Black Con Men

Tim Wise of LiP Magazine writes about the Black Conservatives. How the oppressed co-opt has more than individual initiatives attached. I think a social framework is needed to be created within democratic institutions to call for plurality. And the conservatives of course fit into the mold like nobody's business. The following story is a critical appraisal.

"Working for the Man Every Night and Day": Black conservatives, with their politics of self-abuse, have managed to obtain access to the halls of power - at the expense of respect from within the black community.A few weeks ago, a young man approached me after a speech I hadgiven at his college and handed me a small piece of paper with the name of a book he thought I should read. Given that the student and I had previously gotten into a bit of a row over the issue of racial profiling of Arabs, I didn't have high expectations about his recommendation.I suppose it's a good thing I was prepared for what I got: the name of a book by black conservative Larry Elder, whose only real claim to fame is that he does a bad imitation of Judge Wapner on a pedantic little courtroom reality show called Moral Court.Oh, and that white folks like the student in question really like him. Which, as it turns out, is all it takes to become a bestselling author in this country.Elder - like Shelby Steele before him, and Walter Williams before that, and Ken Hamblin before that, and Thomas Sowell before him, and Clarence Thomas always - says the kinds of things that most white folks love to hear: essentially, that blacks are the source of their own problems in life. Black cultural pathology and bad behavior, according to these types, explain everything from black poverty rates to black incarceration rates.What about racism?, you may ask. What racism? To the Larry Elders of the world - and to the whites who have made them media stars entirely out of proportion to their scholarly credentials (or decided lack thereof) - racism is just an excuse black people use to explain away their own internal shortcomings.Lately, two of the more popular arguments made by black conservatives and the white people who love them are, first, that blacks spend too much money on luxury items they can't afford, refusing to save money the way responsible white folks do; and second, that blacks place too little value on education, preferring to critique learning as selling out or "acting white," and thereby sabotaging their ownachievement.That the evidence for both of these positions is utterly lacking makes little difference, it seems. After all, when one is saying what the Man wants to hear, the Man requires no footnotes or actual corroboration.Black Consumption and the Myth of Black Profligacy:Arguments that support the dominant culture easily become popularized myths, bordering on legend, after which point they are almost impossible to assail. Black profligacy has pretty much attained that status, what with the regular portrayal of blacks as obsessed with "bling-bling," within mainstream TV and other media. While it would have been difficult for whites, on their own, to get away with presenting this one-dimensional, supersized cartoon of black spending, they have had help from folks like Yolanda Young. Young, like Elder and all the rest, is an African American who specializes in the kind of self- flagellating drivel that appeals to the sadistic side of white America's racism. We get a taste of her forthcoming book, SPADE: A Critical Look at Black America, in a recent USA Today article.In her USA Today piece, Young claims that blacks have been spending exorbitant amounts of money lately, despite the tough economic times in which the larger black community finds itself. In other words, instead of rational belt tightening, African Americans have been going on a spending spree: the implication being either that black folks are irresponsible with their money, or at least that they are "motivated by a desire for instant gratification and social acceptance," caring more about their own selfish desires than "our future."To back up her claims, Young turns to a group called Target Market, acompany that tracks spending by black consumers. But a careful glance at thesource of her claims makes it apparent that she is eitherincapable of interpreting basic data or that she deliberately deceives forpolitical effect. In fact, not only do the figures from Target Market notsuggest irresponsible spending by blacks in the face of a badeconomy, they tend to suggest the opposite.According to Young, blacks spent nearly $23 billion on clothes in 2002, andthis, one presumes, is supposed to signal a level of irresponsibleprofligacy so obvious as to require no further context orclarification. But, in fact, the very tables on which Young bases herposition indicate that from 2000 to 2002 (the period of a slowing economy),black expenditures on clothes fell by 7%, even before accountingfor inflation. In other words, as the economy got worse, blacks reined intheir consumption.It's useful to watch how the pros at this dissing game make it work. Youngconsistently bases her arguments on raw numbers, counting on her readers tomarvel at their size, while ignoring the comparativedata that makes sense of those numbers. For example, Young tweaks blacks forspending $3.2 billion on consumer electronics, but fails to note that evenbefore inflation, this is down roughly 16% from 2000,when blacks spent $3.8 billion on the same. She chastises her black brothersand sisters for spending $11.6 billion on furniture in 2002, but fails tonote that black spending on furniture actually fell by 10%,even before inflation, and by 2002 was only a little higher in currentdollars than it had been in 1996.In other words, blacks did exactly what would make sense in a tighteningeconomy: They spent less on the kinds of presumably frivolous items that Ms.Young claims her people just can't resist. Not soirresponsible after all, it seems.Next, Young berates blacks for their consumption of cars and liquor, whichshe labels "our favorite purchases." Unfortunately, the "evidence" shemarshals to support such silliness is embarrassingly weak. Shenotes that although blacks make up only 12% of the population, they accountfor 30% of the nation's scotch consumption. But what does that prove? Itcertainly says nothing about overall use of alcohol byblacks, which is actually quite low. Indeed, contrary to Young's claim,liquor is not