Augean Stables

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, and the author of Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries writes in a courageous Op-Ed for the NYT that black youths in America are not becoming part of the mainstream, and that a key part of the problem is a) cultural and b) it therefore does not appear on the analytical screens of contemporary sociologists.

The problems may seem familiar to the readers of this blog, and the parallels raise important issues.

March 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
A Poverty of the Mind

By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Cambridge, Mass.

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960’s: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Sounds a lot like: Poverty causes terror, not to mention rioting in the suburbs of France.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies “amount to a tax on earnings.”

His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia, the author of a study called “Black Males Left Behind,” and Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is “pumping out boys with no honest alternative.”

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.

I had an experience back in 1975 that sheds some light on this problem. I was a tutor in a program called Upward Bound, a semi-summer camp that tutored kids who failed their high school that year. It became clear quite early on that most of the white kids failed because they were stupid, but the black kids were often quite smart. Their problem was that they didn’t know how to learn. I remember working with one on a math problem and began to realize that all he wanted was to get me to give him the answer. When I asked him why he told me it was called “getting over on ‘the man’ [i.e., me].” What I came to understand is that for these kids, the math problem wasn’t something that they could “get”, but a humiliating hoop that we honkeys were trying to get them to jump through. If they could make us do it for them, they won.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

There is the problem of envy. When you live surrounded by abundance and you don’t have it, it’s hard not only for the people who don’t have it to feel entitled, but also for those of us (like the children of successful parents) to feel, somehow, that we may not deserve what we’ve got.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children — several of them — which they have no resources or intention to support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?

Now we move into territory that’s related to honor-shame and what is it that defines manhood.

What’s most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power. Thus it’s doubly depressing that the conclusions they draw and the prescriptions they recommend remain mired in traditional socioeconomic thinking.

The power of paradigms is truly great. To acknowledge that the basic approach may be mistaken involves much more than making a simple concession. It involves rethinking on a scale few want to engage in.

What has happened, I think, is that the economic boom years of the 90’s and one of the most successful policy initiatives in memory — welfare reform — have made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture. The Clinton administration achieved exactly what policy analysts had long said would pull black men out of their torpor: the economy grew at a rapid pace, providing millions of new jobs at all levels. Yet the jobless black youths simply did not turn up to take them. Instead, the opportunity was seized in large part by immigrants — including many blacks — mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean.

One oft-repeated excuse for the failure of black Americans to take these jobs — that they did not offer a living wage — turned out to be irrelevant. The sociologist Roger Waldinger of the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, has shown that in New York such jobs offered an opportunity to the chronically unemployed to join the market and to acquire basic work skills that they later transferred to better jobs, but that the takers were predominantly immigrants.

The is oft-repeated excuse reveals the mistaken role of “analysts.” Instead of examining the role of cultural phenomena like attitudes towards labor, they rush to the cognitive egocentrism of “they want to act like we do and want them to, it’s just we’re not offering enough. Shades of the PLO apologetics about why Yassir turned down Oslo: he wanted to make a deal, he just didn’t get enough. So we end up with pundits as apologists rather than analysts.

Why have academics been so allergic to cultural explanations? Until the recent rise of behavioral economics, most economists have simply not taken non-market forces seriously. But what about the sociologists and other social scientists who ought to have known better? Three gross misconceptions about culture explain the neglect.

First is the pervasive idea that cultural explanations inherently blame the victim; that they focus on internal behavioral factors and, as such, hold people responsible for their poverty, rather than putting the onus on their deprived environment. (It hasn’t helped that many conservatives do actually put forth this view.)

It hasn’t helped that “progressive thinkers” automatically dismiss anything that “conservatives” say.

But this argument is utterly bogus. To hold someone responsible for his behavior is not to exclude any recognition of the environmental factors that may have induced the problematic behavior in the first place. Many victims of child abuse end up behaving in self-destructive ways; to point out the link between their behavior and the destructive acts is in no way to deny the causal role of their earlier victimization and the need to address it.

Likewise, a cultural explanation of black male self-destructiveness addresses not simply the immediate connection between their attitudes and behavior and the undesired outcomes, but explores the origins and changing nature of these attitudes, perhaps over generations, in their brutalized past. It is impossible to understand the predatory sexuality and irresponsible fathering behavior of young black men without going back deep into their collective past.

Second, it is often assumed that cultural explanations are wholly deterministic, leaving no room for human agency. This, too, is nonsense. Modern students of culture have long shown that while it partly determines behavior, it also enables people to change behavior. People use their culture as a frame for understanding their world, and as a resource to do much of what they want. The same cultural patterns can frame different kinds of behavior, and by failing to explore culture at any depth, analysts miss a great opportunity to re-frame attitudes in a way that encourages desirable behavior and outcomes.

Third, it is often assumed that cultural patterns cannot change — the old “cake of custom” saw. This too is nonsense. Indeed, cultural patterns are often easier to change than the economic factors favored by policy analysts, and American history offers numerous examples.

