freedom and reason

Black conservative professor Walter E. Williams—a man who, when not using biblical examples and calling labor leaders “czars” in the exams he gives his students at George Mason University, sits in for Rush Limbaugh on the latter’s radio program—has published an essay this morning on TownHall.com, in which he is livid about a definition of racism used at the University of Delware. Why so upset? Because the definition, while incomplete, makes the system of white supremacy that he and the elites who privilege him embrace look bad.

According to Williams, the University of Delaware’s Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document defines racism this way: “A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination.”

To it’s credit it accurately reflects history and recognizes the reality of structural and institutional power. However, it does not recognize that blacks can be racist surrogates for whites against blacks. When a black man stands up for the system of white supremacy by denying the suffering of black people and working against the struggle for racial justice around the world, then that black man is a surrogate for racism. Such blacks are privileged (conservatives love them and give them essays in their publications) and indeed have been socialized in the white supremacist system to hold anti-black sentiment and to embrace the system of white privilege. Such blacks have high profiles because they serve as useful idiots for the system of white supremacy.

The other problem with the definition quoted is that it conveys the nonexistence of anti-racist whites. To be sure, the majority of white people benefit from the system of white supremacy whether they are prejudiced against black people or not. But white people can reject white privilege and struggle with blacks against the system. So while, as a white man, I am privileged by a racist system, I am a white anti-racist (a race traitor) because I stand with blacks against that system.

Note (March 16, 2020): I no longer agree with the premise of automatic racism among whites.

Poverty and unemployment are structural and cyclical features of capitalism. They are the facts of life of the capitalist economy. Capitalists cannot put all labor into action at once; therefore, there are always unemployed people, and, without wages and salaries, and without government support, these people will always be poor. When the economy is doing well, the rate of unemployment is lower. When the economy is doing poorly, there are more unemployed people. But there is always unemployment and it has nothing to do with effort or lack of effort. It has to do with business cycles and the structure of capitalist production. Such things mark the nature of the beast.

Can individuals improve themselves? Sure. I know individuals who have. Are there people who are unemployed because they don’t want to work? Sure. I know people like this, too. But individual effort does not eliminate poverty any more than laziness explains unemployment. People who make this argument confuse anecdote with structural fact. 

I can provide two examples that illustrate my point. In 1969, unemployment was 3.4 percent. In 1983, unemployment was 11 percent. These facts contributed to poverty rates of around 11-12 and over 15 percent respectively. Now, if we believed that unemployment and poverty were caused by lack of effort, we would have to explain why it was that three times more people were lazy in 1983 than were lazy in 1969. It is an odd idea, and I don’t know how we would go about measuring aggregate laziness. It certainly couldn’t be measured by the unemployment rate, since that would form a tautology. It raises other questions, such as, if laziness causes unemployment, what causes laziness? Why did laziness decline after 1983? Whey did it go back up only a few years later?

We can dispense with such silliness. The reality is that unemployment was much lower in 1969 because we were at the peak of a economic boom. Unemployment was so much higher in 1983 because we were in at the bottom of the trough of a severe business recession. Poverty was much lower in 1969 because of the economic boom, along with the the fact that the government spent money on anti-poverty programs. In 1983, many of those government programs were being underfunded, and this surrender in the war on poverty combined with the recession to drive up the poverty rate. 

These realities are structural and cyclical features of capitalism, a very unstable economic system. They do not reflect individual behavior. Other observable facts dramatically disprove any crazy theories that could be devised to explain them. Most people who are poor work very hard. The problem is that they don’t get paid very much money for the work they do. And the work the poor do is the work they can find.

This about it. If it is impossible for everybody to work their way to the top (which it is), then it is rather meaningless to say anybody can work their way to the top, unless you believe that it is proper for the exploited to become the exploiter. The system is unjust because there is a structural barrier preventing most people from making it to the top. That barrier is capital—that is, the fact that a handful of people have the ability to profit and the majority don’t. Such a system is immoral precisely for that reason, namely, the few exploiting the many. 

