JOHN MCWHORTER COMMENTARY: Burned, Baby, Burned

Thanks to several readers, who emailed this commentary to me. The moderate linguistics professor and commentator says that while many people this month are focused on the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, another anniversary is on his mind: the infamous Watts riots in Los Angeles on Aug. 11, 1965. He argues that the riots have shaped modern black American history more so than the Voting Rights Act, and - influenced by the white counterculture movement and white socialists - launched a new and misguided tactic of menacing protest and rebellion for its own sake: "The idea that rebellion for its own sake was the soul of black authenticity began with some charismatic figures like Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, but soon imprinted a new generation of black artists and intellectuals. The new mood was seductive in its visceral impact, especially to a people whose history had given them so little else to base an identity upon. Certainly not all blacks fell for it. But enough did that some hotheads surrounding some police cars in Watts one night could spark a vast rebellion instead of being shouted down and ignored. Why not just embrace August 1965 as the time when black America, for whatever reason, started 'speaking up?' Because to settle for this is to ignore the destruction of black communities that the new mood left in its wake. This was not only the physical destruction still on view in the black sections of cities like Detroit, or in less renowned cities like Indianapolis, where solid businesses never returned after the 1967 riot, leaving once-fabled Indiana Avenue hard to imagine as anything but the downmarket stretch that it has since been. There is the deeper destruction that was ultimately wrought. The hopeless plight of today's black inner city is often blamed on the flight of low-skilled factory jobs and the rise of drugs in poor urban neighborhoods. These factors surely contributed to inner-city misery, but my research leads me to conclude that they were hardly the leading causes of the psychic deterioration that soon overtook poor black America. That, instead, was the urban welfare state that was in large part the product of the model of high-pitched, menacing protest that had now been established...."

"The change was most profound in black communities -- because blacks had been the main target of the recruitment efforts. In Indiana from 1964 to 1972, welfare recipiency tripled in only 11 of 92 counties. Of those 11, only one did not have a heavy black population -- in a state where about 75 counties were almost all white and poverty widespread in about 30 of them. Over the next 30 years, multigenerational families lived on government money, fathers had no incentive to take care of the children they made, and poor black communities devolved from shabby but stable slums into hopeless, violent deathscapes. This lasted for so long that the precarious stability of old-time black communities was all but forgotten. But while communities changed, black attitude and political protest as performance has come to seem normal. The models for leadership are not Shirley Chisholms, but talkers like Al Sharpton. And when a spark falls, like the Rodney King verdict in 1992, the same impulses and often the same type of violence travel through black communities as did in Watts. These are the sad examples of what happened when agitprop went mainstream in black activism. The Watts riots were useful in helping push racial injustice further into the national conversation. But the kind of protest model Watts exemplified would best have been left on the margins, as it had always been."