What's So Great About America (17 page)

A few years ago sociologist Sanford Dornbusch and his colleagues were puzzled by the persistence of large differences in academic performance between Asian-Americans and African-Americans. They were disturbed by the possibility that these differences might be due to natural or genetic factors. So Dornbusch and his colleagues conducted a comparative study of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students. Here is what they found: “In general Asian-American students devote relatively more time to their studies, are more likely to attribute their success to hard
work, and are more likely to report that their parents have high standards for school performance. . . . In contrast, African-American and Hispanic students are more cavalier about the consequences of poor school performance, devote less time to their studies, are less likely than others to attribute their success to hard work, and report that their parents have relatively lower standards.”
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Obviously this doesn't settle the issue; one may ask, “But why do Asian-Americans and African-Americans show these differences in attitude and behavior?” Undoubtedly many complex factors are involved, but one that is worth mentioning is the two-parent family. It seems obvious that two parents will have, on average, more time than a single parent to invest in a child's upbringing, discipline, homework supervision, and so on. What is the illegitimacy rate in the Asian-American community? Less than 5 percent. In the African-American community? Nearly 70 percent!

I mentioned these facts at a recent conference, and one of my fellow panelists erupted in anger. “Yes, but who do you think caused the decline of the black family? Clearly it is the result of slavery.” He went on to remind me that in no southern state were slaves legally permitted to marry and that masters periodically broke up families and sold off children. All of this is sadly true. And the argument sounds so reasonable that it is only by looking at the facts that we see that it is largely erroneous. In the early part of the twentieth century W. E. B. DuBois published his study of the black family in which he pointed out that the illegitimacy rate for blacks in the United States was around 20 percent.
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From 1900 to 1965 the black illegitimacy rate remained roughly at that figure.
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Indeed, in 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan did his
famous report on the Negro family and announced a national scandal: the black illegitimacy rate had reached 25 percent.
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Let us concede that slavery was primarily responsible for that figure. After emancipation, however, African-Americans made strenuous attempts to reunite and rebuild their families. This is a black success story that is not well known. (Black activists don't publicize it because it disrupts the profitable narrative of victimization.) Ironically, it is during the period from 1965 to the present—a period that saw the Great Society, the civil rights laws, affirmative action, welfare, and other attempts to integrate blacks into the mainstream and raise their standard of living—that the black family disintegrated. Today that disintegration has reached the point that the typical African-American child is born out of wedlock.

The African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson concedes the existence of cultural pathologies like illegitimacy and high crime rates in the black community. He blames these not on slavery but on racism, poverty, and unemployment.
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Wilson points out, for example, that a young black man who doesn't have a job is in no position to support a family. Who should be surprised, therefore, that he gets a girl pregnant and refuses to marry her? The problem with Wilson's analysis is that it ignores the historical record. Consider the period of the 1930s in the segregationist South. Racism, poverty, and unemployment were rampant. Yet what was the black illegitimacy rate? It remained at 20 percent! The black crime rate? It was a lot lower than it is now. Neither Wilson nor anyone else has explained why, at a time when economic and social conditions have greatly improved for blacks, these cultural problems have worsened.

L
et me summarize my argument by reexamining the debate in the early twentieth century between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Although the debate focused on black Americans, it is relevant to the question of how any group starting out at the bottom can advance in society. DuBois, a distinguished scholar and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), argued that African-Americans in the United States face one big problem, and it is racism. Washington, who was born a slave but went on to become head of the Tuskegee Institute, maintained that African-Americans face two big problems. One is racism, he conceded. The other, he said, is black cultural disadvantage. Washington said that black crime rates were too high, black savings rates were too low, blacks did not have enough respect for educational achievement.

DuBois countered that these problems, if they existed, were due to the legacy of slavery and racism. Washington did not disagree, but he insisted that, whatever their source, these cultural problems demanded attention. What is the point of having rights, Washington said, without the ability to exercise those rights and compete effectively with other groups? To put the matter in contemporary terms, there is little benefit in having the right to a job at General Motors if you don't know how to do the job. Washington further argued that if these cultural deficiencies were not addressed, they would help to
strengthen
racism by giving it an empirical foundation.

The civil rights movement, led by the NAACP, fought for decades to implement the DuBois program and secure basic rights for black Americans. This was a necessary campaign, and ultimately
it was successful. The laws were changed, and blacks achieved their goal of full citizenship. Obviously enforcement remained an issue, but at this point, it seems to me, the DuBois program was largely achieved. At this crucial juncture the civil rights movement should have moved from the DuBois agenda to the Booker T. Washington agenda.

