The Pity Party (18 page)

One website comment on McWhorter's article allowed that its thesis—“the black community has failed to confront fully the behavioral problems within its own ranks, including violence perpetrated by young males”—is “a valid one,” since “individuals and groups should address their own shortcomings before rushing to condemn the failings of others.” The problem was not with the argument but with the effect it would have. “
Time
readers are mainly white,” and are likely to react to the article “by thinking, ‘McWhorter confirms what I've always thought—it's all their fault. They have to change. I don't have to.'”
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Any political cause that has arrived at the determination that the truth will set you back needs to consider its predicament carefully. The logic of compassion and victimhood transforms weakness into strength, as sufferers' greatest power becomes their capacity to rebuke and intimidate those held to have immiserated and then neglected them. Because self-discipline and self-reliance, along with candor about the power of these qualities to alleviate suffering, undercut this message, they amount to disloyalty within the afflicted group. The sort of loyalty that viewpoint compels, however, makes empathizees that much more dependent on empathizers' compassion and guilt, that much less likely to take the steps to advance and flourish regardless of how sorry other people feel for them.

Southfield, Michigan, is a suburb north of Detroit, separated from the city by Eight Mile Road (the one made famous in 2002 by the Eminem movie,
8 Mile
). After the housing market crash of 2008, black Detroit residents began moving to Southfield, not only to take advantage of its reduced housing costs, but to get away from the deteriorating city's quality of life. “The kids are running around without any control,” one worker in an auto factory told Corey Williams of the Associated Press about his reasons for leaving Detroit. “They walk down the middle of the street and block traffic. There was gunfire at night. It was a common thing to hear gunfire.”
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Many residents who had been established in Southfield for years were less than welcoming. Part of their reaction was simple economics. Newcomers were buying houses at prices steeply discounted from ones that had prevailed a few years earlier. Foreclosed homes that could not be sold were rented, and sometimes subdivided, increasing the proportion of Southfield residents with a renter's tenuous investment in, and attachment to, the community. It's “not my fault you paid $250,000 and I paid a buck,” said a man who moved from Detroit in 2008 when he bought a foreclosed house for $109,000, one that had previously sold for $220,000.

But property values are not easily disentangled from civic values. A printer who moved to Southfield in 1988 said, “The reason suburbs are the way they are is because a certain element can't afford to live in your community. If you have $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 homes you're relatively secure in the fact that (the homeowners) are people who can afford it.” Some of his long-established neighbors were less circumspect in complaining about that certain element. “During the summer months, I sat in the garage and at 3 o'clock in the morning you see them walking up and the down the streets on their cell phones talking,” a retired autoworker said. “They pull up (in cars) in the middle of the street, and they'll hold a conversation. You can't get in your driveway. You blow the horn and they look back at you and keep on talking. That's all Detroit.” Regarding the new arrivals, Southfield's police chief Joseph Thomas said sternly, “They still think it's okay to play basketball at three o'clock in the morning; it's okay to play football in the streets when there's a car coming; it's okay to walk down the streets three abreast. That's unacceptable in this city.”

But for one detail, Southfield's problems would fit right into a 1970s after-school special about uptight, bigoted white suburbanites disdaining and thwarting blacks who were merely seeking a better quality of life. That one detail, however, is important: the police chief and long-established Southfield residents Williams interviewed were black themselves. Southfield's population was 54 percent black and 39 percent white in 2000, according to the Census Bureau, shifting to 70 percent black and 25 percent white by 2010. “It's not a black-white thing,” Chief Thomas said of his city's tensions in the 2011 article. “This is a black-black thing. My six-figure blacks are very concerned about multiple-family, economically depressed people moving into rental homes and apartments, bringing in their bad behaviors.” Two of the black residents interviewed in the story, who had left Detroit years ago to get away from its bad behaviors, tell Williams they're considering leaving Southfield before the behaviors
there
get any worse, even if relocating means selling their homes at a loss.

The long-established black residents of Southfield who disapprove of the conduct of the blacks recently arrived from Detroit cannot be guilty of racism. But they must, for the sake of liberal coherence, be guilty of something. If
they
warily denigrate the bad behaviors of the “element” moving from the inner city, and speak candidly about being so determined to move away from this element that they're prepared to wipe out all their home equity as grimly motivated sellers, it becomes harder to accuse whites of racism for the same opinions and actions.

If not racism, then the transgression must be “classism within the black community,” according to Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown law professor quoted in the news article. Poor blacks “have developed their own culture, one that is very different from mainstream America,” she says, and middle-class blacks are as obligated as middle-class whites to get past their objections to that culture. Indeed, the imperative of racial solidarity leaves them more obligated. “To the higher income black people, if you don't want to love and help your lower-income black brethren, why would you expect white people to?” Cashin asks. “You can try to flee or you can be part of the solution.”

Her position is like Robert Putnam's: mainstream America's obligation is to form a new us, one that repudiates the qualities that made it mainstream, in order not to discomfit those who want to join the mainstream while continuing to think and live in opposition to its norms. And her position is like McWhorter's commenter in assuming that, after the civil rights era, the ultimate prize on which blacks should keep their eyes is white solicitude. Any black words or deeds that might be construed to mean whites' guilt has been expiated, whites' obligations discharged, are betrayals. Victimhood means that the victimized group's socioeconomic status depends heavily on two big variables: how badly they've been treated by mainstream America, and how strenuously mainstream America tries to make amends.

