Another shade of black

John McWhorter talks about the pitfalls of reparations and affirmative action, why Eminem will never be hip-hop's Elvis, and why the N-word doesn't bother him much.

By Suzy Hansen

Jan 14, 2003 | In the preface to his new collection of essays, "Authentically Black," John McWhorter clears up a few things about his previous book, "Losing the Race." First off, it is not a book about education, McWhorter, a professor of linguistics, insists, but an exploration of how certain aspects of race get played out in America and particularly, because he works in education, how they get played out in schools. "If I happened to be a criminologist, I would have written a similar book drawing from sentencing issues and racial profiling," he writes. "If I were a businessman I would have concentrated on the corporate world, small business development and affirmative action in hiring and contracting."

All of this is to say that McWhorter, also a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, is much more concerned about murkier, more seemingly trivial but larger and, he maintains, more quietly destructive problems, ranging from blacks' melodramatic reactions to the word "nigger" to the combative countercultural gestures of hip-hop artists. The combined effect of the past 35 years of post-civil-rights healing, McWhorter says, has led to a cult of victimhood and an invasion of black outsider iconography in all areas of black life. In "Authentically Black," whether he's writing about the reparations movement or blacks on TV, the same theme keeps popping up: Most black people act like victims in front of white people because they believe that keeping whites "on the hook" is the right thing for thinking African-Americans to do. Behind closed doors, however, black Americans feel very differently.

Beyond mere annoyances, how does this double-sided racial ideology deal with real issues -- like legislation? "Authentically Black" argues convincingly that black Americans have a conflicted self-image; where that conflict comes from is harder to pinpoint. McWhorter spoke to Salon about affirmative action, the Republican response to Trent Lott's embarrassing remarks, the political potential of hip-hop, and whether Eminem is really the next Elvis.

Do you think that Trent Lott represents a large portion of Americans in the sense that they are still stuck in the segregated past? Or do you think he's an aberration?

Well, I think that whole thing was misinterpreted.

You do? How so?

I felt that he needed to step down as majority leader and I wrote an Op-Ed about that for the Wall Street Journal. But what Trent Lott said did not mean that he thinks the United States should go back to the days of segregation. He would have to be brain-dead to sit there and say that in 2002.

What he said did indicate, however, that he thinks that the civil rights revolution is just not a big deal. If you can make a joke about how Strom Thurmond should have been president, it means that you just don't think that the race thing was a big deal. That's bad enough that you should not be the majority leader of the Republicans when they're in control of both houses and the White House.

But as far as Lott being racist? Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. On a spiritual level, I really don't care. The fact that some man with a toupee from Mississippi doesn't like black people doesn't hurt me. A lot of African-Americans ought to think about that when they talk about how something like that hurts them. Why would I care if Trent Lott -- this person who I don't know, don't care about, don't like -- likes black people or not? But a person who thinks that the civil rights revolution was just kind of a footnote -- which is clearly what he thinks -- should not be in a position of power. What he meant was that he likes Strom Thurmond's other planks, and as far as the fact that he was a racist, well, that didn't matter a whole lot.

You're making a distinction between racism and not putting a priority on desegregation? Is there significant difference?

For me, there's a difference between how highly you rate black people and whether or not you're a racist. Now, what various senators and representatives say behind closed doors -- who knows? As far as I'm concerned, as long as it doesn't affect legislation, who cares? -- although priorities can matter as well.

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases. I don't vote Republican either, but the idea that Republicans' practices over the last 20 years have been racist -- to be honest, it's good for an Op-Ed, but it's not accurate.

For example, Bob Jones University disagrees with interracial dating. Interracial dating is not the biggest thing on their agenda. Say you go and you talk to them because you're a fellow conservative. Interracial dating doesn't matter much to you because you're white and your children are white. You are not so appalled by their racism that you won't go and speak to them. That doesn't mean that you're a racist. It means that [race] is not very high on your agenda. I'm not pardoning this, but to say that the Republicans hate black people -- it's just Op-Ed material. What it really means is that Republicans don't think the issue is all that important.

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