among the favorite purchases of blacks, ranking instead behind18 of the 25 categories listed in the tables from TargetMarket that she relied upon for her article.In fact, in the past year alone black expenditures on alcoholic beveragesfell by almost one-fourth, scotch consumption or no. And, of course, blacksspend far less than whites, per capita, on alcohol, anddrink far less often and less heavily than whites according to all theavailable data from the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes onDrug Abuse and others.As for cars, Young's "proof" of black profligacy in this area is limited tothe fact that Lincoln had P. Diddy design a limited edition Navigator forthem, with DVD players and plasma screens all around. And yet,the amount spent by African Americans (not P. Diddy, mind you, but the other35 million or so black folks) on various vehicles still amounts to less thanthat spent, per capita, by whites, whose consumption ofsuch items is roughly 27% higher that of blacks.Race, Wealth and the Myth of Short-Term OrientationNext, Young insists that blacks fail to save money the way whites do, theimplication being that this - and not racism and unequal access to capital -explains the wealth gap between whites and AfricanAmericans.Young cites the 2003 Black Investor Survey from Ariel Mutual Funds andCharles Schwab to suggest that black households with comparableupper-middle-class income to whites save nearly 20% less thanwhites for retirement. Furthermore, she notes, blacks are far less likely toinvest in the stock market, thereby hindering their own ability to developwealth. Yet a look at the Ariel/Schwab data - which itself islimited to 500 individuals with upper-level incomes from each racial group -indicates a far different set of conclusions than those reached by Young.The report does suggest that whites are more likely to have an IRA thanblacks. Yet it also reports that overall rates of retirement investment areessentially identical for whites and blacks: While 89% of whiteshave money in a retirement program, so do 85% of blacks.As for the amounts of money being saved among this upper-income group,although whites do indeed save more, on average, the difference is not -according to the report itself - statistically significant.Indeed, whites are a third more likely than blacks to be saving nothing forretirement at this time, and roughly two-thirds of both groups are saving atleast $100 or more monthly for retirement.As for investments, while there are small differences between upper-incomeblacks and whites, the methodology of the Ariel/Schwab study makes it clearthat those differences in monthly investments andsavings are, once again, not statistically significant: amounting, as theydo, to less than $60 per month.This kind of "behavioral" gap hardly explains the fact that upper-incomewhite households, on average, have about three times the net worth ofupper-income black households. Instead, that is the residualeffect of generations of racism that restricted the ability of blacks andother people of color to accumulate assets, while whites were allowed,encouraged and even subsidized to do the same.While it is true that black investment in the stock market lags behind thatof whites, the reasons for this can hardly be decoupled from the history ofracism. After all, even upper-income blacks tend to havefar less wealth to begin with than whites of similar income. As a result,the level of wealth they are willing to put at risk is going to be less thanfor those with more of it to spare.Especially in the last few years, the volatility of the stock market hastended to scare away all but the most experienced investors, and certainlythose whose assets are limited from the get-go. Surely, thisdescribes much of black America, which has never had the excess wealthavailable to whites, that would allow them to roll the dice on Wall Streetin the same way.If black savings lag behind white, it is not because of black profligacy; itis because of a legacy of racism that left even well-to-do black familieswithout the assets and resources of white families.The Myth of Black Anti-IntellectualismThe second myth black conservatives love to promote is that blacks have notgotten ahead in the race of life because they devalue education. From ShelbySteele's early '90s bestseller The Content of OurCharacter to Berkeley linguist John McWhorter's near-hysterical rant inLosing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, right-wing blackcommentators have turned cocktail party chitchat into social scienceresearch for the sake of peddling the antiblack myth that blacks devalueeducation.The evidence, of course, for those who still care about such things, revealsthe duplicity of these hucksters in their crusade to blame blacks for theirown academic and economic condition.First, high school graduation rates for blacks and whites are today roughlyequal to one another. In fact, as sociologist Dalton Conley demonstrates inhis 1999 book, Being Black, Living in the Red, once familyeconomic background is controlled for, blacks are actually more likely tofinish high school than whites, and equally likely to complete college. Inother words, whatever differences exist in black and whiteeducational attainment are completely the result of blacks, on average,coming from lower-income families. Comparing whites and blacks of trulysimilar class status reveals greater or equal educationalattainment for blacks.Although it should hardly have been necessary - after all, the entirehistory of black America has been the history of attempting to accesseducation even against great odds and laws prohibiting it - there havebeen a number of recent studies, all of which prove conclusively that blacksvalue education every bit as much as their white counterparts.For example, a recent study conducted by the Minority Student AchievementNetwork looked at 40,000 students in grades seven through 11; it foundlittle if any evidence that blacks placed lesser value oneducation than their white peers. Instead, they found that black males aremore likely than white, Hispanic or Asian males to say that it is "veryimportant" to study hard and get good grades; white males arethe least likely to make this claim. The researchers also found that blackswere just as likely to study and work on homework as their whitecounterparts.Even in high-poverty schools, disproportionately attended by inner-citystudents of color, attitudes towards