Winning the Race

In his first major book on the state of black America since the New York Times bestseller Losing the Race, John McWhorter argues that a renewed commitment to achievement and integration is the only cure for the crisis in the African-American community.

Winning the Race examines the roots of the serious problems facing black Americans today—poverty, drugs, and high incarceration rates—and contends that none of the commonly accepted reasons can explain the decline of black communities since the end of segregation in the 1960s. Instead, McWhorter posits that a sense of victimhood and alienation that came to the fore during the civil rights era has persisted to the present day in black culture, even though most blacks today have never experienced the racism of the segregation era.

McWhorter traces the effects of this disempowering conception of black identity, from the validation of living permanently on welfare to gansta rap’s glorification of irresponsibility and violence as a means of “protest.” He discusses particularly specious claims of racism, attacks the destructive posturing of black leaders and the “hip-hop academics,” and laments that a successful black person must be faced with charges of “acting white.” While acknowledging that racism still exists in America today, McWhorter argues that both blacks and whites must move past blaming racism for every challenge blacks face, and outlines the steps necessary for improving the future of black America.

Winning The RaceIntroduction

TRACING IT

Chapter One
The Birth of the Inner City: The Conventional Wisdom

Chapter Two
The Birth of the Inner City, Part One: Indianapolis

Chapter Three
The Birth of the Inner City, Part Two: The Saga

Chapter Four
Why Are You Talking About Blacks on Welfare?

FACING IT

Chapter five
The Meme of Therapeutic Alienation: Defined by Defiance

Chapter Six
What About Black Middle-Class Rage?

Chapter Seven
What About the View from the Ivory Tower?

ERASING IT

Chapter Eight
Therapeutic Alienation Meets Hitting the Books: "Acting White" and Affirmative Action Revisited

Chapter Nine
The "Hip-Hop Revolution": Therapeutic Alienation on a Rhythm Track

Chapter Ten
Therapeutic Alienation as a Plan of Action? New Black Leadership for New Negroes

Chapter Eleven
Conclusion

Appendix
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Splendid. . . . McWhorter’s answers are anything but orthodox. . . . [He] has a keen eye for the foibles of social scientists. (The Wall Street Journal)

Provocative . . . both grounded in history and forward-looking. (Publishers Weekly)

A provocative challenge to conventional wisdom. (USA Today)John McWhorter is the author of the bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, and four other books. He is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor to The City Journal and The New Republic. He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.