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Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. John H. McWhorter. New York, NY: The Free Press (a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.), 2000. xv + 285 pp. (Cloth US$24.00)
John McWhorter, a black Linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, maintains that affirmative action contributes to lowered expectations for African American students, and compromises their intellectual efforts in American universities. Affirmative action should be abolished, he concludes, because it prevents black students from achieving their true academic potential. McWhorter theorizes that the root of this problem cannot be traced to structural inequalities in the United States, especially unequal power relations, between black and white people, but to specific African American ideological and behavioral patterns that undermine Black American well-being. His central hypothesis is that these patterns coalesce in three "cults" which are endemic to Black American culture: Victimology, Separatism, and Anti-Intellectualism.
The Cult of Victimology, the belief that all black people suffer and are injured by racism, explains why African Americans have not been as successful as other racial and ethnic groups. The Cult of Separatism refers to what McWhorter considers the narrowness of Black American scholarship, exemplified by a lack of commitment to the objective assessment of intellectual issues, and rigorous debate of relevant theories and methods, as well as by an obsession with topics which pertain only to Blacks, Africa, and the African Diaspora. The Cult of Anti-Intellectualism is a tendency among African Americans to attribute low course grades or poor performance on standardized tests to racially marked...