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 40 of 40)
586. G H Brian, Sorry for misspelling your name. Some things I don't focus on very well.
Jerry Brown at 3:45PM on Jan 22nd 2008
587. Proving this to any skeptic is problematic due to the fact that what I'm talking about here is studying the mechanism of the universe that responds to BELIEF.
How can I ask a scientist to believe in something with clearly insufficient proof, in order to study if his beliefs themselves have any affect on reality? How will they ever BELIEVE enough to have any effect in the first place? How does one fake belief? One cannot. It requires a personality that can temporarily believe in something but also not believe, keep one foot in reality as it were, remain skeptical, in a part of his mind, while not in another. It requires a lot of flexibility of thought. And it requires that they temporarily "believe" that their thoughts can affect reality, which seems patently incredible. It's not an easy thing. They cannot pretend to believe. They must believe, at least a tiny bit.
It requires temporary and consciously reversible self-hypnosis through meditation, in fact, in order to study the mechanism of belief at all. I doubt I'm going to convince any mainstream scientists to try that one on for size...
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:02PM on Jan 22nd 2008
588. Proving this to any skeptic is problematic due to the fact that what I'm talking about here is studying the mechanism of the universe that responds to BELIEF.
How can I ask a scientist to believe in something with clearly insufficient proof, in order to study if his beliefs themselves have any affect on reality? How will they ever BELIEVE enough to have any effect in the first place? How does one fake belief? One cannot. It requires a personality that can temporarily believe in something but also not believe, keep one foot in reality as it were, remain skeptical, in a part of his mind, while not in another. It requires a lot of flexibility of thought. And it requires that they temporarily "believe" that their thoughts can affect reality, which seems patently incredible. It's not an easy thing. They cannot pretend to believe. They must believe, at least a tiny bit.
It requires temporary and consciously reversible self-hypnosis through meditation, in fact, in order to study the mechanism of belief at all. I doubt I'm going to convince any mainstream scientists to try that one on for size...
Godless Heathen Brian at 3:52PM on Jan 22nd 2008
589. 577. G H Brain,
I don't have any problem with what you say you think.
Jerry Brown at 3:42PM on Jan 22nd 2008
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well, I'm not having many problems with the way that you think, either.
You like to identify with christ. As stated, a worthy rolemodel, if you adhere to the original and perhaps forget his comment to the roman soldier implicitly condoning his sexual slavery of a boy.
I like Appolonius of Tyana meself. Or Horus.
I prefer not to identify myself with christ since his current followers are mostly rather evil. They've tarnished his name, so to speak.
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:16PM on Jan 22nd 2008
590. No problem Jerry. I always liked you when you were governor of California.
:-)
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:04PM on Jan 22nd 2008
591. G H Brian,
It sounds like you need somebody that thinks along your lines of thinking to challenge your thoughts. I cannot do that, I am a philosopher, not a scientist. I have had, in the past, the good pleasure to find two people who were able to do that for me. It was a great experience for me. I don't think spending your time trying to get that from automatons (most Christians) is worthwhile.
Jerry Brown at 4:10PM on Jan 22nd 2008
592. In fact, let's assume that I'm right about expectations and beliefs.
If a scientist looks at this, what are his or her expectations of it?
That's what they'll see. They'll see the "fact" that I'm wrong. Since they know it in their hearts. They feel it deeply. They have deep convictions about it, as they should. So they will even quite possibly eventually find seemingly hard evidence of it NOT being true. Hard evidence that only came about due to their belief or expectation that it would, ironically. Normal rational people will have a hard time with this, ince it's so silly, how can it be real? So, how can they ever see it, dismissing it as they do? Lol...
It only responds to belief. When studying everything else WITHIN reality, skepticism is necessary. When studing the nature of belief and reality itself like this, you have to retain SOME skepticism in order to study it objectively, but too much skepticism is lethal to the experiment itself. You just won't ever see it. You supress your disbelief, and experiment subjectively as best you can, and when you DO start to see it, it makes subsequent belief much easier, and so on, and so on... The more you can buy it, the more you can see it, and the more you can see it, the more you can buy it. Eventually you realize that it actually is simpler and makes more sense that what we all think reality ultimately is. Even makes more sense than science's current paradigm, which is by far more logical than that of any religion.
I never did see any of this before I was about 36. If I had died before then, I'd have died never knowing about this at all, and scoffing at anybody that thought this way. And I would have been wrong.
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:23PM on Jan 22nd 2008
593. G H Brian,
We are having slight miscommunication about Jesus. I see him as a wise man, and we have some idea of what he thought. However, I feel pretty sure some of what the bible says he said is not true. It makes no difference, the ideas reported to be his carry no more weight with me than if they came from anybody else, if they work for me fine is they don't I will not embrace them. One of the things he said that I have found true is the kingdom of heaven is a living reality here, and now. I don't hear that idea from others. According to info about Jesus he was a living demonstration of service to others. I have found, (as well as read of study's) that a life of service is the way to live that produces the most happiness
Jerry Brown at 4:35PM on Jan 22nd 2008
594. I seem to recall that many early quantum physicists became mystics. Heisenberg and Bohr, I think, and maybe more...
The uncertainty principle used to say that all particles existed in wave-superposition states that were defined at least partially by the OBSERVER's observation itself!
Then more recently the concept of decoherence has arisn, to disprove that, saying that other particles make "observations" and fix the neighboring particles in reality, so we don't have to.
But this doesn't disprove any of this, and really, as I stated, I would EXPECT something to come up when a lot of convinced scientists were trying to find something. I do not doubt that decoherence exists now. I wonder if it did before we looked for it, though... In fact, I wonder if anything existed before we (life in general through all time, not just humans) looked for it. I think in the act of looking for reality, we created it, bit by bit. Of course it's all logical and it all fits. It had to. If it didn't fit, we didn't believe in it any more...
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:40PM on Jan 22nd 2008
595. One of the things he said that I have found true is the kingdom of heaven is a living reality here, and now. I don't hear that idea from others.
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And if I say that this place is like a vast mind (with no body needed) and we're all made of consciousness, how is it different from saying that this place is spiritual and we're all made of spirit? Thus in a way, I agree with you.
If it's true, then we are finally evolved enough to see what we want to encourage (good) and what we wish to discourage (evil) and can finally shape this reality into a heaven on earth. But ONLY if we choose an all-inclusive vision where all can be happy and free to dream their own dream, live their own life. This REQUIRES the "Golden Rule," so your christ is a great role model, if you need a role model. I prefer to remember that the "golden rule" antedated christ by thousands of years, and so it's the rule itself that we should think of as "holy" and not any of the many people that have tried to teach it to us. We should emulate them, yes. Think of them as God? HELL, NO!!!
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:48PM on Jan 22nd 2008
596. G H Brian,
I think the consciousness you speak of is a overall thing that is all inclusive. Whereas I think the kingdom of heaven is one level of consciousness. I believe everything might be consciousness, but I don't know. The kingdom of heaven being a level of consciousness is validated by my experience. I believe there are more levels, but I don't know that to be a fact.
Jerry Brown at 5:40PM on Jan 22nd 2008