“Hey, hey; ho, ho; Western culture’s got to go.” “a state of perpetual paralysis characterized by an absence of free will among the aggrieved.”

At City Journal, Myron Magnet reviews Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure, by Gene Dattel. Here are a few excerpts from Magnet's review I found interesting.

Dattel’s emphasis on the North leads him to write a gloomier-than-usual account of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Given the ugly turn U.S. race relations took during Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps his gloom is in order. Of course, he celebrates, if briefly, the heroic and hugely constructive aspects of the movement—the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins, despite taunts and humiliations; the courageous, tumultuous entrance of James Meredith as the University of Mississippi’s first black student in 1962; the 1963 march on Washington, culminating in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; Freedom Summer in 1964, which cost three Freedom Riders their lives; the “well-disciplined and dignified” southern demonstrations, as King rightly called them, undeterred by Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses. And of course, Dattel hails the results: the Civil Right Acts of 1964 and 1965, plus the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Nor does he minimize the self-help efforts that civil-rights leaders urged upon their followers, to take full advantage of these measures. “We must be able to face honestly our own shortcomings,” King said in the 1950s. “The Negro will have to engage in a sort of Operation Boot-strap.” In 1964, National Urban League head Whitney Young, Jr., declared that “Negro citizens must redouble their efforts to educate and train themselves for the new responsibilities which equal opportunities will require of them. . . . They must make a special effort to eradicate the disorganization which has afflicted the lives of so many families.” The next year, NAACP chief Roy Wilkins urged each black person to “speed up the process of self-development and self discipline, so that he becomes a contributing . . . member of society.”

But almost from the start of this admirable segment of the civil rights movement that so many of us remember proudly and that Booker T. Washington would have embraced, a W. E. B. Du Bois–style countermovement gathered steam, Dattel points out in his original, remarkably comprehensive, and scrupulously researched history. If social pathology plagues black America, that’s not a problem for blacks to solve, Black Muslim separatist Malcolm X declared in 1964. It’s a problem resulting from “economic and political exploitation” by white landlords and shopkeepers—Eisenberg, Gosenberg, Fineberg, and Weinberg, one Harlem street-corner orator called them. And if blacks rioted, as they did in New York City and Rochester that year, the press lied in “depict[ing] the rioters as hoodlums, criminals, thieves, because they were abducting some property,” Malcolm charged. What he meant, Dattel translates, is that, since “politicians, white merchants, and white landlords were the thieves who had stolen property from the black community, . . . [i]t’s all right to steal and burn down the neighborhood.” Those 1964 outbreaks were minor compared with the Watts riots of 1965, which killed 34, injured thousands, and destroyed 100 Los Angeles ghetto blocks—five days after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Equally grievous mayhem resulted from the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967. By then, even the nonviolent Martin Luther King (sensing his growing irrelevance) began to waffle, calling the riots “a distorted form of social protest,” instead of the criminal anarchy that they were.

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, began demanding “black power”—to accomplish what exactly was never clear—and expelling whites from the organization in which they had been key organizers of Freedom Summer. Two years later, the grim farce of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville school-district battle, which led to a prolonged strike of 54,000 New York teachers, gave an ugly glimpse of what black power might mean—a glimpse that dismays Dattel no less than the violent riots.

New York’s leftist panjandrums, including limousine-liberal mayor John V. Lindsay and McGeorge Bundy, then chief of the always-wrongheaded Ford Foundation, had decided to decentralize the city’s school system, turning over control—the power to hire, fire, award tenure and promotion, and set curricula—to community school districts. After segregating white teachers in their own cafeterias and lounges, Ocean Hill-Brownsville’s entirely African-American governing board began asserting its power by firing 19 white teachers. It jettisoned civil-service exams for promotion, on the claim that they were culturally biased against blacks in their emphasis on such white Western norms as merit, materialism, and competition. The new curriculum would foster creative, spontaneous, cooperative black learning styles, supposedly different from cold, abstract, elitist white learning styles, so amenable to disciplined, structured teaching of reading, writing, and math. Black history and culture would take center stage, with an emphasis on resentment of white oppression. As for discipline, since blacks were victims, of course black students would challenge authority by cursing at teachers, misbehaving, and even hitting white teachers—for which there would be no punishment. A “disruptive child,” rightly understood, was a “high-spirited non-conformist.”

