Here’s a little sample of McWhorter’s bulls**t; it’s from a 2003 piece in the neo-conservative magazine City Journal entitled “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back: Violence, misogyny, and lawlessness are nothing to sing about”:

“Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy “black community” here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. The kids ignored her. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. These teens clearly weren’t monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior—as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society.

What struck me most, though, was how fully the boys’ music—hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority—provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. A couple of his buddies would then join him. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation.

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.”

McWhorter’s black youth are the types conservatives love to vilify: too disobedient to be sweating out an 8 hour shift at McDonald’s for minimum wage, smile- on-face pledging allegiance to corporate America. These youth personify what conservatives have long argued is wrong with the black ‘underclass’: negative, anti-social behaviours and a lack of morals fostered by ghetto life. They are ultimately the product of an overly generous welfare state which turns welfare moms into baby machines and absentee fathers into food stamp fraudsters. Institutional and direct racism, the prison industrial complex, joblessness, and intergenerational poverty don’t fit in this analysis.

To understand the importance of McWhorter, you have to check the company he keeps. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute (MI), a conservative think-tank that was established in 1978 to attack and undermine the progress made by various social movements in the 1960s and 70s: the women’s movement, the black and brown power movements, and the labour movement. Funded by a coterie of rich right-wing philanthropists, MI has never been short of money and pays the likes of McWhorter a hefty salary to be propagandist-in- chief – or what they call ‘senior fellows’ – on particular issues (e.g. welfare, urban policy, foreign affairs etc.).

MI peeps are all smooth writers and gifted rhetoricians, but their access to the mainstream media has more to do with their conservative world-views than it does with their rhetorical skills. McWhorter doesn’t fit the MI as neatly as some of his comrades; he claims to be a liberal (and on some issues, like gay marriage, he is) but even today’s most prominent liberals, including Bill Clinton and President Obama, are on the victim-blaming tip when it comes to black poverty (just check Obama’s Popeye’s Chicken speech from 2008). Liberal or not, McWhorter took the big payout to be hip hop attack dog for the conservative MI and as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

At the time the MI was established, New York City was in the midst of an economic crisis. Since World War II, the City had become a more just place, with an expansive public hospital system, strong unions who worked to redistribute the city’s wealth more fairly, community control of some government services, and free tuition for the largely poor and working class students who attended the City University of New York. All this, like most things that make capitalism a little more humane, was the product of social struggles.

But for the Manhattan Institute, these victories for social and racial justice were the cause of New York’s problems: black youth didn’t know their place anymore; single mothers got big enough welfare checks that they didn’t have to stay in abusive or unloving relationships or in demeaning and dangerous jobs; poor kids were getting uppity with their university degrees; working people were constantly going on strike to demand better wages and working conditions; and so on. The mission of the MI was to restore class rule in New York City, and across the country, by giving a critical intellectual beatdown to those who favoured and fought for justice and equality. This is the political context in which McWhorter and his ilk must be understood.

Like other black conservatives such as Shelby Steele, McWhorter has made a career of telling the powerful what they want to hear. With his shallow commentaries on hip hop, he’s actively reinforcing white supremacist stereotypes about black youth; pathologizing the poor; blaming intergenerational poverty on ghetto behaviours and the so-called ‘culture of poverty’ while embodying  a politics that make worse the structural conditions of unemployment, deindustrialization, poorly funded schools and dilapidated housing facing inner-city blacks.

McWhorter knows his audience: conservative whites (and some conservative blacks) who strongly believe that their tax dollars should not be spent on things such as welfare, youth employment schemes, public housing, public health care, public schools (or anything else ‘public’ for that matter) that might slightly mitigate the massive colour-coded gap between rich and poor in American society. He’s become the right’s front-man on hip hop because it became strategically necessary to have a conservative response to progressive political initiatives which link hip-hop culture to left-wing political organizing, such as Vote or Die, Russell Simmons’ Hip Hop Summit Action Network, and the more radical National Hip Hop Political Convention.

It’s the height of irony that the hip-hop McWhorter criticizes most heavily is the violent and misogynist variety that glorifies gangsta life, for it’s this brand of rap that corporate America has so eagerly commodified and packaged for sale to millions of kids in the vanilla suburbs whose obsession with, and titillation by, the ‘realisms’ of inner-city black life have made it rain for capitalists (overwhelmingly white but increasingly black as well) in the music biz for so long.

Many of us criticize violence and misogyny in hip hop too, but we do it because we love the culture, want to foster its health, and know that more positive music is consistently sidelined by the big corporate labels. We don’t criticize to make political capital by stoking white (and some blacks’) fears of the culture (Aside: In terms of corporate hip-hop with negative messaging, the racial politics is becoming more complex. These days the likes of Jay Z and 50 Cent are as much implicated in this fuckery as the traditionally ‘white’ label honchos. And don’t give me that ‘they’re getting paper’ nonsense: there’s no excuse for pimping black death from the beaches of Saint Tropez).

But back to McWhorter. With his attacks on the so-called black ‘underclass’ and their ‘hip-hop soundtrack’, the man’s racial politics are clear: group progress comes through acquiescence to white supremacy; the message of a modern day Booker T Washington.

It’s time McWhorter be exposed for what he is: nothing but a cheap court jester who plays to the American throne of power and privilege.

-simon black