Does black culture need to be reformed?
It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.
After the Times described Brown as “no angel,” the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry accused the newspaper of “victim-blaming,” arguing that African-Americans, no matter how “angelic,” will never be safe from “those who see their very skin as a sin.” But, on the National Review Web site, Heather MacDonald quoted an anonymous black corporate executive who told her, “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” And so the Michael Brown debate became a proxy for our ongoing argument about race: where some seek to expose what America is doing to black communities, others insist that the real problem is what black communities are doing to themselves.
Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known as structuralists, while those who emphasize the importance of self-perpetuating norms and behaviors are known as culturalists. Mainstream politicians are culturalists by nature, because in America you seldom lose an election by talking up the virtues of hard work and good conduct. But in many sociology departments structuralism holds sway—no one who studies African-American communities wants to be accused, as the Times was, of “victim-blaming.” Orlando Patterson, a Jamaica-born sociologist at Harvard with an appetite for intellectual combat, wants to redeem the culturalist tradition, thereby redeeming sociology itself. In a manifesto published in December, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he argued that “fearful” sociologists had abandoned “studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty,” and that the discipline had become “largely irrelevant.” Now Patterson and Ethan Fosse, a Harvard doctoral student in sociology, are publishing an ambitious new anthology called “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth” (Harvard), which is meant to show that the culturalist tradition still has something to teach us.
The book arrives on the fiftieth anniversary of its most important predecessor: a slim government report written by an Assistant Secretary of Labor and first printed in an edition of a hundred. The author was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the title was “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” At first, the historian James T. Patterson has written, only one copy was allowed to circulate; the other ninety-nine were locked in a vault. Moynihan’s report cited sociologists and government surveys to underscore a message meant to startle: the Negro community was doing badly, and its condition was probably “getting worse, not better.” Moynihan, who was trained in sociology, judged that “most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped.” He returned again and again to his main theme, “the deterioration of the Negro family,” which he considered “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community”; he included a chart showing the rising proportion of nonwhite births in America that were “illegitimate.” (The report used the terms “Negro” and “nonwhite” interchangeably.) And, at the end, Moynihan called—briefly, and vaguely—for a national program to “strengthen the Negro family.”
The 1965 report was leaked to the press, inspiring a series of lurid articles, and later that year the Johnson Administration released the entire document, making it available for forty-five cents. Moynihan found some allies, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech in October, King referred to an unnamed “recent study” showing that “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling and disintegrating.” But King also worried that some people might attribute this “social catastrophe” to “innate Negro weaknesses,” and that discussions of it could be “used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Many sociologists were harsher. Andrew Billingsley argued that in assessing the problems caused by dysfunctional black families Moynihan had mistaken the symptom for the sickness. “The family is a creature of society,” he wrote. “And the greatest problems facing black families are problems which emanate from the white racist, militarist, materialistic society which places higher priority on putting white men on the moon than putting black men on their feet on this earth.” This debate had influence far beyond sociological journals: when Harris-Perry accused the Times of “victim-blaming,” she was using a term coined by the psychologist William Ryan, in a book-length rebuttal to the Moynihan report, “Blaming the Victim.”
Orlando Patterson thinks that, half a century later, it’s easier to appreciate all that Moynihan got right. “History has been kind to Moynihan,” he and Fosse write, which might be another way of saying that history has not been particularly kind to the people Moynihan wrote about—some of his dire predictions no longer seem so outlandish. Moynihan despaired that the illegitimacy rate for Negro babies was approaching twenty-five per cent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the equivalent rate in 2013 was 71.5 per cent. (The rate for non-Hispanic white babies was 29.3 per cent.) Even so, Patterson and the other contributors avoid pronouncing upon “ghetto culture” or “the culture of poverty,” or even “black culture.” Instead, the authors see shifting patterns of belief and behavior that may nevertheless combine to make certain families less stable, or certain young people less employable. The hope is that, by paying close attention to culture, sociologists will be better equipped to identify these patterns, and help change them.
