Two articles recently bring into relief my ongoing thought on inequality. First, though, I would like to extend my thoughts (secular prayers) to Russell Arben Fox. There is a terrible human truth that we do not speak about those who have positively shaped our thinking and our values. I hope that as good a thinker and as strong a human being as Fox finds solace and purpose in his faith and family.

The articles are Orlando Patterson's trenchant take on African-American urban male poverty in the Times, and John Cassidy's analysis of inequality in The New Yorker (hat-tip, The American Scene). Both have been criticized, Patterson from the left, for his blame of cultural factors for black poverty, and Cassidy from the right, for his emphasis on pure inequality. I would like to address each article in turn, with a mind to both defend Patterson’s assertion that endemic poverty (both urban black and, although he doesn’t extend the argument, rural white) has its roots in cultural practice and Cassidy’s assertion that inequality itself (not just absolute poverty) is a societal ill, hopefully moving to a prescriptive synthesis of these observations for American society.

I.
Some on the left have called out Patterson for what they see as his head-in-the-sand posture concerning current research into urban poverty. Brad DeLong's criticism (referencing this post) is representative of that meme:

What Tom doesn't understand is that Orlando Patterson has been frozen in a block of ice inside the Museum of Comparative Zoology for thirty years, and has no knowledge of the state-of-play of intellectual debates over poverty in America.

Everyone is entitled to hyperbole, but this charge seems particularly tired. Patterson is writing an Op-Ed in the Times and is a Sociology Professor at Harvard (a good one, too, if personal experience is any guide) with a new book out on the legacy of slavery for present day American cultural formation. Let alone the bizarre, and dehumanizing MCZ reference (is Patterson a specimen?), his vitae certainly speaks to his knowledge of the contemporary state of play. However, I can see why DeLong might be riled. Patterson oversimplifies, but what he is driving at in his Op-Ed is a criticism of the static popular-left consensus that blames endemic urban African-American poverty on structural inequality. The root of Patterson's criticism of Holzer's most recent work (available here) is not a "mystery" pace DeLong, but rather lies in Patterson's view that Holzer's and his co-authors' prescriptive strategies for ending black poverty "remain mired in traditional socioeconomic thinking.” Patterson ties his own transition in thought on poverty correction to the mid 1990's, when the exact conditions that should have resulted in a reduction in endemic urban poverty had next to no long-term effect on black male unemployment:

...the economic boom years of the 90's and one of the most successful policy initiatives in memory - welfare reform - have made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture. The Clinton administration achieved exactly what policy analysts had long said would pull black men out of their torpor: the economy grew at a rapid pace, providing millions of new jobs at all levels. Yet the jobless black youths simply did not turn up to take them. Instead, the opportunity was seized in large part by immigrants - including many blacks - mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean.

If Patterson seems impatient with the recent studies he surveys in his Op-Ed, he speaks here with a convert's zeal for truth. Patterson especially attacks the notion that these newly created entry-level positions are unacceptable because they pay beneath a living wage, citing Robert Waldinger’s work which showed that these jobs served as a type of revolving job-training (which also reveals how attempts to reduce inequality by raising the minimum wage can damage a mechanism for educational transfer to those citizens with the fewest job skills). Patterson then turns to the specific cultural mechanisms which he feels damage African-American male social aptitude. He particularly blames their attraction to an economically irrational anti-Establishment ideation, which he calls the 'cool-pose culture.' Chris Rock, of course, was less polite.

Developing this link between anti-Establishment ideation and contemporary black culture, Blogsforindustry points to a John McWhorter article about the attractiveness of rebellion for rebellion's sake, which McWhorter styles "therapeutic alienation" (in a particularly good jibe at Marcuse). McWhorter writes that:

Whites' alienation from the Establishment began, of course, as a genuine and concrete opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as racism. The countercultural movement effected profound transformations in American society that all of us are thankful for today. However, there was, amidst the constructive efforts, always a certain gut-level thrill in the sheer rebelliousness in itself. As such, it was not surprising that after the smoke cleared, a mood was left in the air, finding pleasure in rebellion for its own sake. Action devolved into gesture, as the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland disappeared and left just his smile.