schooling are far more positive thangenerally believed. Students in high-poverty schools are four-and-a-half times more likely to say they have a "very positive" attitudetoward academic achievement than to say they have a "very negative"attitude, and 94% of all students in such schools report a generallypositive attitude toward academics.In their groundbreaking volume The Source of the River, social scientistsDouglas Massey, Camille Charles, Garvey Lundy and Mary Fischer examinelongitudinal data for students of different races who wereenrolled in selective colleges and universities. Among the issues theyexplore is the degree to which differential performance among black andwhite students in college, in terms of grades, could be attributedto blacks or their families placing less value on academic performance thantheir white and Asian counterparts. After all, this claim has been made bysome like McWhorter, Steele and a plethora of whitereactionaries who seek to explain the persistent GPA gaps between blacks, inparticular, and others in college.What Massey and his colleagues discovered is that the black students hadparents who were more likely than white or Asian parents to have helped themwith homework growing up, more likely than white orAsian parents to have met with their teachers, equally likely to have pushedthem to "do their best" in school, more likely than white parents to enrolltheir kids in educational camps, and equally or more likelyto have participated in the PTA. Black students' parents were also morelikely than parents of any other race to regularly check to make sure theirkids had completed their homework and to reward their kidsfor good grades, while Asian parents were the least likely to do either ofthese.Likewise, the authors of this study found that black students' peers in highschool are more likely than white peers to think studying hard and gettinggood grades are important, and indeed white peers arethe least likely to endorse these notions. Overall, the data suggests thatif anything it is white peer culture that is overly dismissive of academicachievement, not black peer culture.While many of these studies have focused on middle-class-and-aboveAfrican-American families, and while it is certainly possible thatlower-income and poor blacks may occasionally evince a negativitytoward academics, this can hardly be considered a racial (as opposed toeconomic) response, since low-income whites often manifest the sameattitudes.What's more, such a response, though not particularly functional in the longterm, is also not particularly surprising, seeing as how young people fromlow-income backgrounds can see quite clearly the waysin which education so often fails to pay off for persons like themselves.After all, over the last few decades, black academic achievement has risen,and the gap between whites and blacks on tests of academic "ability" haveclosed, often quite dramatically. Yet during the same time,the gaps in wages between whites and blacks have often risen, sending arather blatant message to persons of color that no matter how hard theywork, they will remain further and further behind.In other words, to the extent that blacks, to any real degree, occasionallymanifest antieducation attitudes and behaviors, the question remains: Wheredid they pick up the notion that education was not forthem?Might they have gotten this impression from a curriculum that negates thefull history of their people, and gives the impression that everythinggreat, everything worth knowing about, came from white folks?Might they have gotten this impression from the tracking and sorting systemsthat placed so many of them, irrespective of talent and promise, in remedialand lower-level classes, because indeed the teachersthemselves presumed at some level that education-at least higher-leveleducation-wasn't for them?Might they have gotten this impression from the workings of the low-wageeconomy, into which so many of their neighbors and family members have beenthrown - even those with a formal education?Or, better yet, maybe they got this impression from the black conservativeswho regularly bash them: people who demonstrate that an education doesn'tnecessarily make you smart after all.Busting Up the Black Conservative HustleNone of this is to say that the black con-artist conservatives are entirelyirrational. After all, their hustle has paid enormous dividends. Blackconservatives, by dint of their hard work on behalf ofinstitutionalized white domination, have managed to obtain access to thehalls of power, and even occasionally positions of power themselves. On theone hand, this kind of step'n fetchit routine can belucrative and professionally rewarding: for those willing to play the game,or convince themselves of the beneficence of their white cocktail partyfriends, it can mean foundation grants, endowed chairs atright-wing think tanks, radio shows, syndicated columns and regularappearances on Fox.But one thing it will likely never bring is acceptance from one's owncommunity, and this self-exiled condition, combined with an eventualrecognition that one is being used, can lead to near-completepersonal and professional meltdowns.Consider Glenn Loury, formerly a shining light in the black conservativefirmament, who eventually came to the conclusion that his friends andsupporters really didn't like black folks much. After all, the sameconservatives at the Bradley Foundation who hawk vouchers in public schoolso as to "save black children" also helped fund the writing of The BellCurve, which says, among other things, that there's prettymuch nothing that can be done for black folks, due to their congenitalpredisposition to ignorance, sloth and crime. Enough of thosecontradictions, and even the most hardened black conservative may comearound.Or maybe not. But luckily there are antidotes to the hustle emanatingforcefully from the black community, such as the hard-hitting commentary andexposes at the Black Commentator, which have skewerednot only the voucher con, but also the individual players from Powell toRice to lesser-known but rising figures on the black right. What they andthe bulk of black America knows well, and what the rest of usmust learn, is that the propaganda dispensed by black conservatives is notonly poisonous in its implications, but it is based on utterly falseanalysis, distorted data and the hope on the part of its purveyorsthat the rest of us will never wise up to their game.