That black Americans lag behind whites on important measures of social and economic well-being is indisputable. Black men are disproportionately uneducated, unmarried, unemployed and incarcerated. Black women and their children endure high rates of poverty living in fatherless families.
The question is: What can and should be done about it?
Five years ago, Bill Cosby elicited deep hostility (along with a modicum of support) from the African-American and social science communities when he used the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education to declare that racial disparity “is no longer the white man’s problem.” Cosby’s critics attacked. “Who is he to charge the black community – the very victim of racial oppression – with undoing the harm caused by that oppression?” they asked.
So imagine the reaction when a white, conservative law professor enters the debate – and takes Cosby’s side. That is exactly what University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Amy Wax does with her just-published book, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.
“The taboo against blaming the victim has profoundly distorted thinking about race,” writes Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at Penn.
Wax is sure to elicit controversy with her claims that the history of racial oppression is of little use in resolving today’s achievement gap and that African-Americans’ own collective behavior and mentality have overtaken racial hostility as the leading barrier to ending racial inequality.
“I didn’t start out thinking or writing about race.” Wax explains. “I teach about poverty and inequality, and the laws and social programs designed to address them. In this area, race looms large. And I just got tired of the stale, ritualistic, mindless debates about race, which usually reflected what people felt they had to say instead of what they really thought – and what the evidence showed.”
Drawing on social science evidence and policy experience, Wax challenges the dominant view that only far-ranging efforts by government, private organizations and society as a whole can eliminate black disadvantage. Discrimination against blacks has dramatically abated; the most important factors impeding black progress now are behavioral: low educational attainment, poor socialization and work habits, drug use, criminality, paternal abandonment, and non-marital childbearing.
“I’m not denying racism – just saying that it’s a small and ever-diminishing part of the problem and dwelling on it doesn’t get us anywhere,” Wax says.
In legal terms, Wax finds the answer in the law of remedies and its distinction between liabilities and cures. To illustrate her argument, she uses the parable of the injured pedestrian. Imagine someone struck by a car, through absolutely no fault of his own, and rendered unable to walk. The driver pays for the pedestrian’s hospital bills and rehabilitation expenses but cannot, with all the money in the world, restore the pedestrian’s ability to walk. Rather, the pedestrian must expend enormous effort in physical therapy if he is ever to walk again. In this unfair twist of fate, only the victim can cure himself – no matter that he is depressed and demoralized as a result of the driver’s actions.
Similarly, the notion that white society can right its wrongs and save black America from itself is a dangerous rescue fantasy, she writes. What the black community needs is a “conversion experience,” an internal cultural reform whereby members discard old illusions, find a new path, and redirect their lives.
“The strategies of the past have exhausted themselves and can no longer work,” she writes. “The future of black America is now in its own hands.”
Put another way: “Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes – because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation.”
Another quote from Professor Wax’s book? No. The speaker was President Barack Obama. The president’s remarks “are refreshing,” Wax says, “but they go down easier because Obama sweetens them with the mandatory liberal disclaimer – ‘There is still plenty of racism and we still need special government programs to battle it.’ In my book, I call this ‘operating on two tracks.’ It is ultimately self-defeating, because it is always easier to seize on racial bias than one’s own bad choices to explain failure.”
For Wax: “Equal opportunity – including consistent enforcement of civil rights laws, a wise and honest government, a well regulated free market economy, a sound education system and a humane but not overly generous social safety net – is all the support anyone needs, whatever their race, color or creed, to live a decent life. The rest is up to them.”
