The Culturing of the American Mind

Scroll back ten years. In 1994, trumpeting their “Contract with America” and its call for welfare reductions and prison expansion, Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time in over a generation. The “Contract” did not mention race, but its themes provoked racially disparate responses. Blacks and Latinos voted roughly as they had in 1992, but Whites shifted from 50–50 Republican/Democratic to 58% Republican, and White men shifted from 51% to 62% Republican (Newman 1994). In 1995 Dinesh D'Souza, a thirty-four-year-old, Bombay-born, Dartmouth-educated Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, published The End of Racism, a critique of liberal positions on race, especially affirmative action and welfare. Also in 1995, the Supreme Court sharply restricted permissible forms of economic affirmative action in its Adarand Constructors v. Pena decision. In 1996, Congress enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, ending the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) and transferring responsibility for welfare to the states, with certain restrictions. In 1997, two veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, Harvard history professor Stephan Thernstrom and his wife, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Abigail Thernstrom, published America in Black and White, another manifesto against racial preferences and welfare.

Clearly, in these years national discourse, national elections, judicial decisions, and national policies all moved significantly against then still-prevailing civil rights and welfare orthodoxies. Politically, White men who voted increasingly Republican formed the core of that movement, but some “persons of color” like D'Souza and erstwhile Democratic civil rights activists like the Thernstroms added legitimating voices. The Du Bois Review editors have asked me to reflect on how these developments appear now, especially the arguments of The End of Racism and America in Black and White.

Doing so in spring 2004 presents an inescapable analogy. At the start of the Iraq war, conservative leaders voiced not just rage at terrorists, but also excitement over a promising mission of emancipation. Today, as conflicts, casualties, and instability persist, even many Republicans are dispirited, feeling that they won the war, but are losing the cause in Iraq. Similarly, the authors of these works wrote expansively (both books exceed 700 pages) because they were fueled not just by anger at liberal views, but also by excited confidence that their visions would work better. Though their views have never been fully adopted, public policies have moved in their directions. Yet today, while anger persists, few from any perspective write about race in America with such brio. Because, despite real progress, so many racial problems seem intractable, it is easy to show that positions we disagree with have not worked—but it is hard for all sides to mount compelling evidence that what they favor will work.

Perhaps as a result, and despite the brief flurry of arguments over reparations, few recommendations for addressing Black-White disparities are today commanding widespread attention, much less agreement. The civil rights issues that dominate current discourse are different: the rights of gays and lesbians, including same sex marriage; the rights of those suspected of terrorism, especially Islamic believers and persons of Arabic descent; and the place in America of the post-1965 immigrants, largely Latino and, to a lesser degree, South and East Asian.

But debates over all those issues, as well as discussion of Blacks and Whites in America, are strongly flavored by an element to which these books ardently contributed: the belief that these matters are fundamentally about “culture.” That belief is like the claim that wine is good for your blood pressure. It is not exactly wrong, but if you focus on it too single-mindedly, you are not likely to see or think clearly.

Conservative foundations provided ample research funds to these authors, so their books contain lots of facts and arguments, many of genuine interest. But their basic analyses of race in America can be summed up in four points:

1. Up until the end of Jim Crow, African Americans suffered greatly and unjustly from racial discrimination in myriad forms. (Actually D'Souza stressed how Jim Crow sheltered many Blacks from the most virulent White racists, but he still thought it was wrong [pp. 169–170]. The Thernstroms, to highlight later progress but still to their credit, laid out its horrors memorably [pp. 25–50]).
2. Nonetheless, the authors agreed, African Americans began making material progress even under Jim Crow. With the end of de jure segregation, this progress largely continued—accompanied by a sharp decline in White racism (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, pp. 69–96, 138–142; D'Souza 1995, pp. 239, 253–254).
3. Yet in the mid-1990s ugly racial disparities still persisted, in poverty, in unemployment, in infant mortality, in educational testing, in arrest and incarceration rates. Educational and housing segregation by race remained severe and in some areas growing, and many tests showed ongoing racial discrimination in employment, loans, housing, and retail markets (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, pp. 19, 213–223, 242–246, 340–342, 359–360, 398, 444–445; D'Souza 1995, pp. 6–7, 245–287).
4. Those patterns were, however, not traceable to White racism, the bugaboo of “liberal antiracism.” They primarily stemmed from, in D'Souza's phrase, “cultural dysfunctionalities in the black community”—from the decline of the Black two-parent family, and from inner-city societies marred by violence, drugs, and a disdain for law and for academic achievement that many excused or glorified, especially Black civil rights leaders who stirred senses of racial grievance. In light of Black cultural pathologies, much racial discrimination was rational and practiced by Blacks (D'Souza 1995, pp. 476–524, 529, 532; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, pp. 265–285, 359, 384, 445, 506–512).