That legacy lives on in mainstream American culture today, in the form of a spontaneous embrace of anti-Establishment sentiment in a great many people, expected in particular of the educated and/or thinking person. Certainly plenty of active, committed political activism remains. But there is also a general psychological legacy which expresses itself not in outright rejection of the Establishment or concentrated efforts to change it, but in quiet attitudes now taken as normal that would throw most people brought to our America from as recently as 1960. David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise captures this perfectly: people living lives intimately tied to grand old middle-class Establishment values and concerns who go to great lengths to ensure that their kids perform well enough on tests to get into top schools, but who decorate their lives on the edges with genuflections to the counterculture in terms of artistic taste, dress style, food and voting choices.

But while Blogsforindustry ties this countercultural affect to an exceptional individualism rooted in the American Revolution, Bobos identifies a trend wholly absent in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This countercultural fetish has a more likely source: the separation of moral value from progressive struggle that happened as the New Left took over the progressive movement from the traditional Left. The successful progressive movements in American life (abolition, temperance, suffrage, direct election, civil rights) all tied their causes to moral (often explicitly religious) visions of America—not achieving virtue through withdrawal, but by active transformation. The failed social movements often had similarly utopian visions, but were isolationist (Brook Farm) or separationist (IWW, KKK) rather than fashioned in the unifying language of civil religion that has become political gospel since the Civil War. As the possibility of shared American values started to be more closely interrogated in the late 1960s by a generation personally unfamiliar with collective national sacrifice for moral cause, some people began to view the rights and living standard that they were party to as natural, secured to the individual by virtue of birth, rather than as the result of a shared American narrative of national improvement. We moved from Frost's conception of America's ownership of Americans (how well matched with Kennedy: "Something we were withholding made us weak / Until we found out that it was ourselves / We were withholding from our land of living") and Winthrop's of the City on the Hill, both part of the patristic myth of America, to one more skeptical of our inheritance and angry at its deprivations. Part of this reflects a healthy expansion of the American conception of universal human rights, but the conception of rights as independent from the institutions that nurtured them (and indeed of the 'true' expression of rights as rebellion against those institutions) was novel and unrealistic. (Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies illumines this point better than I might.) The foreign policy idealism that flourished in this anti-historicist clime was an antidote to the worst realpolitik, but was also part and parcel of a movement that rejected traditional sources of value affirmation in favor of a free-floating reaction against hegemony (one that ironically supported many dictatorial Third World movements as long as they were on the other side). But by rejecting a traditional hermeneutic, the political left unanchored its movement from a shared neutral language of moral value in favor of an embrace of the politicization of identity. That is, it is not that white alienation from the Establishment began in the wake of the late 1960s, as McWhorter argues, but rather that in the late 1960s this alienation became severed from the collective call to reform, and turned inwards as a circular self-justification for abandoning social norms. The sense of rights entitlement (rather than rights-in-struggle) and a turn towards value pluralism both reflected the dominant narcissistic character of the Boomers (who had grown up in the fat years of the post-War expansion) and contributed to the fracturing of the progressive caucus. It is as if everyone who read "Two Concepts of Liberties" decided to take the barbarian low ground.

For American blacks, the culture of rights entitlement that replaced a rights movement based on shared struggle meant the creation of a culture of desert, one that fed into powerful victim narratives nourished by the hateful inheritance of slavery and Jim Crow. The movement replaced the active march for participatory liberty with inherently passive requests for legislative protection and provender, and the value pluralism and identity politics that arose amidst the decentralized and anti-liberal theories of the New Left turned minority groups into factions competing for limited political resources. The increasing statism under Johnson and Nixon did not liberate American blacks, but instead replicated the paternalistic reward-and-punishment logic of slaveholding in the form of housing projects, welfare, and an expanding drug war. This official relation to the state to the minority did not accelerate the rise of a white popular culture that fetishized certain traits of anti-Establishment authenticity racistly attributed to black males (or more specifically, to the white ideal of the black male, the ultimate negative space for the projection of radicalism in America). That culture already existed. But the dearth of moral leadership in the African American community after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the forced retirement of John Lewis at SNCC, assisted its acceptance as a lifestyle.