Capitalism is a game in which most people lose everyday and will always lose. We can prove that simply by looking at the numbers provided by the capitalists themselves (Statistics for All Manufacturing Establishments in 2005, published by the US census Bureau). For every hour that an industrial worker labors in America, that worker earns an average wage of $17.69 (that’s $707.60 a week before taxes—not a lot of money). Yet that same worker produces $115.58 in value! Subtracting out the wage, that means the capitalist makes, on average, $97.89 off the worker every hour. That’s $2044.61 a week! The capitalist doesn’t produce that value. The worker produces all of it. Yet the worker only gets a fraction of the value he produces. The capitalist pockets all that dough he didn’t earn. Obviously, the worker is getting ripped off. Worse, the more productive the worker is the more he gets ripped off!

Here’s the paradox: if everybody could work their way to the top, and they did, capitalism would cease to exist. That’s obvious—without most people being exploited workers, capitalism cannot work. (Socialist revolution is everybody working their way to the top.) Furthermore, it’s a fact that people work hard and never make it out of poverty. Poverty is low in successful countries such as Sweden only because of massive government support for people. Without government intervention, capitalism systematically generates poverty and unemployment. Of course, you can continue believing the myth that people who work hard can work their way up the ladder if you want—a lot of people believe false things—but it doesn’t make it true.

The truth is that the people who work the hardest in our society are among the poorest, and the people who work the least are the richest. Indeed, the richest people, those who do no work at all, don’t even raise their own kids or mow their own lawns. They pay other people to do that—money they got by exploiting you!

Finally, it’s a myth that democracy is built on capitalism. Capitalism has existed for around 500 years. Democracy has existed since the dawn of the species, at least 100,000 years ago. In fact, capitalism is one of the least democratic systems in history. It ranks up there with feudalism and slavery, and for most people in the world, capitalism is as bad. Most capitalist countries aren’t democratic at all. True democracy—where you and me get to decide on the most important things our lives and community—can only be possible when we the people control the means of production, and such a situation cannot be capitalist. But the least any worker should settle on in the meantime under capitalism is social democracy and high labor density. To oppose those things is to oppose your own interests. 

Al Sharpton has come under fire for criticizing Mormonism. He denies he criticized the faith (he says he was misinterpreted), but let’s assume for the moment that he did. His detractors say that because he did this he is a “bigot.” To be specific, they say he is engaging in “religious bigotry.” Right-wing blowhard Glenn Beck has made the biggest deal out Sharpton’s remarks.

But is there such a thing as “religious bigotry”? I’m an atheist. I criticize organized religion, as well as belief in the supernatural. I don’t think it’s merely silly to believe in the supernatural and to engage in religious rituals; I know it is harmful to society. Does this make me a bigot? If this were true, then I would be a bigot for criticizing belief in hobbits and trolls or the Easter bunny. Under such a loose definition, anybody who criticizes belief based on error or faith is guilty of bigotry. This is giving religion a status it doesn’t deserve.

Perhaps it’s even more absurd to accuse a believer of religious bigotry. Sharpton is a Christian. Since when must Christians tolerate the beliefs of Mormons? Christians don’t accept Joseph Smith as a prophet of Jehovah. For them, Mormonism is a false doctrine. It’s a disagreement over dogma, not an exercise in bigotry. Criticizing Christians for such a thing is the same as criticizing Jews for not believing Jesus was the son of Yahweh. Does disbelief in Jesus as God among most Jews make them bigots? Of course not.

As if the attack of Sharpton’s statements for religious bigotry were not enough, there is this: Mormonism is one of the most virulently racist dogmas that has ever existed. We now entered the realm of irony. According to Mormon doctrine, the physical appearance of Africans is the result of God’s curse placed upon Cain for killing Abel. God gave Africans “flat noses” and “black skin,” according to church leaders, as punishment for his sin. The curse runs deep. Blacks are spiritually inferior to whites. For this reason, until recently, blacks have been excluded from the priesthood. What caused the change of heart? The US government threatened to take away the church’s tax free status (which should be removed from all churches anyway) unless it changed its bigoteddoctrine. Sharpton, a black Christian, is a bigot for criticizing Mormonism, an anti-black religion?

Let’s get our concepts straight: One can be bigoted against a racial or ethnic group, but one cannot be bigoted against a religion. Religion is foremost an arbitrary system of ideas with no basis in reason or fact. The claim that a person who criticizes religion is a “bigot” is analogous to the claim that a person who criticizes white supremacy is a bigot. Being anti-religious is analogous to being anti-racist! Moreover, to accept the claim that it is bigotry to oppose a candidate for president because he believes in Mormonism would mean that I cannot publicly oppose a candidate for president because believes in Satanism, lest I be a bigot.

