Redefining the American Dilemma

Affirmative action is a failure. It allows many blacks to gain jobs and admission to schools for which they are under-qualified, while cheapening the achievements of those who could have succeeded without preferential treatment. Social programs pushed by the civil rights establishment often aggravate the problems they are supposed to solve. The crises of the ghetto–rampant crime, wanton violence, the high school dropout rate, illegitimate births–can no longer be attributed simply to white racism, nor can they be solved simply with more money from Washington. Blacks must take primary responsibility for the “social pathologies” that ail their communities.

Such opinions are commonly voiced in the Reagan era. What is surprising is that the voices often belong to a growing number of influential black thinkers who are vigorously challenging the liberal notions of their intellectual forebears, the black sociologists who dominated the civil rights era. Not every member of the new breed can be categorized as conservative or even ; neoconservative. But all express skepticism toward the civil rights leadership’s traditional focus on discrimination as the cause of all of America’s racial problems and on federal programs as the cure. Instead, they concentrate on the character and motivations of black Americans and the changing social structure within black communities. Much of the Old Guard has heatedly criticized the new approach as a misguided and dangerous capitulation to the nation’s conservative tide. For better or worse, this philosophical ferment has exposed deep differences in a formerly unified black intelligentsia.

“There’s a lot of talk that one didn’t hear only a few years ago,” says Glenn Loury, 37, a political economist at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “It’s driven by a combination of circumstances: things are bad and getting worse for a significant fraction of the black community in the big cities, and there has been a palpable failure of the old classical strategies to produce results.” Loury has become the most vocal member of what might be called the post-civil rights thinkers. The group also includes William Julius Wilson, 49, a University of Chicago sociologist whose insights into class differences within the black population have provoked considerable controversy; Robert Woodson, 48, head of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which coordinates the work of community-based self-help groups; and Thomas Sowell, 55, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who was the first of the new renegades.

Of course, debate among black thinkers is not unprecedented. At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington, who believed that poor blacks should be content with industrial training and not try to battle white prejudices, was challenged by W.E.B. DuBois, who demanded the right to vote and higher education for black people. In the 1960s nonviolent assimilationists clashed with the more militant proponents of black power. But the fight for legal equality during that era led to a greater unity in the black intellectual community. Racism was the enemy. To suggest that anything but discrimination was responsible for black-on-black crime or poor test scores was considered traitorous to the cause. Even after the triumphs of the civil rights movement, black intellectuals remained reluctant to ask difficult questions about the disturbing aspects of black American life. To do so, it was feared, would only abet those seeking to discredit the race.

Sowell was among the first to shatter the black silence. In the 1970s he began arguing that racism had little to do with inequalities in income and academic performance between whites and blacks, contending that social class and family stability rather than skin color were most important in determining success. Sowell was criticized not only for his conclusions but for his vociferous attacks on civil rights leaders, whom he accused of using self- righteous, “blacker than thou” rhetoric. His intellectual ally was an equally tempestuous economist, Temple University’s Walter Williams, 39, an outspoken free-marketeer. By contrast, the black thinkers currently setting the tone of the debate are smoother operators. “Unlike Sowell and Williams, they will be less cantankerous and iconoclastic,” says Harvard Political Scientist Martin Kilson, 54, one of the more traditional, liberal black scholars. “They don’t have to shout and scream to get a hearing.”

Loury neatly fits that description. In articles written for the New Republic and the Public Interest, he has been unmistakably conservative yet never inflammatory. Loury applauds the civil rights movement for both breaking down racial barriers and leading to the emergence of a secure black middle class. But he faults it for not stemming the growth of the black underclass; today one-third of black Americans live in poverty.

Although Loury agrees that America’s history of racism has contributed to this distressing situation, he writes in the New Republic that the problems of the ghetto “have taken on a life of their own, and cannot be effectively reversed by civil rights policies.” Like Sowell, Loury is particularly hard on black leadership, which he accuses of “taking the wrongs of the past as an excuse for the failures of the present.” Affirmative action, Loury has written, “puts even ‘the best and the brightest’ of the favored group in the position of being supplicants of benevolent whites.” Loury also defends the accuracy of standardized tests, which many black leaders have faulted for displaying cultural bias.

