Who is the greatest African American of the past hundred years? Who was the most prophetic about civil rights concerns for the twenty-first century? Not Martin Luther King. I would have to rank him second or third. The greatest and most prophetic figure was Booker T. Washington. To see why, we have to revisit an early twentieth-century debate between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Although the debate focused on black Americans, it is relevant to the question of how any group starting out at the bottom can advance in society.
DuBois, a distinguished scholar and co-founder of the civil rights organization NAACP, argued that blacks in America face one big problem, and it is racism. Washington, who was born a slave but went on to become head of the Tuskegee Institute, countered that blacks face two big problems. One is racism, he conceded. The other, he said, is African American cultural disadvantage. Washington contended that black crime rates were too high, black savings rates were too low, there were too many broken families, blacks did not have enough respect for educational achievement, and so on.
DuBois insisted that these problems, if they existed, were due to the legacy of slavery and racism. Washington did not entirely disagree, but he insisted that, whatever their source, these cultural problems demanded attention. What is the point of having rights, Washington said, without the ability to exercise those rights and compete effectively with other groups? To put the matter in contemporary terms, there is little benefit in having a right to a job at Microsoft if you don't have the skills to get and perform the job. Washington further implied that if these cultural deficiencies were not remedied, they would help to strengthen racism by giving it an empirical foundation.
The civil rights movement, led by the NAACP and later Martin Luther King, fought for decades to implement the DuBois program and secure basic rights for black Americans. This was a necessary campaign, and ultimately it was successful. The laws were changed, and blacks achieved their goal of legal equality and full citizenship. Other minorities (and I count myself in this group) also benefited from the doors that King and his fellow activists opened. Obviously issues of enforcement remain, but by the late 1960s the early civil rights agenda represented by DuBois and King had been largely achieved. At this crucial juncture, the civil rights movement should have moved to embrace the Booker T. Washington agenda.
Unfortunately this didn't happen. It still hasn't happened. Even today Jesse Jackson and the NAACP continue (in the famous words of Frederick Douglass) to "agitate, agitate, agitate" for black progress. But now there are hardly any Bull Connors and Southern segregationists to fight, and so the activists are reduced to fighting "covert racism" and "institutional racism" and "racism that has gone underground" and basically racism that is only visible to them and to no one else. Most significant, these fights do little to help the blacks who are the poorest, the group that sociologist William Julius Wilson termed "the truly disadvantaged."
Meanwhile, there is another group that is following the Booker T. Washington strategy, and that is the nonwhite immigrants. I don't just mean the Koreans and the Asian Indians; I also mean black immigrants--the West Indians, the Haitians, the Nigerians, and so on. All are darker in complexion than African Americans, and yet racism does not seem to stop them. The immigrants know that racism today is no longer systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to find ways to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start out at the very bottom have shown that they are make rapid gains. These groups are surging ahead of African Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves. West Indians, for instance, have established a strong business and professional community and have achieved income parity with whites.
How is this possible? The nonwhite immigrants don't spend a lot of time meditating about the hardships of the past, nor do they blame their circumstances on society. They recognize that education and entrepreneurship are the fastest ladders to success in America. They push their children to study, so that they will be admitted to Berkeley and MIT, and they pool their resources and set up small businesses, so that they can make some money and move to the suburbs.
Thus we find that any group trying to move up in America is confronted with two possible strategies--the DuBois strategy and the Washington strategy---and it is an empirical question as to which one works better. A century ago, when segregation was still the rule, clearly the DuBois strategy was better. In this sense, Booker T. Washington was wrong during his day. But today it's clear that the man was ahead of his time. So far the evidence is overwhelming that the immigrant approach of assimilating to the cultural strategies of success is vastly better for group uplift than the tired old strategy of "agitate, agitate, agitate."
Martin Luther King nobly led the first phase of the struggle, but he only dimly saw the next stage. At the time of his death King was peddling all kinds of impractical schemes for sharing the wealth and he also became unnecessarily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement which diluted his currency as a civil rights leader. Even so, there were moments when King was prescient about the future. At one point he said that ultimately every man must write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation. I take him to mean that we all have the right to be treated equally under the law. We have this right, but we don't have any more rights than this. What we do with our rights, what we make of ourselves, the script that we write of our own lives, this finally is up to us.
