----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" <debsian at pacbell.net> To: "dsa" <asdnet at igc.topica.com> Cc: <me at davidgrenier.com> Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 10:51 AM Subject: explicit assumption that welfare was a form of reparations for slavery...
Coincidentally, Nathan and y'all, recently on marxist at yahoogroups.com , the UCB linguist, John McWhorter, came up. His recent TNR piece, http://www.thenewrepublic.com/072301/mcwhorter072301.html WHY AFRICAN AMERICANS CAN BELIEVE IN AMERICA. Against Reparations by John McWhorter
polemicized/riffed off what I typed in as the subject line. ("The first of Robinson's assumptions is the denial that there has been any real progress at all. "America's socioeconomic gaps between the races remain, like the aged redwoods rooted in a forest floor, going nowhere, seen but not disturbed, simulating infinity, normalcy. Static." He penned those pessimistic lines six years ago, at a time when almost fifty percent of black families were middle-class (defined by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in America in Black and White as twice the poverty line), in contrast to only one percent in 1940 and thirty-nine percent in 1970. In 1990, one in five blacks were managers or professionals. In the three decades prior to 1990, the number of black doctors doubled and the number of black college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine tripled. Static? Hardly. And there are many other indicators of real social, economic, political, and legal advancement.
But Robinson is not really interested in social-scientific indicators. He prefers to deliver his arguments in the form of allegorical "stories," in the vein of his fellow bard of data-shy pessimism Derrick Bell. A "story" that Robinson uses as a leitmotif in his book involves a certain black boy named Billy. He is being shown around the Mall in Washington, D.C. by a mentor, who is increasingly embarrassed to find that there is no monument on the Mall "about" black people with which he can inspire Billy. Needless to say, Billy is from Southeast, the inner city: the middle-class half (yes, half) of black America is just a lifeless statistic, but poverty-stricken blacks, who in fact represent less than one-quarter of African American families, are what's really goin' down. Nowhere is Robinson's misconception of the economic condition of his race more poignantly clear than in his assertion that, since there are proportionately more poor blacks than poor whites, poverty defines black America. Most black writers decry such a "racialization of poverty" as stereotyping; but after reading Robinson's passage three times, I concluded that he really does accept the terrible equation between "black" and "poor."
In his fable about Billy on the Mall, Robinson revealingly describes "a black woman wearing thick owlish glasses, strolling hand-in-hand with a bookish-looking white man, and two black men with white women." In his tale, all the blacks on the Mall except Billy are "attached to white people." The implication is that all black people who did not grow up like Billy--except, we presume, Randall Robinson--are sell-outs who live and marry outside their race, and are probably homely besides. So the problem for Robinson's picture of the world is not merely that black is indistinguishable from poor, but that blacks who are not poor are disloyal and inauthentic. In Robinson's account, poor blacks are admirable victims, while middle-class blacks are suspect.
He has his peculiar reasons for this sentiment; but he is hardly alone in his basic insistence that the growth of the black middle class is somehow "beside the point," leaving the poor minority as the "essence" of black America. The Debt is symptomatic of a general implication in most arguments for reparations that even in 2001 "black" is essentially a shorthand for "poor," when this has not been true for decades. Of course, many of the people who are most fervently in favor of reparations are quick to condemn the tendency for whites to think that all black people are poor. And so we are brought up against a savage irony: the reparations movement is founded in large part upon a racist stereotype.")
Michael Pugliese P.S. Goo bio. of George Wiley of NWRO, by Nick Kotz. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Coincidentally, the East Bay Express (just bought out by the BIG Megalithic New Times "alternative" weekly newspaper empire out of Ar(id)zona) just had a cover story. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2001-07-04/feature.html/page1.html http://www.google.com/search?q=John+McWhorter&btnG=Google+Search Remarks by John McWhorter to the Wednesday Morning Club ... Remarks by John McWhorter to the Wednesday Morning Club. The Wednesday Morning Club | May 17, 2001. ... Click here for more articles by and about John McWhorter. ... www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/mcwhorter05-22-01.htm Berkeley Linguistics John McWhorter ... John H. McWhorter. Associate Professor. (Pidgin and Creole languages, language change, typology, grammaticalization, language contact, sociolinguistics). ... www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/lingdept/Current/people/facpages/ mcwhorter.html (I hate it when Micro$oft Outlook Express breaks up the URL! cut and paste, or just click the google search URL above!) EDGE 3rd Culture: THE DEMISE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT UC ... ... THE DEMISE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT UC BERKELEY: DISSECTING THE STALEMATE An Essay by John McWhorter. ... www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mcwhorter/ TNR Online | Gimme a Break! by John McWhorter (1 of 3) ... BLACKS, TELEVISION, AND THE DECLINE OF RACISM IN AMERICA Gimme a Break! by John McWhorter 1 2 3 ... www.thenewrepublic.com/030501/mcwhorter030501.html John McWhorter and Affirmative Action KQED Commentary on John McWhorter and Affirmative Action. by Lance T. Izumi, Director of Center for School Reform Pacific Research Institute. ... www.pacificresearch.org/kqed/00-09-19.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Dbooks%26field-au thor%3DMcWhorter%2C%20John/002-9665492-1008016 Michael "Howlin' Wolf" Pugliese