by Patrick Appel
Last week, the left pounced on Paul Ryan for saying that we “have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” TNC asks why only Ryan was called out:
What Ryan said here is not very far from what Bill Cosby, Michael Nutter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama said before him. The idea that poor people living in the inner city, and particularly black men, are “not holding up their end of the deal” as Cosby put it, is not terribly original or even, these days, right-wing. From the president on down there is an accepted belief in America—black and white—that African-American people, and African-American men, in particular, are lacking in the virtues in family, hard work, and citizenship … From what I can tell, the major substantive difference between Ryan and Obama is that Obama’s actual policy agenda regarding black America is serious, and Ryan’s isn’t. But Ryan’s point—that the a pathological culture has taken root among an alarming portion of black people—is basically accepted by many progressives today. And it’s been accepted for a long time.
Chait counters:
Coates treats the cultural explanation for African-American poverty and the structural explanation as mutually exclusive.
“I can’t think of a single credible historian of our 500-year tenure here,” he writes, “who has concluded that our problem was a lack of ‘personal responsibility.’” Not even Paul Ryan, whom Coates argued yesterday holds similar views to President Obama on this issue, believes personal responsibility is the singular, root cause of the African-American predicament. The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success. ….
Coates is committing a fallacy by assuming that Obama’s exhortations to the black community amount to a belief that personal responsibility accounts for a major share of the blame. A person worries about the things that he can control. If I’m watching a basketball game in which the officials are systematically favoring one team over another (let’s call them Team A and Team Duke) as an analyst, the officiating bias may be my central concern. But if I’m coaching Team A, I’d tell my players to ignore the biased officiating. Indeed, I’d be concerned the bias would either discourage them or make them lash out, and would urge them to overcome it. That’s not the same as denying bias. It’s a sensible practice of encouraging people to concentrate on the things they can control.
The Dish 