I will criticize any candidate for public office who believes in the supernatural. And because some religions are worse than others, I may actually prefer a candidate whose religious views I judge to be less harmful to society. History records JFK’s candidacy as a great trump of civil rights because the nation looked past his Catholicism. But voting against JFK for his Catholicism is not analogous to voting against a presidential candidate because he is black or because she is a woman. And if one day the Supreme Court is dominated by Catholics, we will be justified in worrying about the fate of Roe v. Wade. For unlike skin color, religion has a substance.

A point of clarification is necessary. If we are defining bigotry in its traditional sense as intolerant and obstinate devotion to one’s own opinions and prejudices, then bigotry is not something for which one can be too harshly criticized. Such strident devotion is to be expected in religion. A Pentecostal is going to be intolerant and obstinately devoted to his own opinions and prejudices when it comes to religion. That’s what it means to be a devout Pentecostal. However, I am using bigotry here in the sense of racial bigotry or racism. 

I have been discussing the Israel-Palestine question with a group of conservatives today and it is troubling to see how misguided folks of this persuasion are in their basic understanding of the situation. But what is truly astonishing is how blind they are to how they themselves would respond to the situation if they were Palestinian. Some people really believe that a people who are made to suffer the way Palestinians are have no right to resist. They seem, moreover, incapable of grasping the essential truth that one of the inevitable consequence of aggression is that some oppressed people will respond to oppressive violence by resort to violence themselves.

Trying to generate sympathy for the Palestinian resistance I asked them, “Have you had your land taken from you, your house bulldozed, your route to a hospital blocked so that your husband died, your ambulances shot at, your sons taken into police custody and tortured, your apartment building bombed into rubble?” Of course they couldn’t answer this question. They have never had these experiences. They don’t know that the cost of Israel’s occupation of Palestine has been far greater for Palestinians than it has been for Israelis. 

Between 9.29.2000 and 10.31.2007, 4345 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers, the vast majority at the hands of security forces. In contrast, 707 Israeli civilians and 317 Israeli security forces have been killed by Palestinians. Of course, Israeli civilians are not legitimate targets of violent resistance. Neither are Palestinian civilians, the number of their dead standing at more than six times the number of Israeli civilian dead. Source: B’Tselem Statistics

Does oppression justify resistance? Of course. It requires it. Does oppression justify terrorism? I imagine from the perspective of some Palestinians living in Gaza it does. I don’t agree with harming civilians (which the statistics above show that Israel does far more than Palestinians). But you don’t have to agree with the character of a response to understand why that response is occurring. There is justification for terrorism.

However, basic sympathy is a concept apparently alien to many people. They continually justify Israeli brutality towards Palestinians on the grounds that Palestinians in Gaza lob rockets into Israel. I asked them this simple moral question: “If you believe that Israel is justified in bombing civilian apartment buildings in Gaza in retaliation for rockets being launched into Israel, then why don’t you believe that Palestinians are justified in launching rockets into Israel in retaliation for Israel bombing apartment buildings in Gaza.” It’s a rhetorical question, one that speaks to the reality that violence begets violence, and to the moral truth that it is the occupier that has the burden to stop the vicious cycle.

The Americas weren’t empty when Europeans got here. There were tens of millions of people already living there. So Europeans took their land, reduced their numbers by over 90 percent, and herded the remnants onto reservations. If international law had been in effect back then, the United States would be an outlaw state. The same dynamic holds for for Palestine and Palestinians, except in this case there is international law. Yet the law has not resulted in the judgment that Israel is an outlaw state.

There are those who still believe that because Israel defeated Arab armies in Palestine that they now rightly claim Palestine. This is an argument in favor of lawlessness. It is illegal under international law to acquire territory by force. Occupation, whether legal or illegal, is temporary and can never lead to sovereignty over the occupied territory. The land belongs to the people living there. Territory by conquest asserts the “principle” of “might makes right,” a immoral and lawless standard of right.

However, given the failure of the international community to compel Israel to follow the law, and given the reasons for that failure, it would seem that “might makes right” is the prevailing principle in world affairs today.

Right-wing commentators are claiming that questioning of the nominee for the office of US attorny general on the matter of torture is hypocrisy since they had a chance to define what is torture in the law. The argument is entirely fallacious and a transparent attempt to dismiss criticisms of the administration’s policy of torture with a rhetorical prop.

