Race, Wrongs, and Remedies, Reviewed

John McWhorter has written a thoughtful and sorrowful review of a new book: Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century, by Amy Wax.

He's sorrowful because he doesn't see much near term chance of the kind of progress he seeks - progress which would require changes in black culture.

One of the most sobering observations made by Wax comes in the form of a disarmingly simple calculus presented first by Isabel Sawhill and Christopher Jencks. If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view.

His review ends:

To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right.

How do you start
a cultural shift?

Our performance art
just goes with the drift.