Opening by Michael Medved: And another great day in this greatest nation on God’s green earth. And we just went through a couple of days ago our great national holiday honoring the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. Causing a lot of Americans to look back on some of the bright hopes of the Civil Rights movement. How disappointed would Dr. King have been, how disappointed would so many Americans of good will, Black and White have been to see some of the ways in which the state of the Black community certainly falls far short of Dr. King’s dream. Helping the United States to understand why, what went wrong and what can go right in the future is ah Dr. John McWhorter. He is a former professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkley. He is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is become one of the nation’s most pertinent and yes controversial commentators on matters of race and government policy. His new book is called Winning The Race, Beyond the Crisis in Black America
Dr. McWhorter thank you for joining us.
John McWhorter: My pleasure.
Medved: Uh, let me ask you first of all, about some of the disappointment I was talking about. If you were to focus on one factor that has led to what you call the creations of Hells on earth in some of the inner cities in America, what would the most important single factor be?
McWhorter: I think that the most important factor is that among Black leadership and Black thinkers, there’s a new idea, that being oppositional and being Leftist and being agitating just for it’s own sake is activism. Instead of actually being constructive about helping people who need help. And a part of that is a resistance of the idea that anybody might have a cultural problem. Ever since the late 60s we’ve been taught that there’s no such thing as a negative aspect of Black culture. Out of a sense of fairness. There’s a sense that Black people have been through enough already for us to criticize. But the problem is that obviously all human beings are part of cultures and all human beings have negative aspects to their cultures. And instead we have an orthodoxy, that teachers us anything that’s wrong in the Black community is due to circumstances beyond Black people’s control because society isn’t fair. And it’s considered activist to just say that, as if there’s going to be a 2nd Civil Rights revolution. But we know that for better or for worse there isn’t. And I want to get us back to being more constructive about helping people who need it.
Medved: 1-800-955-1776 is our telephone number. You talk about some dysfunctional and ah destructive aspects of Black culture. One of the stands for which you’ve taken a lot of heat is you’re not ah a fan of Hip Hop culture are you?
McWhorter: Um well I don’t want to complain too much about Hip Hop culture. Because it’s simply not going to go away and the more you complain about it the dearer it tends to be to many people’s hearts. But I’m definitely not a fan of the idea that the lyrics of that music are a new version of the freedom songs from the Civil Rights movement. There’s a sense that young Black men being angry is somehow progressive or constructive or interesting. And I don’t think that’s true, I think it needs to be thought of as just music. And to the extent that the music makes anybody think that in general that saying keep your head up and f-u-c-k the police and chanting things over and over again is somehow constructive engagement we’re in trouble.
Medved: Now when you talk about constructive engagement, ah what about the-the idea which you argue very persuasively in your book. That um-ah basically denying power to the Black community is at the very heart of the idea of blaming everything on White racism?
McWhorter: Exactly, if you say nothing will change until there’s a complete upending in the way America has always worked, whether you like it or not. Then basically you’re telling people to just stew in their own juice. To pretend that all of White America is going to realize something or that suddenly America is gonna operate as an essentially a socialist nation. That there’s gonna be anything revolutionary like there was 40 years ago. Is a kind of cruelty in it’s way, because we know those things aren’t gonna happen and we also know that you can improve people’s lives without anything all that revolutionary going on. The revolutionary rhetoric is embraced because it feels good. And it makes people feel enlightened and special. But it doesn’t really have anything to do with sincere compassion for people left behind.
Medved: You talk about people left behind, specifically you focus on the city if Indianapolis. And what once was a very flourishing, dynamic, entrepreneurial Black neighborhood. What went wrong?
McWhorter: Well, what went wrong, is that for one thing cultural norms changed. As part of a larger issue that went beyond Black people in the 60s. But it got to the point that torching your own neighborhood for example, because you were angry came to be seen as normal. This sort of thing started in particular with Watts in 1965, there had been some precursors in 1964. Used to be that a race riot meant that White thugs ran into a Black neighborhood and cracked heads.
Medved: Ah like in Tulsa.
McWhorter: Exactly. Suddenly in 1964 a race riot means that generally because of an unsubstantiated rumor about something the police did, Black people start tearing their own community apart. That starts then. And somehow that started to seem normal with the new idea that rage was what Black people did. And then also there was governmental policy. Welfare in the late 60s was changed from a program for widows and for people who were really at the end of their rope. Into a program where women were paid to have babies, however many they wanted with however many men. And even if the men were around, able bodied, unemployed and living with them. And nobody was concerned with whether or not these women got jobs. That kind of welfare was developed by Leftists in the 60s, with poor Black people in mind. It’s a lost chapter of Black history that I try to tell in the book. It didn’t exist before the late 60s. And I think it really tore poor Black communities to pieces. What used to be struggling, but stable Black neighborhoods. Slums no doubt, but stable. Became the death scapes that we’re familiar with today. Black America as in the inner city that we know now did not exist in 1925.
Medved: 1-800-955-1776 is our phone number. Speaking with John McWhorter, author of Winning ah The Race. Ah people talk about dirty words in rap music and elsewhere. One of the dirty phrases that I would love to see just banned from everyone’s vocabulary and buried out in an open field somewhere with a steak through it’s heart is the phrase “welfare rights”.
McWhorter: Hmm-humm
Medved: But ah something else we owe to the 60’s.
(First call is taken here and the show continues with questions from callers.)
I feel that many of the great words said by some of the greatest thinkers of our time are said on TV and radio. However, those words are seldom transcribed for preservation in a text format. So at times I try to transcribe some of those words here. One great conversation, that took place just last Friday was between Michael Medved and John McWhorter.
