02
CULTURE MATTERS
The last time I saw my father he was pulling away from the curb in front of my home in suburban New York City, where he’d spent the weekend visiting his two toddler grandchildren and taking in a Yankees game with his only son. I asked him to call me when he got back to Buffalo, the city where I was raised, and where he still lived with my older sister and her two daughters. I don’t remember if he ever did, but a few days later my sister would phone to tell me that she had found him slumped over in his recliner when she arrived home from work one evening. Fourteen years after Mom had died, Dad was gone, too.
I have no recollection of my father ever living with my mother, or even much liking her. They married in 1964, had three children by 1972 (I was born in 1971), and would be divorced by the time Jimmy Carter took office. After the split they went out of their way to avoid speaking to one another, often using us children to communicate. Tell your mother this, or tell you father that, were common requests growing up as we shuttled back and forth between residences. But while their dislike of one another was palpable to us kids, it never seemed to interfere with our relationships with them. In fact, one of the few things they seemed to agree on was that the other was a good parent.
My sisters and I lived with our mother, but we had almost unlimited access to Dad, who took full advantage of his visiting privileges. The anthropologist Margaret Mead said that the ultimate test of any culture is whether it can successfully socialize men to willingly nurture their children. “Every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men,” she wrote. “Each new generation of young males learn the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimpose upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role.”1 I don’t know if my parents ever read Mead, but they certainly shared that sentiment.
Until the day he died my father was a constant presence in the lives of his children. Growing up, my sisters and I saw him Tuesdays, Thursdays, weekends, and holidays. My relationship with him was an especially close one that both he and my mother were keen to maintain. He checked my homework, helped me with my paper route, and spent hours at my side constructing and reconstructing my elaborate model train sets. My father and I were sports nuts. He taught me to hit, pitch, shoot, and tackle. He coached my Little League baseball teams. He had me on ice skates as soon as I could walk. We attended countless local college basketball games together, were Buffalo Bills season ticket holders, and regularly drove to Toronto to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays. None of this is especially remarkable fatherly behavior, of course, unless the father happens to be black. Fathers who live apart from their offspring are less likely to spend time with them, or contribute financially to their upbringing. My father distinguished himself by being there for us. And his behavior would become even more exceptional, statistically speaking, over time.
In 1965, when he was assistant secretary of labor for President Lyndon Johnson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was already warning that the black family was in a state of crisis. Although nine in ten children in America lived with their biological father in 1960, some one in four black kids did not. By 2011 33 percent of children in the United States would be living with their mothers, but not their fathers. Among blacks the number would climb to 64 percent, or nearly two in three.
“Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status,” reported the Washington Times in 2012, citing census data. “Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother.” Just 12 percent of poor black households have two parents present, compared with 41 percent of poor Hispanic families and 32 percent of impoverished white families. “In all but 11 states, most black children do not live with both parents. In every state, 7 in 10 white children do.”2
Divorce helped to drive these numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s unwed parenthood was largely to blame. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 16 percent of black households are married couples with children, the lowest of any racial group in the United States, while nearly 20 percent are female-headed with children, which is the highest of any group. Like most blacks, my parents knew (if only from the experience of friends and family) all about the strong links between broken homes and bad outcomes. They knew that the likelihood of drug abuse, criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, and dropping out of school increased dramatically when fathers weren’t around. And though they couldn’t save their marriage, my parents were resolved to save their kids. What this meant in practice was that they tried, with mixed results, to minimize the impact of America’s black subculture on their children.
For her part, my mother turned to the church. She was born in Alabama in 1938 and raised Baptist, but became a Jehovah’s Witness at the urging of an older sister in the mid-1970s. My mother, my sisters, and I attended services three times a week, and the congregation was integrated but mostly black. That included most of the church elders—married men who held down jobs, provided for their families, didn’t smoke or curse, spoke standard English, dressed in suits and ties, and took fatherhood seriously. My mother wanted them to serve as role models for me, and they did, even long after I left the religion voluntarily in my teens. In addition, most of my extended family in Buffalo were members of the church. The aunt who introduced my mother to the religion had adult children who were also Witnesses. Two of her sons were church elders with kids my age; a daughter was married to an elder and they, too, had children being raised in the faith. It was a large, extremely close clan, and the adults were counting on the religion to provide not only spiritual guidance for the children but also something of a refuge from a larger black culture that seemed to be rapidly coarsening.