Postscript: This article has been loosely adapted from my book What's So Great About America. The issues it raises are exhaustively treated in one of my earlier books, The End of Racism.
Reader Comments ( Page 39 of 40)
571. For all the superstition involved in religious belief, even the most primitive and humble belief system is a more rational choice than a loud but hollow certainty that there is nothing.
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Uh, NO!
I'd rather believe in nothing that something that makes me onto a huge hypicritical asshole any day.
And you'd rather believe in the witch doctor shaking his zebra tail dipped in blood to scare away your demons, than be an atheist?
Well, so you're a moron then. I see.
Godless Heathen Brian at 2:13PM on Jan 22nd 2008
572. And what does it say about you that you can't contain your contempt and show some civility and respect for others by capitalizing "Christ", "God", "Christian" etc.? Apparent testimony to just how small you are.
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I capatilize christian when talking to a real one. I've met two on this board. Botts and Father John. Both good men.
The rest are pathetic hypocrites, "hypochrists" that act in almost the exact REVERSE manner as Christ was supposed to have acted.
I absolutly have no respect for most christians. I feel no need to contain this, as they certainly do not contain their contempt for me and those that think like me. They're shallow, vain, egotistical, mean, ignorant, self-important, prejudiced, holier-than-thou jerks.
I'm an atheist, remember? And I don't bother to capitalize the word "atheist" either.
Capitalize your own shit. I'm not gonna do it for you. You want respect from me, you're going to have to earn it like everyone else does. So far you're all mostly doing the opposite. Earning my contempt instead.
Godless Heathen Brian at 2:22PM on Jan 22nd 2008
573. Any suggestions about when there are fewer turistas in the park?
Linda at 9:53AM on Jan 22nd 2008
xxx
I was only there once, between gigs at Tahoe and Idaho Falls. I was there in October, it was cold as hell, and the only tourists I saw were a bunch of Norweigians.
It was really amazing, but I just had a day. I spent about sixteen hours, me and my siberian husky, and I got chased by a moose!
I remember finding a really nice european bistro type restaurant too, which surprised me.
Make sure you have several days. There's too much to see and nothing you should miss. There is no place else like it on earth.
Clif Kuplen at 2:31PM on Jan 22nd 2008
574. G D Brian,
It sounds like you are using the fact that Christianity is a failed religion to prove there is no God. Is that right?
Jerry Brown at 2:36PM on Jan 22nd 2008
575. G H Brian,
It sounds like you are using the fact that Christianity is a failed religion to prove there is no God. Is that right?
Jerry Brown at 2:44PM on Jan 22nd 2008
576. 566. G D Brian,
It sounds like you are using the fact that Christianity is a failed religion to prove there is no God. Is that right?
Jerry Brown at 2:36PM on Jan 22nd 2008
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No, I wasn't trying to prove that there is no god. I was trying to prove that christianity is a failed religion. Thank you for admitting it finally.
I cannot prove to a sane person that there is no god. I can prove to that sane person that the bible is not inerrant, that what is does say is REPULSIVE and replete with killing and maiming and terror and death and HYPOCRISY, and I can thus prove to that sane person that the christian religion is based on lies and control. Also I can point out to that sane person the history of the religion, from it's formation as a political tool to the early christian forgeries lying about the divinity of Jesus, to the fact that the gospels weren't written by the apostles they're named after... and were written years after christ died... And differ! I can point to the two DIFFERENT accounts of Genesis. And I can point to all the inconsistencies, like the SILLY and blatantly IMPOSSIBLE Noah's Ark story and many others... So I can say with a LOT of confidence that the Christian VERSION of god is ridiculously false.
But all I was going for was the religion, not the god.
I was surprised that you said that about the FACT that christianity is a failed religion. I never thought you nor any other christian here would ever admit it.