Demanding an answer to the question is consistent with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. People should read that act. It covers interpretations of the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as well the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Since the Attorney General interprets and enforces the law, it is crucial to know his position on what constitutes torture according to these laws.

As for the Military Commissions Act of 2006, while this act indeed contravenes human rights standards, it also limits the ability of the president to torture people. However, in his signing statement, Bush said the law doesn’t apply to him. Therefore, since the Attorney General interprets and enforces the law for the president, it is especially crucial to know his position on what constitutes torture.

* * *

A presidential finding, signed in 2002 by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, approved of waterboarding as a legitimate interrogation technique. In other words, Bush approved of torturing prisoners, a war crime under international law. 

US generals designated waterboarding as an illegal practice in Vietnam 40 years ago. The above photograph, taken in 1968, of a US soldier involved in waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner led to that soldier being court martialed. In 1947, the United States sentenced to 15 years hard labor Japanese officer Yukio Asano with war crimes for waterboarding a US civilian. Before that, in 1901, an Army major who used waterboarding against an Philippine insurgent was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. Waterboarding dates back to at least the 1500s when it was used during the Italian Inquisition, and even way back then it was considered torture.

Waterboarding is torture. President Bush ordered officials to torture human being. Bush is a war criminal.

Steve T. Suitts, author of the report A New Majority: Low-Income Students in the South’s Public Schools, was quoted in a story in Education Week as saying: “If this new majority of students fail in school an entire state, an entire region, and—sooner or later—an entire nation will fail simply because there will be inadequate human capital to build and sustain good jobs, an enjoyable quality of life, and a well-informed democracy.”

The study was published by the Southern Education Foundation, which had a time line on their web page that covers the injustices of American society. However, Suitts use of the term “human capital” shows that at least one of the foundation’s members does not grasp a fundamental reality about American society. Capital is an owned resource that generates income and wealth. It is wealth in the form of money or property used or accumulated in a business by a person (or family) or group of people (corporation). It is material resource that is used or is available for use in the production of wealth. As capital, human resources are considered in terms of capacity to generate income and wealth. Human capital means that humans, either themselves or the results of their efforts, are property that belong to some person or persons.

For example, black slaves were human capital. The slavemaster owned a member of a disadvantaged racialized caste of human beings and used that person as capital to generate income. It was not the ownership of the African person or the person of African descent that generated the income, but ownership of the value created by the slave. Ownership was the form of control used to extract the value. Transfer of value from the person producing it to a person not producing it is exploitation. As a result of exploitation, the slavemaster lived a life of leisure in a mansion while the slave lived a life of toil in a small house. Because of his power and wealth, the slavemaster determined and shaped how life happened for both himself and the slave. Because the slavemaster owned the means of production, the slavemaster controlled society.

Similarly, a worker is human capital. While the capitalist does not formally own the worker, he does own the value created by the worker, a member of a disadvantaged economic class of human beings, and uses that value as capital to generate income. Structural coercion is the form of control used to extract the value—namely, the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a small number of families compelling most persons to sell their labor rather than dedicating most of the value they produce to self and collective improvement. As noted, transfer of value from the person producing it to a person not producing it is exploitation, and as a result of these exploitative relations, the capitalist lives a life of leisure in a mansion while the worker lives a life of toil in a small house. Because of his power and wealth, the capitalist determines and shapes how life happens for both himself and the slave. Because the capitalist owns the means of production, the capitalist controls society.

Returning to what Suitts said, his argument becomes problematic when the reality of capitalism is made explicit. Let’s read the key parts of the quote again: “If this new majority of students fail in school…there will be inadequate human capital to build and sustain good jobs, an enjoyable quality of life, and a well-informed democracy.”  

Human capital—the working family—is impoverished because of capitalist needs. Capitalists have, along with several other tactices, destroyed the labor movement in the United States to reduce wages and salaries in order to increase the surplus value produced by labor with the intent to convert that value into profit in the market to generate income for their life of leisure and privilege. Intensifying labor exploitation (whether through intensifying effort, mechanization and automation, rationalization, or globalization) is the fundamental imperative of capitalist relations. 

In the current period, is not very important from the capitalist standpoint that children from low income families have a real education for the simple fact that low income children will grow up to do jobs that don’t require a real education. Indeed, a real education is detrimental to the interests of the capitalist class; for, if you teach children to be creative and to think critically, more than a handful of them may come to the realization that capitalism is an exploitative system that should be replaced with real democracy—a government and an economy in which working families are in charge. Capitalists don’t want a “well-informed democracy.” They want a docile and subservient workforce educated just well enough to read instruction manuals and perform relatively simple calculations. The want a workforce just curious enough to turn on the television and watch corporate propaganda disguised as objective information.