My father, who was never involved with the religion, thought it most important that his children be educated. He was born in Florida in 1941, but in the 1950s his family move to Newburgh, New York, where he attended high school. He was an outstanding athlete, went to college on a football scholarship, and played professional football in Canada in the 1960s. When his playing days were through he returned to school and obtained a master’s degree in social work. I played my share of sports as a kid and he was always there to cheer me on, but Dad was adamant that schoolwork come first.
A year after I was born my parents left a predominantly black neighborhood and purchased a home hard by the University at Buffalo, my father’s alma mater. University Heights, as the neighborhood was known, was still predominantly white in the 1970s and 1980s—our nonwhite neighbors were mainly foreigners who attended the college or taught there—but black families like ours were starting to move in. Years later I asked my father why he and my mother had quit the black side of town. He told me that they didn’t like what blacks were doing to their own communities. He mentioned the crime, the abandoned lots, the graffiti, the litter, the unkempt homes. But his main concern, he said, were the “knuckleheads” and “thugs” whom he wanted his children far away from. He understood that some families didn’t have the means to leave, and he didn’t begrudge those who could move, but stayed anyway. But he wasn’t taking any chances with his kids.
My father spent most of his professional life working at a local psychiatric hospital run by the state. But he always had other jobs on the side, and they typically kept him in close contact with Buffalo’s black community. He ran a home for troubled boys when he got out of graduate school. Later he ran an after-school tutoring program for low-income kids in a depressed section of town. For a few years he even owned a bar and restaurant in a black neighborhood, and was able to provide some economic activity and jobs in the community. But when it came to himself and his family, he didn’t want to tempt fate. We lived around whites.
Of course, many of our friends and most of our extended family lived in the black sections of town. Growing up, my best buddy, Trevor, lived on the same street that we had before moving to University Heights.
Like my family, Trevor’s was middle class. Like me, Trevor had a mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness and a father who wasn’t. His parents were married; he and his younger sister had a good relationship with their dad; and Trevor was a solid student who excelled in math and science. Buffalo had two selective public high schools that used entrance exams. Trevor attended one of them and his sister attended the other.
But Trevor’s neighborhood ultimately got the better of him. Over time, he was taken in by the knuckleheads and thugs. School became less attractive to him than running the streets. He drank and smoked weed. His language and attitude changed. Always a little quiet, he became sullen and much more withdrawn. He listened to gangsta rappers like the Geto Boys and Ice-T. Girls became “bitches.” He got into fights. He asked me why I hung out with “white boys.” We would cross paths from time to time as teenagers, but by the end of high school I hardly knew Trevor anymore. We lived in different worlds. He kept company with a crowd that I consciously avoided.
At the time, Trevor’s “white boys” comment stung. I did have a number of white friends on account of the schools I attended. So long as we could afford it, my father sent me to private institutions, where black students were scarce. I went to public schools in seventh, eighth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, but I wound up in honors classes where the vast majority of kids were white. My two sisters, to my father’s chagrin, opted for the neighborhood public schools. Nor did they take to the church, which distressed my mom. Both of them fell in with the wrong crowd, willingly. Indeed, they largely rejected the middle-class values that our parents labored to instill in us. And notwithstanding the geographic distance, soon they were sliding into Trevor’s world. We lived under the same roof, but I spoke, dressed, and generally behaved in ways that were not only different from my siblings but associated in their minds with “acting white.” The teasing was good-natured for the most part, and I didn’t let it get to me, but it was constant throughout my adolescence. It came from friends and family, from children and adults, from fellow congregants in the church, and on one occasion from a black public-high-school teacher who mocked my standard English in front of the entire class after I’d answered a question.
I very much enjoyed school. I was outgoing, athletic, made friends easily. But it wasn’t just the social life that attracted me. I also liked learning. I liked books. I was curious about the world. I wanted to be smart, not because I associated it with being white but because I associated it with my father. Dad was smart, and I wanted to be like Dad. I didn’t avoid black friendships, but most of the people I came across who shared my sensibilities, particularly about education, were white. There were other studious black kids around, but not many, and there seemed to be fewer as I got older. The reality was that if you were a bookish black kid who placed shared sensibilities above shared skin color, you probably had a lot of white friends.
