Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Hardcover)

by John McWhorter (Author) "Until I was eleven, my family lived in Philadelphia, and my mother worked at Temple University downtown..." (more)
Key Phrases: therapeutic alienation, alienation meme, conscious rappers, New York, Ellis Cose, William Julius Wilson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this sequel to his 2000 bestseller, Losing the Race, McWhorter exhorts blacks to leave their "anti-whitey theatrics" behind and acknowledge the new racial realities of America. What began as civil rights activism in the late 1960s, he argues, has devolved into empty gestures that leave blacks "defined by defiance" and unwilling to face their problems with innovative responses. The flight of industrial jobs and middle-class blacks from the inner city and the spread of drugs should all have been dealt with head-on, he writes, but instead a debilitating rejectionist attitude took hold. McWhorter vigorously claims that, while blacks weren't well off before the '60s, black Indianapolis in 1915 wasn't "New Jack Indy," and blacks managed to get by without welfare. Yet welfare ended urban blacks' self-reliance and "taught poor blacks to extend the new oppositional mood from hairstyles and rhetoric into a lifestyle separated from mainstream American culture." Blacks grew to think of studying hard as "acting white," and a destructive sense of "therapeutic alienation" that ignores personal responsibility permeated black society, from school and hip-hop culture to leadership and politics. Accessible, if at times long-winded and repetitive, McWhorter's provocative, tough-love message is both grounded in history and forward-looking. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
McWhorter, author of Losing the Race (2000), returns to expand on the theme that the problem with black America is black centered. He attributes the current crisis in black America to that point in the mid- to late-1960s when the countercultural forces opposed to the war merged with a black-as-perpetual-victim perspective, creating a sense of entitlement that has undermined notions of personal responsibility. To make his point, McWhorter strikes at progressive critiques about the causes of the black underclass, from Douglas S. Massey's American Apartheid and its focus on hypersegregation to Wilson Julius Wilson's Truly Disadvantaged and its emphasis on job loss and withdrawal of the middle class from the inner city. McWhorter dismisses these claims as insignificant, if not outright false. The theme--the Left is wrong and the Rright is right--is his direction, if not objective. Although readers with strong opinions on the subject may not be moved by McWhorter's work, his arguments are worthy reading for more open minds on the Left, Right, and in between. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; First Edition edition (December 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592401880
• ISBN-13: 978-1592401888
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #478,225 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McWhorter is an Intellectual Force for Positive Change, January 23, 2006

By	Wynton C. Hall (Bainbridge, GA United States) - See all my reviews

I have long been an admirer of John McWhorter and his scholarship. My background in rhetoric and his in linguistics makes us fellow travelers of a sort. But my admiration for Professor McWhorter is more a function of his courage, intellectual independence, and his fresh, crisp writing style. Moreover, his positions are always deftly argued and rooted in serious study and reflection. That he has to endure the kind of slanderous ad hominem attacks he sometimes encounters is sad. Yet, ironically enough, these actions only serve to bolster his thesis: bereft of any new ideas, the left must use race as an electoral bludgeon, a mechanism designed to ensure obeisance. And so, his critics' barbs morph into boomerangs; they backfire.

Still, it's regrettable that discourse has devolved and brought us to this point. With Professor McWhorter and scholars like him courageously leading the way, perhaps we may yet still "Win the Race." Let us hope so.

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Author Knows What He's Talking About!, February 14, 2006

By	D. A. Martin "Avid Reader" (Morocco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

John Hamilton McWhorter, V, is a scholar whose research and insight into black American culture make his contribution to today's race relations debate crucial for three reasons. First, he takes readers on a journey back in time to black life in America before the 1960s. In doing so, he shows that, despite living under brutal and systemic racial oppression, crushing poverty, and not far removed from slavery, hard-scrabble black folks carved out a sustainable existence for themselves by living by a cultural credo where you basically played the hand you were dealt in life as best you could.

Secondly, juxtaposing this earlier slice of black life next to the 1960s - where racism was on the down-slope and the overall economic situation for black Americans was improving - McWhorter demonstrates how embracing the Anti-Establishment Zeitgeist of the sixties all but nullified the cultural credo of that earlier era, thereby rendering blacks - especially the black poor - culturally worse off than previously. Lastly, in Winning the Race as well as in his two previous books (Losing the Race and Authentically Black), McWhorter offers a ray of hope on what can and should be done to make things better.

Winning the Race represents John McWhorter's third installment on race and culture in America that will cause readers to look at these crucial issues in fresh new ways.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling, January 28, 2006

By	Ronald T. Jones (Chicago, Il) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Winning the Race, by John Mcwhorter, is the work of a man who has thought long and hard about race and the condition of African Americans. Mcwhorter's approach to this study is that of an observer who has soaked in his surroundings and then delved painstakingly into the task of investigating why things are the way they are. Has he found the right answers? I won't say that the conclusions in this book are definitive, but they are plausible, and they do make a great deal of sense. Mcwhorter's questions are as follows: how did certain black inner city neighborhoods across the nation become the drug ravaged, urban war zones that they are today? Why are so many black children underperforming academically? And perhaps most importantly, is racism to blame for the fact that blacks trail whites in every economic and educational indicator? Or is the problem a cultural one? The author's answers to these questions are very well thought out. He is aware of opposing arguments on the various issues he has covered and has regurgitated those arguments in the pages of his book so as to debunk them. When academics have blamed the removal of factories, hence jobs, from the inner city as a reason why black unemployment spiraled and working class black neighborhoods deteriorated into cauldrons of dead end poverty, he refutes the notion. If factory relocation were to blame, he asks, why did this terrible social blight affect the black community in Indianapolis, where factory jobs remained accessible to blacks? Mcwhorter analyzes poor blacks' disproportionate dependence on welfare, pointing out how blacks early in the twentieth century were disinclined to accept charity. Mcwhorter brings much history into his argument to compare and contrast the attitudes of African Americans in the past with those of the present. What he has discovered is an alienation, that has gripped a segment of black people, a militant, inward looking rejection of whites and perceived white values. This behavior pattern, or meme, as he calls it grew out of the white leftist counter culture movement of the sixties. It was adopted by blacks opposed to non-violent civil rights methods and became the goundwork upon which was erected the apathy a number of blacks share toward work, academic achievement and family life. He argues that the America of today, with its bountiful opportunities for blacks, is not the America of the past where white racism was overt and brutal. To those blacks who have equated the feather stroke grievance of a racial slight to the systemized hammer blows of racist oppression suffered by blacks at the turn of the century for example, the author takes them to task. He criticizes black leaders for reinforcing this meme of alienation among their followers while taking a lengthy jab at hip hop. He eloquently rips into academics who choose to focus on the negative aspects of black life in America while ignoring, or downplaying the real progress blacks have made in the post civil rights era. Winning the Race is not all about the author going after those whose views he does not agree with. The book has an optimistic tone. It conveys the author's pride in the struggles and achievements of blacks in the past. Mcwhorter is clearly proud of contemporary black progress: burgeoning black affluence combined with black visibility and accomplishment in all sectors of society. His optimism is tempered with frustration, however. But this is the frustration of a man who believes black people possess the potential do more, if and when the meme of alienation is removed. His anaylsis is not written in stone, but it is sound. Again, his conclusions are not definitive; I'm sure that wasn't his intent. His effort to describe the origins of the ills affecting much of Black America while pointing the way to solutions makes for an admirable piece of popular scholarship.