John McWhorter (photo at right) is an acclaimed linguistic historian, a writer, and a culture and politics Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His writing includes duties as a columnist for the New York Sun and such books as The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.In this piece for TheRoot.com, McWhorter defends Bill Cosby's new book, Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors from the charge that is an exercise in mere nostalgia. Indeed, he says of the book, "It will deservedly be a standard reference for years to come." McWhorter has other compelling things on his mind too, a few of which I print below:
Cosby's central point is that what's happening in black America today can't be linked to racism, since racism has been receding since the 60s. He thinks, therefore, that we are faced with a cultural problem...Back to Chicago in 1925, black leaders were worried that the black out-of-wedlock birth rate was 15 percent. Obviously that figure sounds like science fiction today, and it's hard to trace that to racism. Black laborers in Detroit at this same time regularly travelled 90 minutes to the Ford plant; William Julius Wilson documented their equivalents in the 80s dismissing the same distance as requiring them to get up too early. In 1940, 9 in 10 black Indianapolis residents worked full-time. By 1976, tens of thousands of blacks in Indianapolis were on welfare – three times more than had been in 1964 -- and people were regularly turning down wage work.
Life in a St. Louis housing project in the 60s was no fun, and some of the residents' complaints would be familiar to us; they were about trash and people sleeping around. What is significant is what was absent: guns were not common coin, nor was selling drugs. A D.C. ghetto included types who weren't into working: "corner men." However, there were only so many of them...
I think the crucial factor was the transformation of Aid to Families with Dependent Children from a temporary safety net to an open-ended program that became a lifestyle, something that happened quietly in the late 60s...