The inadequacy of this equation was conveyed, inadvertently, by the
Atlantic
's Ta-Nehisi Coates in a 2013 blog post, “A Rising Tide Lifts Mostly Yachts.” Using a chart based on Census Bureau data, it showed how little median household incomes disparities had changed among America's racial groups over the preceding forty years. Specifically, it showed that in 2012 the median household income for blacks was 41.6 percent lower than that for non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics' median household income was 31.6 percent lower. It also showed, however, though the accompanying article did not discuss it, that Asians had a median household income 20.4 percent larger than non-Hispanic whites. If discrimination were determinative, one might expect (after stipulating that Asians have suffered less severe discrimination) that Asians would be doing better than blacks and Hispanics. One would not expect, however, they would be doing better than the majority group that had discriminated against them.
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The frequency with which groups, throughout history and around the world, have flourished despite having been oppressed, often quite brutally, reinforces the notion that it's better to err on the side of overestimating our ability to shape our destinies than to err on the side of overestimating the power of the forces stacked against us. If discrimination explained most of what we need to know about disparities among various groups, it should be quite unusual to find such victimized groups possessing a disproportionately large amount of life's good things and a disproportionately small amount of the bad ones. In fact, as Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell points out, people of Chinese ancestry have been and continue to be targets of discrimination throughout Southeast Asia. Yet in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, “the Chinese minority—about 5 percent of the population of southeast Asia—owns a majority of the nation's total investments in key industries. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Chinese owned 75 percent of the rice mills in the Philippines, and between 80 and 90 percent of the rice mills in Thailand.” Looking at America, Sowell notes, “Japanese immigrants to the United States also encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, culminating in their mass internment during World War II, but by 1959 they had about equaled the income of whites and by 1969 Japanese American families were earning nearly one-third higher incomes than the average American family.”
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There are
no
clear counterexamples: groups that have acquired significant, durable social and economic advantages by feeling sorry for themselves, or by inducing other, more powerful groups to feel sorry for and guilty about them. What such groups secure, instead, is the “advantage” of being dependent on the kindness of strangers, an advantage that debilitates individuals struggling to build lives and communities on sturdier foundations. The implicit moral baseline against which liberals condemn white American racism against minority groups is, like Plato's Republic, a city in speech. In that hypothetical nation, people of different races, creeds, and ethnicities have a long history of harmonious, mutually respectful relations. Every subset of the population—from the corporate boardroom to the faculty lounge, unemployment line, or prison yard—is a demographic miniature of the entire society.

No such society has ever existed, and the wisdom of treating that baseline as a yardstick or goal is highly doubtful. The most profound causes of differences among ethnic or racial groups are not, Sowell argues, social injustices but
cosmic
injustices. It isn't fair, if the term even applies sensibly, that sub-Saharan Africa, surrounded by vast oceans and a desert as big as the continental United States, has few natural harbors or navigable rivers. Its inhabitants, as a result, had limited contact with people from other continents, as well as with one another, and therefore limited access to civilizational advances. (With only a tenth of the world's population Africa has a third of the world's languages.) To take another consequential but amoral happenstance, Europe and Asia had horses and oxen. Until Europeans brought them in the sixteenth century, North and South America did not, a basic difference that profoundly affected agriculture, commerce, warfare, prosperity, and the cultural advances prosperity makes possible. Being conquered by Rome was no picnic, but the parts of Europe that were incorporated into the Roman Empire acquired an alphabet and a written language centuries before the parts that weren't, giving them an enormous head start compared to the peoples whose ancestors had never encountered the Roman legions. None of the resulting advantages and disadvantages from any of these historical or geographical circumstances are “fair,” but any project to scrub the world clean of all such cosmic injustices falls on a spectrum between the quixotic and the apocalyptic.
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Compassion's imperatives, as understood by liberals, militate against self-reliance. So far, I've discussed how this prohibition affects relations between empathizers and empathizees, or within the ranks of empathizees. It also, however, complicates life within the subset of the population who see their role as empathizing rather than being empathized with.

After 2012's Hurricane Sandy,
New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof deplored the growing number of homeowners who acquired and used standby generators to provide electricity when the power grid failed. Better, he said, that Americans, especially wealthy ones, pay higher taxes that could be used to make electrical service more reliable (as well as cleaner, to mitigate the global warming that allegedly caused Sandy) than to spend some of their less encumbered after-tax incomes on generators that benefit only a single household. The same antisocial self-reliance, he complains, leads Americans who can afford it to move to gated communities rather than support the taxes needed for good policing, enroll their children in private schools rather than pay for good public ones, and buy their own books and magazines (and
Times
subscriptions?) rather than support public libraries. Again and again, he complains, “we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.”
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Kristof is blasé about selfishness compared to
Slate
's Allison Benedikt, who admonished her readers in 2013, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like
murderer
bad—but bad like
ruining-one-of-our-nation's-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what's-best-for-your-kid
bad. So, pretty bad.” Benedikt doesn't go as far as Marian Wright Edelman or Melissa Harris-Perry in urging us to jettison the distinction between our own children and other people's. It's OK to care for your own kids, that is, but empathy demands recognition of the certain fact that other parents care for theirs. The only decent way to act on this knowledge is to channel your concern for your own child into collective actions that will help all children, forswearing individual solutions that will benefit your child while facilitating neglect for other people's. “Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better,” Benedikt states. “Whatever you think your children need—deserve—from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. . . . Send your kids to school with their kids.”
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