By contrast, the Trevors were everywhere. I was related to them, attended school with them, worshipped with them. These were black kids from good families who nevertheless fell victim to social pathologies: crime, drugs, teen pregnancies, and a tragically warped sense of what it means to be black. Some were ghetto kids from broken homes with the odds stacked against them. But a surprising number were middle-class children from intact families who chose to reject middle-class values. They were not destined for Buffalo’s mean streets. They had options and they knew better. Yet the worst aspects of black culture seemed to find them, win them over, and sometimes destroy their lives. My black peers were getting pregnant and fathering children. My cousins were compiling criminal records and doing drugs. My parents did what they could, but in the end neither the church nor University Heights proved impenetrable. By the time I graduated from high school my older sister was a single mom. By the time I graduated from college my younger sister was dead from a drug overdose. A short time later Trevor would also be dead, and his sister would also be a single mother.
The kind of ribbing that I experienced as a child would follow me into adulthood, where my older sister’s children would take to deriding my diction. “Why you talk white, Uncle Jason?” my niece, all of nine years old at the time, once asked me during a visit. Turning to her friend, she continued, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he trying to sound so smart?” They shared a chuckle at my expense, and I was reminded of how early these self-defeating attitudes take hold. Here were a couple of black third graders already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. Moreover, they had determined that “sounding white” was something to be mocked in other blacks and avoided in their own speech.
The findings of academics who have researched this “acting white” phenomenon are thoroughly depressing, and demonstrate that my experiences are neither new nor atypical. Here is basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar describing his experience as a studious kid at a predominantly black Catholic school outside of Philadelphia in the 1950s:
I got there and immediately found I could read better than anyone in the school. My father’s example and my mother’s training had made that come easy; I could pick up a book, read it out loud, pronounce the words with proper inflection and actually know what they meant. When the nuns found this out they paid me a lot of attention, once even asking me, a fourth grader, to read to the seventh grade. When the kids found this out I became a target . . .
It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for doing everything I’d ever been taught was right. I got all A’s and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide.3
In the late 1990s the black residents of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb, invited John Ogbu, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the black-white academic achievement gap in their community. Roughly a third of the town’s residents were black, and the school district was divided equally along racial lines. Yet the black kids trailed far behind whites in test scores, grade-point averages, placement in high-level classes, and college attendance. Black students were receiving 80 percent of the Ds and Fs.
Nationwide, the racial gap in education is well documented. Black kids are overrepresented among high-school dropouts and students who are not performing at grade level. Black scores on the SAT and other standardized tests are far lower on average than those of whites. The achievement gap begins in elementary school and widens in higher grades. By the end of high school the typical black student is several years behind his white peers in reading and math. The usual explanation of this is class inequality. Blacks don’t perform on the level of whites because they come from a lower socioeconomic background and their schools have fewer resources, goes the argument. But what Ogbu found is that this problem transcends class and persists even among the children of affluent, educated black professionals.
“None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why Black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as White students,” wrote Ogbu. “Within the Black population, of course, middle-class children do better, on the average, than lower-class children, just as in the White population. However, when Blacks and Whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, one sees that Black students at every class level perform less well in school than their White counterparts.”4
Ogbu and his team of researchers were given access to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and students in the Shaker Heights school district, which was one of the country’s best. And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among Black students,” wrote Ogbu
. “The students themselves recognized this and used it to explain both their academic behaviors and their low academic achievement performance.”5 Due to peer pressure, some black students “didn’t work as hard as they should and could.” Among their black friends, “it was not cool to be successful” or “to work hard or to show you’re smart.” One female student said that some black students believed “it was cute to be dumb.” Asked why, “she said it was because they couldn’t do well and that they didn’t want anyone else to do well.”6
Ogbu found that black high-school students “avoided certain attitudes, standard English, and some behaviors because they considered them White. They feared that adopting White ways would be detrimental to their collective racial identity and solidarity. Unfortunately, some of the attitudes labeled ‘White’ and avoided by the students were those that enhanced school success.” The behaviors and attitudes to be avoided included, for example, enrolling in honors and advanced-placement classes, striving for high grades, talking properly, hanging around too many white students, and participating in extracurricular activities that were populated by whites.
“What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don’t know how their parents made it,” Ogbu told the New York Times in 2002. “They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children.”7
Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed Page 4