Patterson notes the attractiveness of a such a culture without the force of attendant obligation, comparing the attraction of street life to a drug itself. Essentially, Patterson’s observation is similar to Anya Kamenetz’s observations regarding Generation Y's pursuit of unrealistic and self-involved goals, except that it describes a tragically real phenomenon of cultural disintegration, or rather one unshielded by the phenomenal wealth, education, and lack of irony by which Kamenetz and so many of her fellow travelers are protected. (It is surely symptomatic of the same social problem). Patterson notes that African-American males aren’t stupid, and know the economic consequences of their avoidance of educational and economic responsibility. (Steven Levitt’s work on drug dealers’ residences surely reveals this as well: who chooses to live with one’s mother on a rational economic basis?) However, this street lifestyle provides, if not economic success, autonomy and white respect. The significance of white respect for this anti-Establishment posture is considerably more complicated than McWhorter's or Patterson's narratives, and perhaps as influential in modern black male self-fashioning as the autonomy offered in the street. The mask of black male authenticity, which has been appropriated for years by white culture as the ultimate signifier of outsider freedom (the tragic legacy paradox of slavery: free black as continual ratio difficilis) has had a particularly insidious quality when applied to black faces. The burnt cork is very difficult to wipe off: the paint becomes the man.

Patterson states that African-American males have fairly high subgroup self-esteem ("young black men and women have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups"), and that this self-esteem is specifically engendered by white male respect. This is a respect unlikely to accrue to responsible earners, especially towards African-Americans in the service industry, or with government jobs. Or as Cam’ron might say, "All my whole life I heard, 'Go to school, get an education, go to college.' What the fuck for? So I can get a job making 30,000 a year? Pay back my student loans? Plus, how the fuck am I gonna buy Lamborghinis, Ferraris and go to Miami ten times a year!?" This is what we might call in the business a self-aware critique. Patterson calls it the "Dionysian trap" of the "cool-pose culture," a disconnect from responsibility fueled by an appropriating mass culture which has adopted black modes of signification into its core language ("Hip-hop, pro basketball, and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie," Patterson says, making a legitimate bid for academic obvious statement of the year (saved by the clever cherry/apple substitution)). Cam’ron has the fantasy simpler: "Lights, Cameras, Action, Movie Script, / Cut! This is real life movie shit." And the movie fantasy is just as damaging to poor whites in its sway (those who do not, pace Patterson, know when to put down the 50 Cent and pick up the SAT prep), as it can be for black youth.

Eric Lott, in his seminal book, Love and Theft (1993 [yes, Dylan’s minstrel ballad album took its title from this book; Bob Zimmerman is still two steps ahead of the game]), identifies how the American minstrel tradition signifies the instabilities of the dynamic racial and class hierarchies even as it plays within them. To wit:

Where representation [of blackness] once unproblematically seemed to imagine forth its referent, we must now think of, say, the blackface mask as less a repetition of power relations than a signifier for them–a distorted mirror, reflecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities between which and the social field, there exist lags, unevenness, multiple determinations.

The minstrel form had its roots in white representations of anxiety and desire for blackness, rather than in specific white representations of black cultural forms. The curious mockery that blackface performance took on in the mid nineteenth-century—a perverse Carnival, where the ruling class put on the garb of the subjected, not for a Bakhtinian cathartic reversal of the normally taboo, but rather for a dynamic recirculation around the existing social order—seems to be explained by the collective anxiety of minstrelsy's audience about the place of the free black in a white society that defined its freedom negatively, in terms of slavery, and yet also longed for the particular freedom that only a free black man could possess. In the evolution of American popular music culture after the Civil War, the presence of the free black destabilized this trope, preserving white desire for black authenticity, but uneasily circling about its newly unshackled subject.