GD Brian? LOL! In YOUR fantasy, not mine!
Godless Heathen Brian at 2:50PM on Jan 22nd 2008
577. In my post 562 above I direct it to rick, but I meant cincinnati rick. The agnostic.
This post:
562. It's amusing how much pride Rick has in not being proud. How vain he is about his humility.
Was NOT directed at rick the christian.
Godless Heathen Brian at 2:57PM on Jan 22nd 2008
578. Oh, I see that you've corrected yourself there, Jerry. Youre first post was directed at GDBrian, and your second otherwise identical one at GHBrian.
Guess the first one was a freudian slip, huh? :-)
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:00PM on Jan 22nd 2008
579. G H Brain,
I am not a Christian. I have had personal experiences that has shown me there is spiritual kingdom as Jesus stated. I agree with you, at least for the most part, about Christianity, and wonder why people buy into the bible as being the word of God. I spoke with a lady once that did not believe in the bible, and then she had a spiritual experience, and immediately bought into the bible. That is the misleading part of Christianity that keeps many from understanding the true nature of God. It is so obvious that Christianity no longer, if it ever did, call forth the higher nature of man.
Jerry Brown at 3:02PM on Jan 22nd 2008
580. Jerry, I have unusual beliefs, if you want to call them that...
I hear the voice of the spirit, if you will, but recognize that it is not the voice of any god.
I believe in a consciousness basis to this reality. Not in a god.
I can see why some people are misled by the nature of this reality, which will give you "signs" confirming whatever you're thinking... It responds to the BELIEF and the strength of it, not to WHAT IS BELIEVED IN.
So you can be a faithful and dedicated follower of a giant shoe in the sky as your god, and if you're faithful and deeply believe in shoe and pray to shoe, then you will get "signs" and even "miracles" that are obviously from shoe. But of course, they're not. They're from YOU, dressed up in YOUR BELIEFS in shoe as god.
This makes it hard for christians that have had such spiritual experiences to see that their god is still not real. It seems to confirm their god.
All it confirms is their BELIEF in their god.
I get the "signs" all the time. Almost every single day. But mine aren't dressed up in the robes of a god, since I don't believe in one. To me, it's just reality and how it works. And I marvel at it, of course, and attempt in my own feeble way to better understand it WITHOUT coloring it in any way with any beliefs that I may have still hanging around in my head of primitive tribal deities. Reality is much more interesting and complex than any of that anthropomorphic silliness.
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:17PM on Jan 22nd 2008
581. Jesus was right about the spiritual kingdom, but don't follow Jesus. Follow the spiritual kingdom, as he did. Within yourself. Look not without for your god. Not even to Jesus. Although he is a useful archetype to follow, if you really follow him and not the false image of him constructed by christians...
The gnostics were right.
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:18PM on Jan 22nd 2008
582. WTF, I'll repost this here, if Jerry's curious about what I just said...
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What would be the simplest explanation for this universe? That would account for the maximum number of observations that we've made of it? I used to ask myself this all the time. I knew it couldn't be something that we'd thought of before, since all of those theories have huge holes in them, even science in a way, though science is the best single one of all so far. But still science sees infinities in time and distance, and quantum paradoxes galore, along with things like the wave-particle duality and entanglement, which are hard to explain. SO I thought and thought, and studied a lot of different sources, and this is what I came up with...
Simplest Explanation for this Universe:
It's all a vast mind, or very similar to one. Now I KNOW that's a hard one for a christian, or most anybody, to ever believe. But give me a chance to explain. Oh, and if you can't follow this, it doesn't mean that it's not true, so perhaps some study would be in order, at least before you dismiss it. Not that you won't.