The Thernstroms and D'Souza disagreed in part on how to address these “cultural dysfunctionalities.” They concurred that “destructive” social policies like welfare should be replaced by programs providing stronger incentives to work; that educational standards should be more demanding, that illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancy, and crime should be more severely discouraged; and above all, that public affirmative action programs should be ended (D'Souza 1995, pp. 525–537; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, pp. 255–257, 283–285, 384–385, 537–541). But D'Souza favored amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to let private institutions employ any and all racial preferences, believing they would provide ethnically constructed channels of opportunity. The Thernstroms wanted to maintain that law and to interpret it as banning all racial preferences in governmental programs and in private markets.

These differences were captured in the contrasts between their summary tests for public policies. D'Souza urged us to judge every measure by “the degree to which it expands opportunity while at the same time fostering productive and responsible behavior on the part of citizens,” a standard which he saw as consistent with, for example, allowing Black employers to favor Blacks in hiring (D'Souza 1995, pp. 537, 544–545). The Thernstroms' “rule of thumb” was instead “that which brings the races together is good; that which divides us is bad,” and they saw all racial preferences as divisive (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, pp. 539, 543–545).

But the larger message shared by the two books was clear. The time to decry White racism had ended. It was time to focus on destructive behavior in Black and Latino communities traceable to their flawed cultures. Both their concluding guidelines really aimed at improving what they perceived as Black and Latino cultural values. D'Souza sought to expand opportunity, but only in ways that would foster “productive and responsible behavior.” The Thernstroms wished to bring “the races together,” but since they saw Whites as no longer racist, that really meant getting Blacks and Latinos to relinquish their irrational anger, misguided demands for racial preferences, and alienating misconduct. By and large, American policies have since pursued these cultural aims.

The Clinton years saw the “end of welfare as we know it” not only via the ending of AFDC, but also by the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which made even most permanent resident aliens ineligible for welfare benefits. Both measures sought to prompt D'Souza's “productive and responsible” conduct. The second Bush administration has tried to toughen educational standards through its “No Child Left Behind” Act, combating perceived anti-academic values. And though strong amicus support from the military and private corporations helped persuade the United States Supreme Court not to end affirmative action in the 2003 Bollinger decisions, those rulings along with the earlier Adarand decision indicated that many existing affirmative action practices were no longer acceptable (Gratz v. Bollinger, Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 [2003]; Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 525 U.S. 200 [1995]). Judicial critics of affirmative action programs made clear that they saw them as sources of divisive racial tensions and unjust senses of racial entitlement.

Attuned to the zeitgeist as these books were, reviewers at the time still noted glaring weaknesses in them. D'Souza's contention that “cultural relativism” formed the root of “liberal antiracism” presumed that if we believe that it is hard to judge the comparative worth of whole cultures, then we must expect persons in all cultural groups to succeed in all activities at the same rates (D'Souza 1995, p. 529). But to say that we cannot evaluate which of two different cultures is on balance morally superior is not to say that participants in those cultures will perform identically in all regards: the cultures are, after all, supposed to value different activities and goals. The very real egalitarian aspirations of the civil rights movements and its latter-day proponents therefore cannot logically be traced to “cultural relativism.” Christianity and, yes, Marxism did more.

The Thernstroms claimed that Blacks made more material progress in the 1940s and 1950s, prior to the civil rights era and especially before affirmative action, and that this progress was due to causes that continued thereafter. Their own evidence refuted both contentions. Economic progress in the earlier decades was high in percentage terms due to an incredibly low starting point. In absolute terms it did not compare to later eras. Much of the progress came when southern Blacks moved from subsistence agricultural work to northern industrial and commercial jobs during W.W. II and the post-war boom. There they received lower wages than Whites, but more than they had in the South. Much also came from Blacks gaining public sector jobs as Jim Crow fell (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, pp. 79–81, 178, 187, 233–235, 550n34, 560n61). But the move from subsistence agriculture to industrial and commercial jobs could not sustain Black progress once virtually all Blacks, north and south, had left the agricultural sector. And, with the support of both the Thernstroms and D'Souza, recent Republican administrations have cut back the sorts of public sector jobs that have since supported Black economic advances—along with affirmative action, which D'Souza openly and the Thernstroms grudgingly recognized as contributing to the growth of the Black middle class (D'Souza 1995, p. 239; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997, p. 538).

