‘White' Values vs.
‘Black' Values
by
Khalil G. Muhammad
This
article originally appeared in the Washington
Post.
"The myth assumes that
‘white' culture is the gold standard for judging everyone."
Recently I showed my college students a YouTube
clip of Bill
Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's appearance on "The Oprah
Winfrey Show." After hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace
their parenting responsibilities, many of the students said they wished their
parents had followed his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had
done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol, and run afoul of the law.
These problems, they agreed, might have been avoided with more supervision at
home.
They might have been the perfect audience for a Cosby
town-hall lecture on the dangers of self-destructive values in black America.
They might also have been perfect illustrations of the growing "values
gap" between poor and middle-class blacks described in a widely cited
recent Pew
Research Center poll.
Except almost all my students are white.
Cosby and the recent Pew study are the latest in a long
finger-wagging tradition of instructing poor blacks to lift themselves up by
their bootstraps and reject pathologically "black" values. Today, rap
culture is usually presented as Exhibit A, but strains of the same argument
have cropped up for more than a century. If blacks would just get their
act together, this old story goes, all the social inequalities between them and
the rest of society would disappear.
In its coverage of the Pew report findings, National
Public Radio asked whether some blacks were lagging behind because they
were choosing not to become "closer to whites in their values."
Unfortunately, this line of questioning reinforces one of the most persistent
myths in America, that white is always right. The myth reflects an enduring
double standard based on "white" and "black" explanations
for social problems. And it assumes that "white" culture is the gold
standard for judging everyone, despite its competing ideologies, its
contradictions and its flaws, including racism.
"If blacks would just get their act together, this old
story goes, all the social inequalities would disappear."
The masquerade began over a hundred years ago. Shortly after
the end of slavery, sociologists and demographers began presenting research on
black failure and struggle as "indisputable" proof of black
inferiority. One of the first studies was released in 1896, when the leading
race-relations demographer of the period, Frederick L. Hoffman, analyzed census
data showing that blacks were doing worse than whites in mortality, health,
employment, education and crime. The problem was not racism, he argued, but
"race traits and tendencies."
To him, the civil rights acts of the 1860s and 1870s had
leveled the playing field. Blacks should be left to compete against whites on
their own and face the inevitable. The black man, he wrote, "has usually
but one avenue out of his dilemma - the road to prison or to an early
grave."
At the same time, when explaining rising rates of crime,
suicide and mental-health problems among whites, Hoffman blamed
industrialization and the strains of "modern life." He called for a
reordering of the nation's economic priorities. Hoffman's study coincided with
- and provided justification for - the Supreme Court's notorious Plessy v.
Ferguson decision, which legalized segregation.
As segregation took hold, there was a powerful need to
minimize the role of racism as a factor in explaining racial disparities. The
"Cosby" role at the start of Jim Crow was first played by Booker
T. Washington. Counseling blacks to conquer their inferiority, he
repudiated civil rights activism in favor of self-help and moral regeneration.
Many whites loved Washington, and his ideas were echoed
by liberal social scientists such as the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who
instructed black people to stop sympathizing "with their own
criminals" and "accept without whining patheticism and corroding
self-pity [their] present situation, prejudice and all."
"The 'Cosby' role at the start of Jim Crow was
first played by Booker T. Washington."
But when Hall turned his focus on whites, his research on
adolescent psychology directly influenced national efforts to protect them from
the ravages of industrial capitalism. Drawing on his work, the child-welfare
activist Jane Addams established Hull House in Chicago
at first to help immigrant families adjust to American life, and later to save
thousands of Chicago's white youth from lives of crime, violence and drug abuse
attributed to "modern city conditions." But black children were not
generally welcome at Hull House. Addams claimed that similar problems among
black youth were due to the race's "belated" moral development,
manifested in poor parenting and a lack of "social restraint."
The pioneering black social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois
challenged this first generation of white liberals and social scientists,
including Hoffman, on the flawed assumptions and racial double standards in
their studies and in their practices. But when Du Bois tried to argue that
pathology knows no color, he was ignored, criticized and dismissed by his white
peers as an angry black man with, as one sociologist put it, a "chip on
his shoulder."
Du Bois's frustrations led him to leave academia for a life
of anti-racist activism. In 1910, the year he became director of research and
publicity for the NAACP,
he warned that "whiteness" was becoming the new basis of the nation's
consciousness. "Are we not coming more and more day by day to making the
statement, 'I am white,' the one fundamental tenet of our practical
morality?" he asked.
"When Du Bois tried to argue that pathology knows no
color, he was ignored, criticized and dismissed by his white peers."
In today's era of hip-hop, Du Bois's warning still goes
unheeded. If rap music is so bad, why are white kids its major consumers? And
by what value system should we judge the large media companies that publish and
distribute hip-hop -- or, really, gangsta rap, its most popular and sinister
cousin?
Were "white values" on display two years ago when
the federal government failed to adequately respond to one of the greatest
natural disasters in American history?
If lower-class "black" values are so distinct from
those of the rest of America, particularly the "white values"
supposedly now embraced by middle- and upper-class blacks, why, according to
the Pew report, do less than a third of white Americans graduate from college?
Are legions of whites similarly devaluing higher education? Are they
"acting black"?
If lower-class black values are so peculiar, why do whites
report the same or higher levels of illegal drug use as blacks, as numerous
studies show?
What of underperforming white schoolchildren in rural
America, the Great
Plains, Appalachia or the Deep South? Are they "acting black"
because they can't compete with their upwardly mobile suburban counterparts?
"Why do whites report the same or higher levels of illegal
drug use as blacks."
Today's liberals still empathize with America's invisible
white working poor, who they warn are being "nickel and dimed" to the
point of near homelessness. But why the empathy? Isn't their poverty really a
function of their choosing to embrace their hidden blackness?
Du Bois's scholarship and activism helped pave the way for
the modern civil rights movement, which helped exorcize the ghost of America's
Jim Crow past. That he was right about racism but that we still continue to
accept the same flawed thinking about race and social problems suggests a powerful
and enduring paradox.
If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of
black vs. white values, then we need to explain what exactly white values are.
When we do, we'll find that whiteness is an inadequate standard by which to
judge good black people vs. bad ones.
As my students would tell you, the real white world is as
pathological, as respectable and as diverse as the black one.
Khalil G. Muhammad is an assistant professor of
history at Indiana University and the author of the forthcoming The Condemnation of Blackness: Ideas about Race and
Crime in the Making of Modern Urban America. He can be contacted at kgmuhamm@indiana.edu.
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