White May Be Might, But It's Not Always Right

Du Bois's frustrations led him to leave academia for a life of anti-racist activism. In 1910, the year he became director of research and publicity for the NAACP, he warned that "whiteness" was becoming the new basis of the nation's consciousness. "Are we not coming more and more day by day to making the statement, 'I am white,' the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality?" he asked.

In today's era of hip-hop, Du Bois's warning still goes unheeded. If rap music is so bad, why are white kids its major consumers? And by what value system should we judge the large media companies that publish and distribute hip-hop -- or, really, gangsta rap, its most popular and sinister cousin?

Were "white values" on display two years ago when the federal government failed to adequately respond to one of the greatest natural disasters in American history?

If lower-class "black" values are so distinct from those of the rest of America, particularly the "white values" supposedly now embraced by middle- and upper-class blacks, why, according to the Pew report, do less than a third of white Americans graduate from college? Are legions of whites similarly devaluing higher education? Are they "acting black"?

If lower-class black values are so peculiar, why do whites report the same or higher levels of illegal drug use as blacks, as numerous studies show?

What of underperforming white schoolchildren in rural America, the Great Plains, Appalachia or the Deep South? Are they "acting black" because they can't compete with their upwardly mobile suburban counterparts?

Today's liberals still empathize with America's invisible white working poor, who they warn are being "nickel and dimed" to the point of near homelessness. But why the empathy? Isn't their poverty really a function of their choosing to embrace their hidden blackness?

Du Bois's scholarship and activism helped pave the way for the modern civil rights movement, which helped exorcize the ghost of America's Jim Crow past. That he was right about racism but that we still continue to accept the same flawed thinking about race and social problems suggests a powerful and enduring paradox.

If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of black vs. white values, then we need to explain what exactly white values are. When we do, we'll find that whiteness is an inadequate standard by which to judge good black people vs. bad ones.

As my students would tell you, the real white world is as pathological, as respectable and as diverse as the black one.

kgmuhamm@indiana.edu

Khalil G. Muhammad is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University and the author of the forthcoming "The Condemnation of Blackness: Ideas about Race and Crime in the Making of Modern Urban America. "