Still, with all their flaws, there can be no doubt that these books expressed and reinforced the dominant American political mood in the mid-1990s. In 2004 that mood has not radically altered, but it has dampened. To be sure, many insist that the 1996 welfare laws have promoted work and reduced poverty, and that racial discrimination in markets is declining (O'Neill and Hill, 2003; Turner et al., 2002). But others contend that the new welfare system has sustained racial economic disparities and done little to alleviate poverty (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2002; Lindsey 2003). No one denies that Blacks and Latinos are still more than twice as likely to be poor than Whites, that White median family worth is still more than seven times that of Blacks and Latinos, and that patterns of school and residential segregation remain stark, declining in some respects, but increasing in others (Iceland et al., 2002, pp. 3–4; Orfield and Lee, 2004, pp. 2–3).

Since these books appeared, the most large-scale public program for dealing with the “cultural dysfunctionalities” of inner city populations has been the prison expansion urged in the “Contract with America.” It has given the United States an incarceration rate vastly higher than any other Western industrial nation, with a prison population that is nearly half Black, even though African Americans form only 12% of the U.S. population (Bobo and Johnson, 2004, p. 12). Today many conservatives still advocate welfare reductions, prison expansion, and bans on affirmative action. But in light of these persistent racial disparities, most do not exhibit their former assurance that these policies are going to make a dent in American racial dilemmas any time soon.

One thing, however, has not dimmed: many, perhaps most analysts, still explain America's racial difficulties and design racial solutions by focusing overwhelmingly on “culture.” And not just racial difficulties: the issue of whether our institutions should make marriage available to same-sex as well as heterosexual couples is presented as a question of cultural values more than institutionalized privileges. Debates over threats posed by radical Islamic adherents and their claims to civil liberties are portrayed as clashes of cultural values, not institutionalized protections. And Samuel P. Huntington has just published a new work contending that recent immigrants, and Mexican immigrants particularly, pose threats to the “Anglo-Protestant culture” that is America's greatest resource, via arguments longer on speculation than concrete institutional impact (Huntington 2004, p. xviii). Today on a host of political topics, cultural analyses dominate diagnoses and prescriptions, in ways that were not nearly so prevalent before conservatives claimed that Black and Latino cultural values, not oppressive institutionalized practices and unequal resources, lay behind America's racial difficulties.

It is time to ask anew: are America's problems, including its racial problems, really so overwhelmingly about getting our cultural minds right? After hundreds of years in which American elites structured a whole range of economic, political, educational, and social institutions as vast systems of racial hierarchy, is it really likely that there are no significant surviving structural contributors to racial inequalities? In fact, what we ought to expect is for the U.S. to have structures of racial hierarchy so deeply entrenched that they are extraordinarily difficult to transform—creating the temptation not to try to do so and to focus on other targets instead.

That is exactly what we do find. This case is well made in, among other places, Whitewashing Race, the 2003 book by political scientist Michael K. Brown and a team of social scientists and lawyers that takes the Thernstroms as its chief target. Brown and his crew provide fresh analyses and evidence on how an array of real estate, labor, credit market, criminal justice, and educational structures work to “accumulate” White advantages and “disaccumulate” resources for non-Whites, even in the absence of conscious racist sentiments. Cultural values are part of these stories, but they are far from the whole story. Instead, works like these make a strong case that treating non-White cultures as the core problem often serves to distract attention from more potent sources of current racial inequalities. They also suggest that if structural conditions really change, the disaffected values they breed in some are also likely to diminish.

From a similar perspective, Philip Klinkner and I argued in 1999 against the sorts of policy tests that the Thernstroms and D'Souza had advanced. We contended instead that we should adopt an overarching guide that focused on whether particular policies, institutions, and systemic practices were likely to “perpetuate or even intensify the racial inequalities government has done so much to create in this country,” or were more likely to lessen them (Klinkner with Smith, 1999, p. 347). Though this guideline does not dismiss all concern for cultural values, it points more directly to whether sharp differences in material circumstances are being reduced or not. It does so not from a commitment to “cultural relativism” or even a conviction that White racism is rampant. It rather stems from awareness that American governments have always extended material assistance in many forms to all the groups and economic sectors that have flourished in American history, and from the belief that there is no reason not to do so for long-excluded groups who are not yet flourishing. If policy analysts today weaned themselves of the preoccupation with “cultural dysfunctionalities” bequeathed us by writers like D'Souza and the Thernstroms and looked harder for ways to make material improvements in the conditions of life for all, I suspect that American material conditions, institutional structures, and cultural values would all benefit.