Click HERE to listen LIVE while you FReep! HIFI broadband feed HERE! (when available)
Would you like to receive a note when RadioFR is on the air? Click HERE!
Click HERE to chat in the RadioFR chat room!
Posted on 02/25/2003 10:17:56 AM PST by Chi-townChief
I was prepared not to like John McWhorter. After all, he's labeled by others as a conservative (although he calls himself a neo-conservative) and as such, I expected him to have horns and a tail.
But the youngish-looking man who stepped off the elevator at the Omni Hotel looked like any other black man. Given his stature--he is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley--I expected him to be arrogant or at least a little bit cocky.
He was neither.
While the presence of some black leaders can fill a room, McWhorter shied away from even posing for photos. After receiving a copy of his latest book, Authentically Black: Essays For The Black Silent Majority, and enjoying it, I was curious.
Although I had intended to write up my interview with McWhorter last week, the Epitome/E2 Chicago tragedy sent me off in a different direction.
But as details of the catastrophe started coming out, I found myself thinking about what McWhorter had to say.
He defines the "New Double Consciousness," with regard to race. That is, black people feel compelled to play the underdog in public, while they fully understand progress has been made in private. I watched as this dynamic went into play during the many press conferences that took place after the E2 deaths.
Only that dynamic explains why most of the community and political leaders in the public spotlight last week ignored the root cause of the Chicago nightclub tragedy.
Instead of seizing the chance to point out that the security problems shouldn't have existed in the first place, they allowed the truth to stay behind closed doors. In doing so, they perpetuated the myth that young black people don't know how to act.
The truth is, the majority of young black people can go to the party without turning the place out. But in schools, on the basketball courts, at house parties, there is a segment of young people who have embraced "gangsta" behavior and they are making things unsafe for everyone.
Last week, it was fighting and brawling that contributed to the deaths of innocent victims. What will be next?
While we can rest assured that the city, the club owners, the security guards and the club promoters will pay dearly for those deaths, the people responsible for the chaotic scene will not be held accountable.
In my interview with McWhorter, I asked him if he thought this "New Double Consciousness" would ever change.
"I think that black people across the United States are ready for a new message," he said. "I think we are ready to talk the way we talk at home, in public. There will always be some of us who are more comfortable with an older kind of message, and there will always be some of us who think that our main job is to remind whites that they are responsible for our fate," he said.
The "New Double Consciousness" (which is really a remix of the "Don't Air Dirty Laundry" syndrome) "is more about theatrics than about helping the people who are suffering," McWhorter concluded.
Speaking honestly about race, of course, is easy in the barbershop. But public discussion in which someone suggests that black people be held accountable for the problems plaguing predominantly black neighborhoods, but fails to point the finger at the white man, can get one toe-tagged as a conservative.
Not a pleasant thought in a city like Chicago. Here, conservatives are beaten back with a stick.
Yet on the street, the people know. They know how this current catastrophe could have been avoided. They know, but they are silent.
"Whatever remaining 'anti-black sentiment' is out there must concern us no more than it did the people who built Bronzeville, Chicago, or the millions of black families who worked their way into comfortable houses in the suburbs, after the real obstacle, legalized discrimination, was eliminated," McWhorter writes.
"We must not let the New Double Consciousness teach us that in public we must don the costume of the underdog. What ethnic group has ever risen on the basis of such a defeatist, self-loathing ideology?" he asks.
I almost hated to agree with McWhorter, but he made a lot of sense.
Many of us are proof of that. Yet we have allowed a different message, one filled with anger and resentment, to poison younger minds.
What can we say to young black people now? I asked.
"This is the message to young people. We cannot insist that we are a strong people and at the same time maintain that we can only succeed under ideal conditions," he said. "Yes, you are going to encounter residual racism, there's racism in every country in the world. You cannot wait for that to go away. The message to young people is you can succeed despite not having ideal conditions.
"And if you can't then you don't believe that black is beautiful. You don't believe we're a strong people. You don't think of us as survivors."
I hope young people begin to hear this message.
E-mail: marym@suntimes.com
Ms. Mitchell has a point here - if you're white with even slightly conservative leanings, you're a racist; and if you're black, you're a self-hating Negro. The liberals in Chicago don't fool around with any kind of relativism on this one.
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
We'll see...
Click HERE to listen LIVE while you FReep! HIFI broadband feed HERE! (when available)
Would you like to receive a note when RadioFR is on the air? Click HERE!
Click HERE to chat in the RadioFR chat room!
A linguist celebrates the "riotous diversity" of the world's languages and the "inner genius" of spoken English.
=================================
McWhorter's a linguist at Berkeley. My kind of guy, but he's got me 3-2 spoken & 8-1 reading.
A conservative in the belly of the beast.
(snip)But linguistics is his true passion. In turning aside a question about Black English during the following interview, McWhorter said: "Can we skip that this time? I'm on a mission to show that black people can be deeply interested in something that doesn't have to do with melanin."
He is so cool. And if I may say... he's easy on the eye too. (-:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.