The black oppositional mindset.

[The book's author] McWhorter stresses that, while blacks faced more discrimination in the days of Jim Crow, their culture then was healthier, with a stronger work ethic and less crime, illegitimacy, and drug addiction. In 1960, he notes, two out of ten blacks were born out of wedlock; by the mid-1990s, seven out of ten were. In the 1960s, African Americans lost a sense of shame about illegitimacy and much else.

Winning the Race demolishes the claim that factory relocation and the departure of middle-class role models is to blame for inner-city decay (he focuses on the example of Indianapolis, where there was no appreciable factory relocation but the inner city decayed anyway). McWhorter also marshals the evidence that belittling academic excellence as “acting white” is a real phenomenon and a real problem, “a facet of black peer culture that senses school as something separate from black culture.”

Racial preferences — a.k.a. affirmative action — aggravate this problem, since they undercut insistence on black excellence. . . . Sander, a liberal who had been favorably disposed toward affirmative action, has concluded that in fact there are now fewer black lawyers because of it.

“Attitude, then, plays a big part here,” writes McWhorter. . . . The oppositional mindset is self-destructive in school, in the workplace, at home, in the ’hood — even on the radio. Thus, McWhorter . . . concludes that “rap is the most overtly and consistently misogynistic music ever produced in human history” . . . .

"Closer to the Prize." By Roger Clegg, 1/30/05, NationalReviewOnline, 2/24/06, reviewing Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, by John McWhorter (Gotham, 434 pp., $27.50), from the January 30, 2005 issue of National Review.