The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by John J. DiIulio

As Jim Sleeper, a first-rate journalist, observes in Liberal Racism, "there is a hint of displaced racism, a contempt for blacks, which seeps out of Hacker's prose even as he struggles to project it onto working-class whites . . . His discussion of policing is an example of how racialist analysis slides from reality into cant." He effectively detonates Hacker's ideas and those of others who display "liberal racism," which he defines as patronizing "nonwhites by expecting (and getting) less of them than they are fully capable of achieving," "perpetuating double standards by setting the bar so much lower for its intended beneficiaries that they are denied the satisfactions of equal accomplishment," and assuming that "racial differences are so profound that they are almost primordial."

In fewer than two hundred pages sans footnotes, Sleeper convincingly pierces the veil of leading liberal racists. So why do the Thernstroms go on for over seven hundred pages? Not merely to take Hacker and kindred straw men apart straw by straw, but to advance and defend an argument of their own: namely, that the indisputable socio-economic gains enjoyed by most blacks in the post -civil-rights period are an empirically and morally decisive rebuttal to those who insist that white racism blocks black progress, that affirmative action is at worst a necessary evil, and that blacks are sometimes entitled to play racial politics.

Thus, when it comes to the social condition of blacks who are poor, jobless, welfare-dependent, in trouble with the law, abusing alcohol or drugs, America in Black and White is true to its title in that the Thernstroms see relatively few shades of grey. For example, they report at length on the destructive individual and social consequences of the rising tide of non-marital births among blacks. But they don't see as clearly the evidence that variance in socio-economic outcomes (who does and who doesn't escape poverty, crime, joblessness, educational failure, future family breakdown, and so on) is almost as great within the population of single-parent black households as it is between single-parent and two-parent black households.

Likewise, in passing, the Thernstroms accept as "plausible" the thesis of Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson that the loss of jobs is the main culprit in the downward spiral of inner-city blacks. But Wilson and other superior social-policy analysts with a liberal view on inner-city economic and social revitalization get surprisingly short shrift in America in Black and White.

For all their new and excellent data syntheses, the Thernstroms merely bring one back to what I term the conservative "stop - start" model of black inner-city progress. According to this model, inner-city blacks will start doing better socially and economically when, if, and only if they stop having out-of-wedlock births and start getting married; stop behaving badly and start attaching themselves to any jobs that become available; stop watching so much television and start taking advantage of educational opportunities; stop spending and start saving; stop abusing alcohol and drugs, committing crimes, acting like victims, blaming whites, and relying on welfare, and start holding themselves strictly and personally accountable; and so on.