Loury’s solution for black poverty is to inculcate a “pick yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality in the black community. That might sound simplistic, almost naive, given the vicissitudes of ghetto life in the 1980s, but it is a recommendation that Loury himself followed. Raised on Chicago’s tough South Side, he dropped out of one college before winning a scholarship to Northwestern University, then earned a doctorate at M.I.T. Within five years he was a tenured professor at Harvard. His belief that the poor must push themselves if they are to achieve the American dream echoes the ideas of a familiar conservative figure, and Loury in fact asserts, “I’m not ashamed to say I voted for Reagan.”

Whereas Loury’s essays have left him open to criticism as an ideologue, Wilson has taken great care to produce analyses that are low key and thoroughly documented. Nevertheless, the Chicago sociologist came under heavy fire for his 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race, which studied the stratification of the black population since the civil rights victories of the ’60s and concluded that “economic class is clearly more important than race in predetermining job place and occupational mobility.” The Association of Black Sociologists scorned the book as a “misrepresentatio n” of black life that catered to reactionary ideologues. Wilson, who describes himself as “a social Democrat, which is a euphemism for a Democratic Socialist,” suddenly found himself pegged a neoconservative.

Forty years after Gunnar Myrdal published his seminal analysis of the black crisis, An American Dilemma, Wilson is undertaking a similar intensive study of Chicago’s black underclass. Far from ignoring past racism as a factor, he argues that the plight of the black poor is the result of “historical racial prejudice and discrimination that created a large disadvantaged population that is especially vulnerable to current social and economic changes.” Among these changes is the decline of America’s smokestack industries, which, Wilson contends, has contributed to the drop in labor-force participation by black males from 84% in 1930 to 56% in 1983. Says Wilson: “It’s as though racism, having put the black underclass in its economic place, stepped aside to watch technological change finish the job.”

Unlike many post-civil rights thinkers, Wilson does not automatically reject government programs to help blacks get ahead. “We made some real progress during the ’70s and ’60s,” he argues. “Now we need to develop the same amount of energy and imagination in dealing with the problems of the poor black that unfortunately were not addressed by the race-specific programs of the civil rights movement.” Wilson calls for massive job-retraining plans for minorities and sweeping economic reforms to promote full employment.

Woodson is among those who have tried to translate the new academic approach into activism. A former official of the National Urban League, he condemns the civil rights establishment for its “liberal hypocrisy” and policies that have created a “welfare colonialism.” Woodson wants to “rekindle the entrepreneurial spirit” in black communities through such grassroots organizations as churches and fraternal orders. Indeed, his National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise has aided blacks around the country in launching a broad range of small businesses. His strategies have found a sympathetic ear in Washington. Last January Woodson led a group of conservative blacks to a White House meeting during which President Reagan listened to their ideas for using tax incentives to develop inner-city neighborhoods.

The Old Guard accuses many of the new thinkers, particularly Loury, of catering to current prejudices. Wrote Harvard’s Kilson in a letter to the New Republic last week: “Neoconservative analysts like Glenn Loury address these issues for their own Reaganite public policy purposes” and display “a gross insensitivity toward the weak and historically abused sectors of American life.” Benjamin Hooks, director of the N.A.A.C.P., is tougher, calling Loury and others who criticize traditional civil rights groups “treasonous.” Says he: “It’s always strange to me that somebody with a Ph.D. cannot understand that this organization was designed to eradicate racial discrimination. To say we should stop talking about civil rights is ludicrous.”

Nevertheless, much of the civil rights establishment has sought to address the issues raised by the new thinkers while still preserving its liberalism. Hooks points out that the N.A.A.C.P. has not kept quiet about the unsettling problems of ghetto life, citing a Fisk University conference held last year on black teen pregnancy and other symptoms of underclass family breakdown. Similarly, M. Carl Holman, president of the National Urban Coalition, sounds more than a bit like Wilson and Woodson when he discusses the need to “educate our children for technological survival and maximum economic self-sufficiency,” as he put it in last month’s issue of Ebony magazine. His conclusion: “Much of the work to be done will have to be done by blacks themselves.” That black Americans must gain control of their own destiny is one point on which the traditionalists and the new breed see eye to eye.