nineteen were in a U.S. prison, as were 70 out of 1,000 black males aged twenty to twenty-four. This is by far the highest rate for any group—three times the rate of Hispanics and seven times the rate of whites. In 2004, black males aged fourteen to twenty-four, making up only 1 percent of the U.S. population, committed 26 percent of homicides; moreover, 15 percent of homicide victims that year were other black males in the same age group.
Given these numbers, it can be no surprise that many Americans, and hardly whites alone, express fear about the “nexus” of blacks and crime: 44 percent of Hispanics in one recent poll said they were generally afraid of blacks “because they are responsible for most of the crime,” as did 47 percent of Asians. But instead of dealing honestly with the legitimate basis of this fear, Obama in his Philadelphia speech dismissed it with a piece of rhetorical legerdemain. First expressing sympathy with the “resentments” of whites over being accused of prejudice, he then blamed these same resentments for having shaped “the political landscape for at least a generation” by allowing politicians to distract attention “from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze”—a charge followed by a predictable litany of corporate greed and malfeasance and “economic policies that favor the few over the many.”
In short, according to this analysis, whites and others are suffering from a kind of false consciousness. What they fail to understand, when confronted with the pathologies disproportionately afflicting the black community, is that the fault lies elsewhere than in persistent but remediable behavior. It lies in the capitalist system and in government.
Is it such condescending and conversation-stopping platitudes that the editors of the New York Times, echoing Obama himself, have in mind in calling for a “serious, healthy, and much-needed discussion” on race?