Unfortunately, this did not happen. It still hasn't happened. Even today the NAACP and other civil rights groups continue to “agitate, agitate, agitate” to achieve black progress. This is the approach that Jesse Jackson has perfected. It draws on the language and tactics of political struggle to make gains. But how significant are those gains? A few years ago I was in Washington, D.C., and there was a big march on the mall. All the major civil rights groups were represented. Several speakers ascended the podium, thumped their fists, and said, “We've got to go to Bill Clinton and demand 300,000 new jobs.” Now this was during the impeachment controversy, and anyone who had been following the news knew that Bill Clinton had found it incredibly difficult to get
one
job—for Monica Lewinsky. Where did the man have 300,000 jobs to give anyone? The fact is that the civil rights leadership continues to pursue a strategy that has run its course, that no longer pays real dividends.

Meanwhile, there is another group that is following the Booker T. Washington strategy, and that is the nonwhite immigrants. I don't mean just the Koreans and the Asian Indians; I also mean black immigrants—the West Indians, the Haitians, the Nigerians. All are darker than African-Americans, and yet white racism does not seem to stop them. The immigrants know that racism today is not systematic, it is episodic, and they are able
to find ways to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start out at the very bottom are making rapid gains, surging ahead of African-Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves. West Indians, for instance, have established a strong business and professional community, and have nearly achieved income parity with whites.
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How is this possible? The immigrants don't spend a lot of time contemplating the hardships of the past; their gaze is firmly fixed on the future. They recognize that education and entrepreneurship are the fastest ladders to success in America. They push their children to study, so that they will be admitted to Berkeley and MIT, and they pool their resources and set up small businesses, so that they can make some money and move to the suburbs. There are plenty of hurdles along the way, but the immigrant is sustained by the hope that he, or his children, will be able to break the chain of necessity and pursue the American dream.

Thus we find that any group that is trying to move up in America and succeed is confronted with two possible strategies—the immigrant strategy and the Jesse Jackson strategy—and it is an empirical question as to which one works better. So far the evidence is overwhelming that the immigrant approach of assimilating to the cultural strategies of success is vastly better for group uplift than the Jesse Jackson approach of political agitation.

One of the blessings of living in a multiracial society is that we can learn from one another. Black Americans have contributed greatly to America by pressuring the country to live up to its highest principles. As an immigrant, I owe a tremendous debt to the black civil rights movement for opening up doors that would otherwise have remained closed. All Americans have a lot to learn
from African-Americans about suffering, about dignity, about creativity, and about charm. But it is also a fact that the black leadership can learn a lot from the immigrants, especially black immigrants. African-Americans can move up faster if they focus less on manufacturing representation and more on building intellectual and economic skills. In this way blacks can achieve a level of competitive success that is ultimately the best, and final, refutation of “rumors of inferiority.”

Martin Luther King once said that ultimately every man must write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation. What he meant by this is that in a decent society, citizens will be granted equality of rights under the law. We do have that right, but we do not have any more rights than this. African-Americans were not always granted legal equality, but now they have it, and it is all that they are entitled to. King's point is that what we do with our rights, what we make of ourselves, the kind of script that we write of our lives, this finally is up to us.

Freedom and Its Abuses

T
HE MOST SERIOUS CHARGE AGAINST AMERICA IS NOT that it is an oppressive society, or one that denies freedom and opportunity to minorities. It is the charge that America is an immoral society. Islamic fundamentalists hold that the United States and the West may be materially advanced but they are morally decadent. This is not a new perspective. Muslim travelers to the West have frequently commented on what they regard as the low state of Western morality, especially in the sexual domain. In one medieval Muslim account, a Frenchman comes home to find another man in bed with his wife:

“What brings you here to my wife?” he asks.

The man replies, “I was tired so I came in to rest.”

“And how did you get into my bed?”

“I found the bed made, so I lay down on it.”

“But the woman was sleeping with you!”

“It was her bed. Could I have kept her out of her own bed?”

“If you do this again,” the Frenchman warns, “you and I will quarrel.”
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The Muslim writer cites the incident to show the shocking moral laxity that he believes characterizes marriages in the West. If Muslims thought the level of Western sexual morality was bad in the Middle Ages, imagine what they must think of us today. Not surprisingly, Islamic criticisms of Western mores have intensified in modern times. As Sayyid Qutb observes, at least the West used to be Christian; now it is pagan. Qutb argues that modern America is suffering from
jahiliyya—
from the same polytheism, idolatry, and moral degeneracy that the prophet Muhammad found in the Bedouin tribes in the seventh century.