So while I applaud any efforts to make real education a reality in this country, failure to understand the fundamental reality of capitalism leads to an effort that cannot substantially move the people forward in such a cause. Using the term “human capital” tells us right away that there is a failure to understand the fundamental reality of capitalism: a system of exploitation in which human beings are compelled to rent themselves to wealthy families who determine and shape how people live their lives.

The bottomline is that either a subset of persons in a society rules society or all the people in society rule society. Democracy is where the people rule themselves. Under capitalism, most people are ruled by a few people. Democracy is therefore not possible under capitalism. Ultimately, in order to make society work for working families, working families must be put in charge of ordering society. The people have to replace unelected rulers (capitalists) with democratically-elected leaders and direct democratic participation in a system that elminates the wall of separation between the polity and the economy. Democracy cannot exist without some form of socialism, and this requires a socialist revolution. We need a socialist movement.

Update (November 9, 2025): I just revisited this essay after many years and thought I should acknowledge something I have known about for some time: that University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Mike Adams killed himself in 2020 after being pushed into early retirement for offensive tweets. Greg Lukianoff, of the free speech organization FIRE, writes about the tragedy in this essay (I borrowed the image below from that essay). Wilmington treated Adams very poorly. While I disagreed with Adams over a great many things, more so back then than now, he deserved to be treated with respect and in accordance with the foundational law of this republic and the ethic of academic freedom.

Mike Adams, a conservative criminologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, illustrates how intelligent people are often not logical. The premise of his recent article undermines the author’s argument. If people generally don’t understand their motives, and if the author did not understand his motive all those years that he was an atheist, then it is likely the author does not understand his motive now that he has returned to Christianity.

Given his explanations, which uses cognitive dissonance theory, both imagined motives (that is, for leaving and returning) are problematic. People don’t become atheists because they don’t want to love their enemies. They simply continue hating their enemies and being Christians. It’s called hypocrisy and—apologies to my Christian friends—Christians are great at it. (I have always been particularly interested in the cognitive framework of the right-wing conservative Christian, as there is so much hatred in his heart, I often wonder why he is even a Christian.)

Cognitive dissonance can be resolved by reason and fact. The rational person needs proof to believe in the existence of things. This proof can be either logical or empirical. When confronted with his own faith-belief, the rational person experiences cognitive dissonance, namely, “I am supposed to believe in God with no logical or empirical proof, but because the rational person demands reason and fact to belief something, I have a choice to make: either I will be a theist and rely on faith belief or I will be an atheist and rely on reason.”

Either choice resolves the conflict (although they are not created equal, as reason is demonstrable in proof, whereas faith is not). In the first, the person has decided to give up rationalism. In the second, the person has decided to give up religion. Of course, most people compartmentalize, which is to say that they make a distinction between rational belief and faith belief, convince themselves that these are not in contradiction, and continue on their way. While this distinction is irrational—a truth usually not understood by the person—it allows the individual to carry on with life. Unfortunately, this irrationalism leads at the same time to a life of irrational belief and action.

Finally, to clarify what cognitive dissonance is, I will use a contemporary example. Republicans are confronted with the fact that the President of the United States has ordered the torture of human beings. Because torture is a bad thing and Republicans don’t want to be seen as supportive of bad things, they deny that what Bush has ordered is tortured. Bush helps them out by redefining what torture is. Because what he is doing is called something else, Republicans can support the torturer and claim not to support torture.

The Environmental Program of the United Nations has released its 550-page report, Global Environment Outlook (or GEO-4). The UN report warns that climate change, diminishing water supplies, and species extinction, among many other threats, will irreversibly alter life on Earth.

We’re in trouble, folks, and, unfortunately, as executive director of the program Achim Steiner notes, most nations had failed to “recognize the magnitude of the challenges facing the people and the environment of the planet.” Steiner went right to the source of the problem: overshoot and collapse. The capitalist treadmill of production, its imperative to expand the depletion of resources continually for the sake of profit, is a recipe for disaster. “That equation cannot hold for much longer,” Steiner said. “Indeed, in parts of the world it is no longer holding.”

