Discourse on Race Has a Conformity Problem
The social sciences have to embrace the counterintuitive.
A graduate school colleague told me that her subfield of linguistics was more valid as science than the subfield some other students were working in. Her metric was that the findings in her subfield were more counterintuitive, as opposed to applying terminology to things we basically know are true already.
I didn’t like it. My work was commonly (mis-)associated with the kind she was dissing. I sensed that she thought me more well-spoken than exactly brilliant. Diplomatic she was not. However, her valuation of the counterintuitive was also correct.
I have carried her lesson with me since. It’s important to describe things and to give them careful labels. But the real magic is figuring out workings of the world that we would not have expected. Motion is matter’s default state rather than stasis. English, Polish, Persian, and Hindi began as the same grandfather language. Tomatoes are fruits. Betty Boop was originally a dog.
Last week I had the privilege of convening a panel of talks at TED that illustrate things you wouldn’t have known already. Wolves’ howling exhibits the beginnings of language. Kids grow up best through spontaneous play with other kids rather than being watched over by adults. Genes are “selfish” (thank you, Professor Dawkins!). We often operate on the basis of knowing what others think, even if we really don’t. (À la Steven Pinker’s forthcoming When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.) That so much of what people do—including bad things—is because of a fundamental desire to matter.
My interest in the counterintuitive is actually much of what makes me what many call “contrarian” on race issues. If I were in a musical, the song introducing my character would be “I Don’t Agree With Everything But…” Someone writes or says that to me a good three or four times a week, and what they often mean is that they feel that I underplay racism in my writing.
They are operating from an unspoken agreement especially prevalent among educated people: that the work of the true “Race Man” is identifying racism’s existence and power. But it’s hard to say that this qualifies any longer as a novel quest. Objectors may say that it remains an ongoing civic duty. However, when decrying racism becomes less a single concern than a North Star, it turns into a bridle on the horse. When you can only look in one direction, it stifles creativity and even curiosity. The counterintuitive becomes a lesser priority.
This worries me especially in fields like sociology. I once had occasion to read all of the articles on race in two leading journals of the field from 1990 to 1999. All of these articles were surely based on hard work, but the guiding commitment was clearly to reveal the persistence of racism. In the American Journal of Sociology, two out of 30 articles on race depicted progress. Over the same time period, in the American Sociological Review, all but five articles out of 51 on race were about bad news.
And specifically, this Cassandra imperative had a way of focusing on things we already know. From 1990 to 1999, articles in the American Journal of Sociology regularly included revelations such as that social pathologies spread fastest in the most dangerous neighborhoods, that single motherhood was not unknown among poor black women in the early twentieth century, that bad neighborhoods make growing up hard, that white people tend to leave neighborhoods with high rates of robbery, and that white flight increased the number of poor neighborhoods in America.
And today, the race-related article in last February’s issue of American Journal of Sociology reveals that there are difficulties involved in parenting an incarcerated son, including that it can be difficult to maintain closeness. A race article in last January’s issue of American Sociological Review teaches us that people’s definitions of racism, classism, and sexism vary with culture and shape their positions on policy issues. In both cases, we would hardly have expected otherwise.
I worry as well when an African-American Studies department’s main commitment is to instruction about the operations of racism. Courses about racism. The arts covered mostly as responses to racism. History more about racism than progress in battling it. Stereotypes, covenants, legacies. All of this is important. But I question whether it is natural or even necessary to frame it as the most urgent and interesting thing about a race of people.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the realtor Philip Payton, a Black New Yorker in a time of naked and often violent racism, created Black Harlem through a series of genius moves. As in: they were counterintuitive, and we should hear about him more often.
The controversy at that time between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington is too often watered down to Du Bois defying racism and singing of a “talented tenth” of Black people while Washington settles for segregation and envisions us as a race of laborers. How counterintuitive, though, that this is a vast oversimplification. Washington was a much more interesting figure than his cartoon version, and was very popular among Black people of all classes in his day. A preacher in Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine asks “Du Bois? Who is dat? ‘Nother smart (N-word)? Man, he can’t be as smart as Booger T.!”
Point us forward by telling us what we didn’t know. I didn’t know that community nonprofits combating violence actually have a significant effect on it, as this article teaches (and to be fair, it appeared in the American Sociological Review in 2017). I didn’t know that of late, the percentage of adults who are employed in a child’s community has come to affect their later success more than race (or racism), as the economist Raj Chetty with his co-authors has discovered.
Even if people May Not Agree With Everything, they should know that my watchcry—in the classroom, in public speaking, here—is to explore something that may not have been obvious.
John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, a columnist for The New York Times, and a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors. He is the author of, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
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I learned any number of new and nucanced things from reading this article. Which is not what I would say about most things I read, regrettably, as most of them simply serve to confirm my existing views. Sincere thanks, not only for this article, but for the reminder to keep a more open mind.
Isn't seeking novelty as much of a bias as seeking conformity? Seeking accuracy seems better.