IT'S NOT STRUCTURAL! IT'S JUST THE NEIGHBORHOODS AND SCHOOLS WE TRAPPED THEM IN...:

McWhorter's conclusion about the connection between inequality and opportunity (that the insisted linkage simply "is false") is casually asserted without explanation or discussion, except to offer the admonition that "the insistence on this mantra makes us dumb." When McWhorter does make specific arguments, these skim along just as superficially. He describes a 1987 "experiment" in which a rich donor "adopted" 112 Black children in Philadelphia, guaranteeing them a fully funded education as long as they "did not do drugs, have children before getting married, or commit crimes." McWhorter points to the poor results for many of these children as evidence that outcomes do not equate with opportunity. If they did, he suggests, wouldn't this infusion of resources have solved their problems? McWhorter does not mention that George Weiss, the philanthropist who "adopted" the children in Philadelphia, managed (with the help of his intervention) to double the high-school graduation rate considered normal for their demographic.

McWhorter's dismissal of the connection between outcomes and opportunity rests on an unnecessarily pinched definition of the latter. Writing about Weiss's Philadelphia experiment, he concludes that, "what held those poor kids back was that they had been raised amid a different sense of what is normal than white kids in the burbs. That is, yes, another way of saying 'culture.'... "

But are culture and structural racism mutually exclusive causal explanations? Is some of what McWhorter describes as "culture" simply a manifestation of the challenges of living in geographic communities characterized by extreme poverty, racial segregation, and a radical lack of economic opportunity? And is it possible to call the persistence of such economically disadvantaged communities a form of "structural racism," as the conservative columnist David French did last year? After all, such communities are shaped by policies in land use and local government finance that reinforce the consequences of historically racist practices, such as redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and exclusionary zoning.

McWhorter is no doubt correct when he says that, more than slogans, we need a better understanding of the mechanics that lie behind racial disparities, which are surely complex. But, precisely because of that complexity, it is far from clear that his examples absolve a legacy of racial discrimination for many or even most persistent inequities we observe today. What we need, from both antiracists and their critics, is sound social science that rigorously analyzes the social and economic mechanisms that connect historic (or continuing) racist practices with persistent inequalities. And we need to be able to evaluate proposed remedies with equal rigor.

Antiracists like Ibram X. Kendi would certainly benefit from such rigorous empirical investigation. If what makes a policy or practice "racist" is its impact on the material well-being of Black and Brown people, as Kendi argues, then a crucial ingredient in assessing policies or practices is a deep and accurate understanding of the nature and extent of those impacts. This is no small undertaking. Policies rarely have just one impact, and understanding the full panoply of a policy's effects, over the short and long term, can be the work of an entire academic career.

Would removing onerous licensing requirements for small urban businesses improve Black lives, or make them worse? What if it improves some Black lives (Black small-business owners) while making other Black lives worse (some of their customers who might have been protected by the regulations in question)? What if the policy causes some harm in the short term, while expanding opportunity over the long run?

Precisely because we are so desperately in need of more and better knowledge about how seemingly race-neutral policies or structures operate to perpetuate racial inequity, it is essential that theorists and social scientists fearlessly pursue research into the operation of those structures -- even when their findings might prove controversial or uncomfortable. For this reason, McWhorter's critique of efforts by the Elect to stifle debate is the most important argument he makes in the book. And yet, even here, he misses the mark by relying heavily on anecdote and by focusing exclusively on opponents to his left.

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