Of course, the global warming denial lunatics are out in force denying the soundness of the science in the report. So I think it is helpful to point out that this report is five years in coming and is the work of nearly four hundred scientists. They took their sweet time in producing a very carefully researched report (it’s been a long twenty years since the last one).

The facts are dramatic and incontrovertable. Just take a look at one fact, first reported in June by the World Health Organization: thirteen million human beings die annually as a result of dirty water, polluted air, and poor working conditions. The UN report found that if the trends identified by WHO continue, almost two billion people will suffer from fresh water shortages.

Nobel Prize-winning DNA scientist, the man who (along with with Francis Crick and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins) won the prize in 1962 for his description of the double helix structure of DNA, and chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Dr. James Watson, said recently in an interview with the London Times that, while “there are many people of color who are very talented,” he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.” Watson wants to deny he meant what he said, and he apologized for saying it, but he has long been a believer in the hereditary theory of intelligence and tests purported to detect such intelligence find that people of African decent are as a group less intelligent than those of European decent.

Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement: “The comments, which were attributed to Dr. James Watson earlier this week in the London Times, are wrong, from every point of view – not the least of which is that they are completely inconsistent with the body of research literature in this area.” This is true. There is no scientific basis for there being races of human beings. Moreover – and I’m not sure Serhouni meant this but – there is no scientific basis for claiming that mental testing measures hereditary intelligence (see Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man). Noting what appears as the underlying agenda, Elias said, “Scientific prestige is never a substitute for knowledge. As scientists, we are outraged and saddened when science is used to perpetuate prejudice.”

The Science Museum of London canceled a speech Dr. Watson was to have given there today, saying that Dr. Watson’s assertions on race and intelligence are “beyond the point of acceptable debate.” Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, said it was “tragic that one of the icons of modern science has cast such dishonor on the profession.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson from the laboratory, where he was president for 35 years and remained (until yesterday) chancellor. They rebuked him and said that they do not do research there that has any bearing on what Watson argued. However, there appears to be a political motive for the laboratory moving so quickly on this matter: the eugenics archive

It’s in his influential 1971 Blaming the Victim that psychologist William Ryan of Boston College coined the phrase “blaming the victim.” For Ryan, victim blaming is an ideology and a tactic used by middle and upper class whites to invalidate demands from black or otherwise marginalized communities for social justice. Racial inequities constituted a racist situation wherein whites are able to deny racism by laying the blame for inequality on what Ryan see as the black victims of white privilege.

Ryan wrote the book in response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notorious 1965 The Negro Family. Moynihan was a Harvard sociologist who was the time serving as an assistant labor secretary under Lyndon Johnson. The thesis of The Negro Family. often referred to as as the “Moynihan Report,” is that a dysfunctional subculture lay at the roots of black poverty, an idea introduced in the 1930s by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier.

“Don’t you think that black people share any responsibility for the conditions of their existence?” This is the question that is sometimes put to me when discussing racial inequality, although I have noticed growing hesitation among my white students to post it. It’s a way to force me to admit that blacks are partly to blame for their situation so that those who blame blacks can feel vindicated.

Once they get their foot in the door, they think (this is my interpretation of motive, anyway), they can push it wide open and confuse others as to the sources of the problems black Americans face that are allegedly more significant than racism.

The question is frustrating because it is so often asked in bad faith. Asked by somebody who is trying to prevent frank discussion of the problem marginalized groups feel, the question forces the expert into a defensive position. A lot of social liberals are made reluctant to speak frankly about the problems facing black Americans because they worry that soon the camel will be inside the tent—as well as risking the charge of victim blaming.

The strict structuralist social scientist will answer the question this way: If by bearing responsibility for the conditions of existence as a demographic category one means that there are black people who don’t pick themselves up by their bootstraps and work hard to achieve the American Dream, then the answer to the question is no. The ordinary everyday behaviors of black people, supposing they aren’t of the hard working and self-reliant type allegedly associated with success, have nothing to do with causing the conditions that befall blacks in the aggregate. To the extent that behaviors in the black community can be differentiated from the behaviors of other groups, these differences are caused by the conditions of their existence and are not the cause of them.

To understand why this is so, attempt an explanation of the circumstances of the white working class that depends on their failure to work hard and act in self-reliant ways. It’s a fact that white workers trail white managers and capitalists in every significant social category. On the whole, white workers suffer poorer health, shorter life-spans, lower incomes, cheaper houses, unstable job market, longer working days, inferior retirement, lower educational attainment, etc.