he conclusion of Reckoning with Race bears out more emphatically and more depressingly than I had imagined a prediction that I made almost a quarter-century ago in The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass. In that book, I argued that the counterculture’s remaking of mainstream white American culture in the 1960s—the sexual revolution; the fling with drugs; the non-conformist, drop-out anti-capitalism; the devaluation of marriage and family; the belief that in racist America, the criminal was really the victim of society; the belief that welfare payments were appropriate reparations for the slavery and discrimination that had produced so much ghetto poverty; the anti-rationalism; the belief in American oppressiveness, in Vietnam as well as at home—all these attitudes that devalued traditional mainstream values trickled down from young people and their teachers in the universities, to the media, to the mainstream Protestant churches, to the ed schools, to the high schools, and finally to American culture at large. And when these attitudes made their way to the ghetto, they destigmatized and validated the already-existing disproportionate illegitimacy, drug use, crime, school dropout, non-work, and welfare dependency there, and caused the rate of all these pathologies to skyrocket startlingly in the 1960s and beyond.

... Leave it to the inimitable Jesse Jackson to lead Stanford students in a successful protest against that once-great school’s required Western civilization course in 1988 by chanting, “Hey, hey; ho, ho; Western culture’s got to go.”

By the new millennium, the belief that white oppression bore sole responsibility for black shortcomings had hardened into orthodoxy. When Barack Obama, on the presidential campaign trail, urged his fellow blacks “to demand more from ourselves” and to accept that what makes “a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one,” Jesse Jackson snarled, “I want to cut his nuts off.” As president, Obama almost never raised the subject again.

...No longer could black anthropologist John Ogbu gain a hearing for his warning that “broad cultural attributes among blacks—such as parental style, commitment to learning, and work ethic—bear a heavy responsibility for the black-white educational gap,” and that black kids would do much better if made to follow school rules, do their homework, and pay attention in class. That educational gap has only widened, so that recent testing showed only 6 percent of black students college-ready, and of New York City’s black public school students, only 20 percent passed the state’s watered-down math test and 27 percent the English test for their grade level in 2016—with performance dropping from third grade to eighth grade. In Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, the idea that a disruptive black student is creatively protesting oppression or regimentation has also become dogma, solidifying the earlier shibboleth that “disparate” numbers of black suspensions or expulsions are evidence of school racism rather than a failure of minority culture and family dynamics. Even the broadly accepted consensus among blacks in 1968 that cops unjustly ignored black-on-black crime and should arrest the thugs preying on their own community has vanished, replaced by the mantra that police—now black as much as white—oppress blacks on behalf of a racist society.

But hardened into orthodoxy how? For this, Dattel makes clear, we can thank the universities. To redress America’s 300 years of racism, these culture-transmitting institutions embraced affirmative action with a vengeance, with the eight Ivy League schools boosting black enrollment 35 percent in the decade ending in 2016. Though that increase totals a paltry 393 students, Yale, with 12 percent of its Class of 2021 black, now zealously offers 49 courses in African-American studies and 45 in African studies—up from one when Dattel was an undergraduate there in the 1960s—and it has increased the ranks of its black faculty members proportionally. In an especially craven act of self-abasement, Yale removed the name of alumnus John C. Calhoun, the slave-owning South Carolina senator who held off the Civil War for two decades, from one of its colleges, replacing it with the name of a woman no one has heard of.