It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.After the Times described Brown as “no angel,” the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry accused the newspaper of “victim-blaming,” arguing that African-Americans, no matter how “angelic,” will never be safe from “those who see their very skin as a sin.” But, on the National Review Web site, Heather MacDonald quoted an anonymous black corporate executive who told her, “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” And so the Michael Brown debate became a proxy for our ongoing argument about race: where some seek to expose what America is doing to black communities, others insist that the real problem is what black communities are doing to themselves.
Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known as structuralists, while those who emphasize the importance of self-perpetuating norms and behaviors are known as culturalists. Mainstream politicians are culturalists by nature, because in America you seldom lose an election by talking up the virtues of hard work and good conduct. But in many sociology departments structuralism holds sway—no one who studies African-American communities wants to be accused, as the Times was, of “victim-blaming.” Orlando Patterson, a Jamaica-born sociologist at Harvard with an appetite for intellectual combat, wants to redeem the culturalist tradition, thereby redeeming sociology itself. In a manifesto published in December, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he argued that “fearful” sociologists had abandoned “studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty,” and that the discipline had become “largely irrelevant.” Now Patterson and Ethan Fosse, a Harvard doctoral student in sociology, are publishing an ambitious new anthology called “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth” (Harvard), which is meant to show that the culturalist tradition still has something to teach us.
The book arrives on the fiftieth anniversary of its most important predecessor: a slim government report written by an Assistant Secretary of Labor and first printed in an edition of a hundred. The author was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the title was “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” At first, the historian James T. Patterson has written, only one copy was allowed to circulate; the other ninety-nine were locked in a vault. Moynihan’s report cited sociologists and government surveys to underscore a message meant to startle: the Negro community was doing badly, and its condition was probably “getting worse, not better.” Moynihan, who was trained in sociology, judged that “most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped.” He returned again and again to his main theme, “the deterioration of the Negro family,” which he considered “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community”; he included a chart showing the rising proportion of nonwhite births in America that were “illegitimate.” (The report used the terms “Negro” and “nonwhite” interchangeably.) And, at the end, Moynihan called—briefly, and vaguely—for a national program to “strengthen the Negro family.”
The 1965 report was leaked to the press, inspiring a series of lurid articles, and later that year the Johnson Administration released the entire document, making it available for forty-five cents. Moynihan found some allies, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech in October, King referred to an unnamed “recent study” showing that “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling and disintegrating.” But King also worried that some people might attribute this “social catastrophe” to “innate Negro weaknesses,” and that discussions of it could be “used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Many sociologists were harsher. Andrew Billingsley argued that in assessing the problems caused by dysfunctional black families Moynihan had mistaken the symptom for the sickness. “The family is a creature of society,” he wrote. “And the greatest problems facing black families are problems which emanate from the white racist, militarist, materialistic society which places higher priority on putting white men on the moon than putting black men on their feet on this earth.” This debate had influence far beyond sociological journals: when Harris-Perry accused the Times of “victim-blaming,” she was using a term coined by the psychologist William Ryan, in a book-length rebuttal to the Moynihan report, “Blaming the Victim.”
Orlando Patterson thinks that, half a century later, it’s easier to appreciate all that Moynihan got right. “History has been kind to Moynihan,” he and Fosse write, which might be another way of saying that history has not been particularly kind to the people Moynihan wrote about—some of his dire predictions no longer seem so outlandish. Moynihan despaired that the illegitimacy rate for Negro babies was approaching twenty-five per cent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the equivalent rate in 2013 was 71.5 per cent. (The rate for non-Hispanic white babies was 29.3 per cent.) Even so, Patterson and the other contributors avoid pronouncing upon “ghetto culture” or “the culture of poverty,” or even “black culture.” Instead, the authors see shifting patterns of belief and behavior that may nevertheless combine to make certain families less stable, or certain young people less employable. The hope is that, by paying close attention to culture, sociologists will be better equipped to identify these patterns, and help change them.
by Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Tony Rodriguez