Are these the cause of their condition? The features of the conditions of the white working class result from the situation of structural inequality. White workers suffer such things because white managers and capitalists enjoy better health, longer life-spans, higher incomes, expensive houses, stable occupations, more leisure time, superior retirement, higher educational attainment, etc. In other words, the equation is not balanced, formulated as it is in the context of capitalist accumulation.

Capitalism is a system in which a few families own and control the means of production (capitalists and managers) and the rest of society is forced to sell its labor to survive or starve when its labor is not wanted—that is the dynamic of capitalist accumulation and the legal relations that maintain the status quo. White working people suffer because capitalists and managers exploit their labor, with the latter paid out of the surplus value labor generates. This is the only way that those who work so little can have so much while those who work so much can have so little.

This is why we call those who blame white workers for the conditions of the white working class classists. The elite look down on the white working class. They maintain the status quo that benefits them by maintaining that the problems working people face are caused by the workers themselves—blaming the victims of the capitalist mode of production.

Of course, we should note that there are very few people explicitly pushing the anti-working class argument these days. Why? It’s campaign season. Phil Gramm of Texas, an adviser to the John McCain campaign, told working people to stop whining and work harder. The McCain campaign quickly disavowed his comments because such an argument is offensive to white workers, and McCain needs their votes.

McCain knows that campaigning on slogans blaming the white worker for unemployment, bankruptcies, and a broken health care system is a nonstarter. McCain doesn’t want to seem like an elitist. He wants to appear to support the white working class. To be sure, Republicans make the personal responsibility argument in terms of class when they are talking among themselves. The same might be said for Democrats except that they wouldn’t be caught dead blaming the working class for its problems. They, too, want those votes. They have a legacy to leverage—however false that legacy is.

To say that black working people are responsible for unstable labor markets, poor health outcomes, educational underachievement, and residential displacement because they don’t try hard enough is something akin to saying that all working people are responsible for unstable labor markets, poor health outcomes, educational underachievement, and residential displacement because they don’t try hard enough. 

It’s not only conservatives who target blacks for special criticism. Progressives defend Obama against the charge of talking down to black people and attack critics like Jesse Jackson for criticizing Obama. It’s a double standard. White workers are the victims of large impersonal forces in their eyes, but black workers aren’t? Black workers need a little tough love from one of their own?

Obama says, “I think it’s time we had a president who doesn’t deny our problems or blame the American people for them but takes responsibility and provides the leadership to solve them.” Political sophisticates on the other side say the same thing. When Sean Hannity notes that we are not in a recession and that people in the US have every opportunity to pursue their dreams, that they don’t appreciate that gift and don’t take advantage of it, Gingrich bristles and said it was the most un-Reaganesque thing Hannity had ever said. Hannity defends himself by saying that it was very Reaganesque because “if you work hard and you play by the rules, you can’t fail.” To which Gingrich replied,

If the American people are complaining, you ought to listen to them and find out why. Now why are they complaining? The price of health care is going up, the price of health insurance is going up, the price of sending their kids to college is going up, the price of gasoline is going up. They fear China as a competitor. They look at a tightening situation. I talked to manufacturers who are seeing dramatic increases in the cost of their—of their raw materials, and they say to each other, this is hard—people for the first time that I can remember, people decline the number of miles they’re driving in the last two months because it is directly affecting their pocketbook. Now if your customer comes in and complains to you it is not good to say to the customer why don’t you quit whining.

Except if you’re black, of course. If you know anything about Newt Gingrich you know that he believes that, if you’re black, then the problem is that you’re not trying hard enough. But, again, Obama operates the same way. Obama is pushing the lie that the problems of black America’s workers are caused by the behavior of black Americans.

Again, ask yourself, are white workers losing their houses and jobs, failing to go to college, etc., because they don’t exhibit proper levels of personal responsibility and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Is Gramm right that white workers are a bunch of whiners who suffer a recession that exists only in their imagination? BrO is Gingrich right white workers have a right to whine? And black people aren’t allowed to whine?

Even though their situation is worse because of racism, even though they are in less of a position to do anything about their situation compared to whites, blacks are held to an different standard of personal responsibility, even though personal responsibility is not the reason for their problems. It’s racist when Gingrich does it. It’s racist when Obama does it.