As Jim Crow was finally repealed, and the explicit legal limitations on black freedom were removed, the Carnival wheel spun dangerously free. In taking ownership of the appropriated representations of black authenticity, black artists (increasingly visible in the 1960s to white audiences and not just played on race radio) availed themselves of their potentially radical critique of American society, but also became (all too willingly) complicit in the minstrel tradition’s use of blackness to signify the radical other. The white minstrels haven’t gone away, but in the diminishment of the power relations that informed the original performance, the color of the skin behind the mask has taken on less importance (especially as producers like Kanye, Jay-Z, and Pharrell, increasingly become distributors). The mask, the imprisoning posture of cool, has become more significant, and more seductive, than that which it had previously concealed. Or as another Dipset member, Juelz Santana, might say: "Now listen, you could either comprehend it / or compliment it: it’s all authentic / —yup but you better believe whenever I say, / no homo, you could bet your balls / I meant it."

The complicated heritage of American cultural performance and its attendant worship of an authenticity racistly constructed out of stereotypes of the black male (criminality, freedom, misogyny, the untamed phallus) has produced a mass culture attractive to both whites and blacks. Patterson should observe out-of-wedlock birth rates and drug use patterns (as well as similar attitudes towards work, education, and fatherhood) in rural white communities before he solely bemoans the loss of young black men to the “cool-pose culture.” The ‘wigga’ is a (stale) joke on SNL, and a tired slur in the hands of those who mean to define African-Americans downwards as the determined result of a nearly unbreakable cultural shackle they did not forge, but the poisoned fruit of slavery’s demonization of labor and disintegration of family were actively discussed as problems for both poor whites and blacks by DuBois and Douglass: has the feudal aristocracy of the plantation faded so far from our shared memory, or have our attitudes towards physical labor changed so much? Much of the current debate over immigration, with its chorus of "jobs Americans won't do," argues otherwise.

All of this is not to argue for censorship. Coke rap is a symptom, and the "multiple determinations" that exist within our complicated musical history cannot be erased or morally simplified, nor would any but a foolish authoritarian think that seizing mixtapes would increase graduation rates in the B-X. But the renaissance in urban material consumption and what Christgau called in this year's Pazz and Jop "grotesque coke nostalgia" are troubling signs that a lack of black moral leadership and shared cultural bankruptcy have allowed MLK's dream for black Americans to stagnate into entitled separatism.

I say ‘dangerously free’ above, which is an odd thing to hear on a generally libertarian blog. But the cultural legacy of America, a moral triumphalism which saw in slavery the ultimate evil, and therefore in its opposite the ultimate good, has not tempered that freedom with responsibility. A defining question for Americans as we move to a post-liberal polity must be how to protect the vital gains made for liberty in the last fifty years, while also articulating a set of shared values. However evil the laws that coerce, freedom without (and indeed, from) value is a hollow freedom. It is the siren of free desert. The gains of the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements were tied to their transformative conception of American society as one unjust without the eradication of the legal boundaries to participation in its bounty. While the mechanism for the most significant change was liberal, the language was not one of liberty in a vacuum, but of transformational justice. America, and its attendant rights, are a shared moral struggle, and not an individual entitlement. This is not mere nationalism or exceptionalism, but a realization that the American Dream is not for any individual to live alone unimpeded (a Stoic’s victory), but that any American might fashion for him or herself a place within the City on the Hill. If we lose sight of the possibility of a unified vision, and surrender to either the restless anomie of freedom without value, or values antithetical to the American project of inclusion, than we will have lost our civic religion.

(Part II: Why losing civic faith is bad: Schmitt, Inequality, and Christopher Lasch, to follow.)