Have you applauded President Barack Obama's new "My Brother's Keeper" initiative? Did you nod approvingly when Wisconsin's Rep. Paul Ryan spoke recently about the culture that leaves so many people jobless in America's inner-cities? If you had either of those responses, you'd be well served to read the written debate between New York magazine's Jonathan Chait and The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates. Actually, you should read it even if you didn't.
These are two heavyweights debating one of the more pressing issues of our times: How might we help poor black people do better? Are the problems poor black people face of their own making? Or are the problems outside their control? If the problems are of their own making - i.e., if it's culture - then one might assume that the answer can be found by lecturing them until they straighten up their acts. But if the problems are not of their own making, then there's no amount of finger wagging or pep talks or kicks in the rump that's going to make a difference.
Chait, in a piece called "Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Poverty, and Culture" suggests that after a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, we might expect there to be a "cultural residue" that becomes for those folks' descendants "an impediment to success."
Coates responds with a piece called "Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind." In detailing there the great lengths newly emancipated black folks went to in legalizing marriages, searching for sold-off children, learning to read and building schools, he finds it curious that the "residue" of which Chait speaks wasn't observable in the late 19th century. And if wasn't there then, why would it be present now? "I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be 'independent' of white supremacy," Coates writes. " I have not found one."
As I said earlier, this is one of the more pressing issues of our times. But Coates - who in my mind is the clear winner of this debate - makes plain that it's a debate that's been going on for well over a century. There were people in the late 1800s who were arguing that it was the fault of those who had just been enslaved that they weren't further along than they were. If the absurdity of those long-ago arguments is clear to us, why isn't it just as plain the absurdity of the same arguments being made today?