What do these 94 courses, and hundreds like them in academic America, teach? The unifying theme, says Dattel, “is the reinterpretation of American history as one extended nightmare of grievances,” an incapacitating rather than an empowering lesson that generates “a state of perpetual paralysis characterized by an absence of free will among the aggrieved.” Meanwhile, those who teach such courses are churning out books arguing that black family dysfunction results from the undeserved jailing of so many black men in America’s “carceral state,” a maliciously racist society that arbitrarily spirits away upstanding men who would otherwise be model husbands and fathers—notwithstanding that black Americans commit murder at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and black New Yorkers, 23 percent of the city’s population, commit two-thirds of its violent crimes. Indeed this trope of the carceral state and its explanation of black family dysfunction lies at the center of Between the World and Me, the Ta-Nehisi Coates screed that many elite colleges have required their entering freshmen to read, as the beginning of their PC indoctrination. Concurrently, propaganda-cum-community-organizing groups like Black Lives Matter, with $33 million from ethically puzzling billionaire George Soros at the time Dattel wrote—now augmented by the $18 billion that Soros has given his Open Society Institute, which is becoming as toxic as the Ford Foundation in its War-on-Poverty heyday—spread the message far and wide. Not a Protestant church in my part of Manhattan lacks its Black Lives Matter banner. And of course the sixties-enhanced ghetto culture of violent anti-authoritarianism and misogyny lives on vigorously in the gangsta rap whose avatars so often appeared at the Obama White House.

To Dattel, an infamous incident at Yale crystalizes the damage this campus orthodoxy is doing to black students. “The ‘coddled’ atmosphere on campus,” he writes, “encourages fragility, tribalism, insecurity, narcissism, an inability to deal with confrontation, an appeal to narrative rather than analysis, and a repugnance to diverse ideas.” Case in point: Halloween at Yale. Yale had sent students a memo warning against costumes that could cause racial or ethnic offense—though why college students have not put aside such childish things as Halloween costumes is another question. Child psychologist and Yale lecturer Erika Christakis, wife of physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis, then-master of Yale’s Silliman College, sent her own email objecting that Yale should not meddle in student’s lives at this level of detail, and that students could rationally work out any such problems themselves. An uproar ensued: How could Mrs. Christakis be so . . . insensitive? A crowd of angry students, many of them black, surrounded Nicholas Christakis in the college courtyard to upbraid him for his wife’s perfidy. Yale senior Jerelyn Luther, privileged daughter of upper-middle-class parents, harangued the unwaveringly reasonable if sometimes bewildered professor in a tearful, screaming, two-year-old’s temper tantrum, laced with adolescent profanity whose four-letter word I don’t like, so I will substitute another, capitalized for quick recognition.
“Why the Yale did you accept the position? Who the Yale hired you?!” the Shrieking Girl, as she came to be known, wailed. “If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! . . . It is about creating a home here. . . . You are disgusting.” Did college administrators discipline the Shrieking Girl? Oh, no. In the modern university, it’s the Christakises who were forced out of their jobs—just as last month, Yale’s English Department voted to accept a student petition to “decolonize” its requirements for graduation, so that now a Yale student can earn an English B.A. without taking a once-required course teaching Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne.

It’s not about creating an intellectual space, indeed. Or even a civil one.

A recent anti-police protest in St. Louis​ (Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
Dattel’s solution to America’s racial dilemma takes one step further a suggestion that, he recounts, drama critic Robert Brustein made two decades ago to black playwright August Wilson. Black Americans are no longer slaves, Brustein said, but Wilson talks about himself “as if you are standing on the ground of the slave quarters . . . representing yourself as a 300 year old man. That fact is, things have changed over the course of the last 300 years.” We fought a Civil War that cost 620,000 lives, ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, had a civil rights movement, a Civil Rights Act, a Voting Rights Act, a War on Poverty, a massive affirmative-action program in education and employment. Now, says Dattel, it’s up to black Americans. “Before we can achieve any major, broad-based improvement in the social and economic status of blacks, they must develop a frank process of self-examination to replace the current unwillingness to look objectively at destructive behavioral norms. Otherwise, the myriad programs designed specifically to aid blacks will fail to achieve large-scale transformation. The particular burden—of facing themselves—lies squarely on the black community.”

Read more here.