Imagine it as if we're all complex thought patterns in a vast mind of some sort. We think of ourselves as matter, and the universe as matter and energy and space and time, but if it were all more like a mind, it negates the problems of the infinite. The universe would be as large as we think it is, and as old as we think it is... The more we looked, the more we'd find, but in a mind this is all interplay of consciousness and not the real traversing of space, so infinity is not a problem... We feel as solid matter and a rock feels hard and heavy, but they're consciousness or thoughts too, but since WE are as well, the rock feels heavy and we feel solid to ourselves. As we've developed over the years we've formed this vast mind by our subconscious expectations of it, since it IS us, and all other things as well. Thus it conforms to our expectations of it, follows logical rules, etc. We are individuals, yes, but only at the conscious and near-conscious levels. At the deep subconscious level we all share the same identity, as does everything else, since we're all made of the one thing, mind, in a world of the same. So, the person looking out of your eyes and calling yourself "Me" is, at the deepest level, IDENTICAL with the person that looks out of MY eyes and says the same. God, or the Universe, is ONE, and we're all a part of it, connected at every point. There's only ONE "sense-of-identity" in the universe. That's what that means. We just all have it and think it unique to us as individuals, and it's not. Now if in this vast mind you manage to convince yourself that it's all due to an anthropomorphic God, this reality/mind will accomodate you and give you "signs" that you're on the right track, EVEN THOUGH YOU AREN'T!!! It will give you exactly what you expect it to in your deep subconscious. If I meditate strongly enough, I get the same types of signs, and I'm not a believer in any God, really. Strange coincidences, synchronicities, and actual events taking place that related to my meditation... Even at times, wish-fulfillment... You can produce this with prayers, if you REALLY believe deeply. It won't matter that what you REALLY believe in isn't TRUE, either. You can pray to a big Shoe in the sky, and if you have enough belief, real-world phenomena can and will occurr that seem to be an answer to your "prayers" with no god needed other than this universe, which in it's entirety, can be called God but more accurately is just the mind that we all call home. It's not a human mind, but it's composed of all minds and all things.
Seems simple enough, if you have an imagination. Now tell me why it can't be true. You can't. In fact, it explains EVERYTHING. Not one thing left out. It's the only theory that can even come close to doing that. All scientific problems, the mind-body problem, the placebo effect, miracles, faith-healings, synchronicities, deja-vu, "signs," ESP, clairvoyance, all psychic phenomena including hauntings, and even your belief in your god.
It can’t be proven yet, but it looks like it might be provable in the near future, if it’s true, of course. The beginnings of proof are already there. Look at the quantum realm, with all its strangeness and problems, which vanish if we assume that the universe is all consciousness. But as of right now, it can’t be proven. Neither can your God, or anyone else’s, but since it explains not only your god but all others, and science, and scientific fallacies and paradoxes, and indeed ALL mysteries, and has hopes of being proven in time by science, it’s far superior to any other faith or religion. By Occam’s Razor, it is the most likely to be the correct theory, if you detach yourself from your habitual view of reality and just think of the probabilities from an un-reality-biased perspective.
For me, I was the agnostic almost-atheist that loved science and the scientific method, was completely skeptical of anything that even smacked of the paranormal, then at about age 36 started to get 'signs' or more accurately perhaps jungian type synchronicities in my day-to-day life, synchronicities that I soon realized always related to thoughts expressed when I was in an emotionally excited state, such as when I was joking around with friends. Oh, and since the friends involved saw them too and thought that they were creepy, I know that it wasn't just a delusion. All of this worldview of mine that I have expressed above came about in my mind as a RESULT of my having these experiences and then investigating them with various thought experiments as my tools, all subjective of course, but compelling nonetheless. Very compelling.
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:21PM on Jan 22nd 2008
583. Who can say what they themselves expect that the next moment will bring, deep in their subconscious?
Who knows themselves well enough? If your conscious mind is thinking one thing, often the subconscious thinks the opposite.
And so, who would know if the next moment isn't EXACTLY what they were expecting it to be deep down in their subconscious, when that moment finally happens?
And this we have the explanation for deja-vu as well.
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:31PM on Jan 22nd 2008
584. And this we have the explanation for deja-vu as well.
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Typo. And THUS we have...
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:32PM on Jan 22nd 2008
585. G H Brain,
I don't have any problem with what you say you think.
Jerry Brown at 3:42PM on Jan 22nd 2008