These three points (especially the last two) are variants on a single theme that confuses culture and race: you can’t change culture. Whenever I draw attention to the role of honor and shame in the Arab attitudes towards Israel, I get the same response: “That’ll never change.” The interesting thing about this response is that it reveals the poverty of the thinking involved on two levels. First, as Patterson goes on to point out, it means that they can’t even begin to think about culture as a force for change, and second, it means that all this prattle about how it’s just socio-economic conditions and nothing to do with attitude assumes that they’ve already made the change. So that, rather than acknowledge a change to be made that is so great one thinks it impossible, one prefers to pretend it’s already been made. Not a promising formula for reality-testing, and a good clue as to why “progressive thinking” has gone from producing dead ends to solutions that backfire.

My favorite is Jim Crow, that deeply entrenched set of cultural and institutional practices built up over four centuries of racist domination and exclusion of blacks by whites in the South. Nothing could have been more cultural than that. And yet America was able to dismantle the entire system within a single generation, so much so that today blacks are now making a historic migratory shift back to the South, which they find more congenial than the North. (At the same time, economic inequality, which the policy analysts love to discuss, has hardened in the South, like the rest of America.)

Alas, that’s a change in white culture, which by its very commitments to civic processes, favors voluntarism — hence the ability to change direction. It’s actually precisely the ability of civic cultures to change and the immense resistance of “honor-shame” cultures to do so that leads to MOS: “it’s easier to work on the changers than get the resisters to change.” Hence, for example, put the pressure on the Israelis, not the Palestinians. It makes sense up to a point. We’ve just gone so far beyond that point that the resisters now feel entitled not to change.

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren’t always obvious. Sociological investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation — that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for “acting white” — turns out to be largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

I am surprised at this, since calling blacks who try to succeed by the white man’s rules “Oreos” is a widespread problem related to “crabs in the basket.” I certainly ran into it that summer in 1975 when, the more enthusiastic some of my tutees got about learning the more they got anxious about both their peers and their parents. “What, do you think you’re better than we are?” they’d be told. For an example of a parental “crab in the basket,” see the mother in Real Women have Curves

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college (”We’re not stupid!” they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the “cool-pose culture” of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation’s best entertainers were black.

I don’t think this in any way offers a explanation for why not the approbation of “acting white” — on the contrary, this is the flip side.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

This is related to Finkielkraut’s comment in his talk that one of the problems in France among the Gaulois youth is that they no longer have any shame. Last generation would at least have enough shame to lie about not having read Le rouge et le noir, but today’s youth is proud of not having read it.

It’s also an interesting insight into the “therapeutic” approach of a generation of scholarship based on the notion of encouraging performance by enhancing “self-esteem,” the idea behind the popularity of such intellectual fads as glorifying the Black past (e.g., Black Athena), and depreciating the western accomplishment (e.g., The Great Divergence. Somehow, went the theory, if the West self-deprecates enough, then the rest will get the ego confidence to succeed. Here we find a passage from lack of confidence to overconfidence, from raw to rotten without ripeness.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America’s largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

I do think that this is where an analysis of honor-shame culture and the notions of manhood found in “warrior societies” can shed a great deal of light on this subject. For the warrior, “making” is sissies, “taking” is for men. For the plains Indians, raiding horses was far more noble that breeding them. That was women’s work. (This is precisely the point that Bernard Lewis makes about going into politics to become rich in the Muslim world rather than becoming rich to go into politics in the West.) Plunder or be plundered, or, in the words of 50 cent“Get rich or die trying.”: When you are surrounded by wealth that seems like it can be yours for the taking, why bother going to the trouble to make it, especially if that means losing your manhood.

Of course, such attitudes explain only a part of the problem. In academia, we need a new, multidisciplinary approach toward understanding what makes young black men behave so self-destructively. Collecting transcripts of their views and rationalizations is a useful first step, but won’t help nearly as much as the recent rash of scholars with tape-recorders seem to think. Getting the facts straight is important, but for decades we have been overwhelmed with statistics on black youths, and running more statistical regressions is beginning to approach the point of diminishing returns to knowledge.

The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a time-slice of a deep historical process that runs far back through the cataracts and deluge of our racist past.

And among the places it flows back to are cultural patterns that long precede the advent of white racism, that go back to the honor-shame warrior cultures that all peoples — white, black, yellow and brown — developed as part of an evolutionary process. The study of these cultures, so stunted by the kind of scholarship encouraged by Saïd’s Orientalism. They explain many aspects of the problem, including the differential between black men and women (and more broadly between immigrant men and women). Since, in honor-shame cultures, women do not have and cannot earn honor (they have purity and can lose it), they are not stuck in postures of manliness that make it impossible to yield to demands (e.g., to learn, to be vulnerable, to accept a [temporary] posture of inferiority) that call into question one’s honor.

Most black Americans have by now, miraculously, escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth languishing in the ghettos is the remains. Too much is at stake for us to fail to understand the plight of these young men. For them, and for the rest of us.

Indeed, as I’ve tried to point out in my comments, it’s not only the plight of our African-American youth that’s at stake in figuring out this problem. This is a world-wide problem whose solution is most urgent precisely because failure means, as Gibbon once put it in his Fall of the Roman Empire, the triumph of religion and barbarism.