Now I know why people reject "linguistic culture"

[Harold F. Schiffman]

If I may be permitted a personal comment, this article explains to me why
some people in the field of language policy study reject my notion of
"linguistic culture."  I have seen and heard partial explanations before,
but now I think I get it--what he calls " the rejection [since the
mid-1960's] of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural
attribute--its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the
resulting behavior of its members [...]"

Hal Schiffman
**************************************************************************

>>From the NYTimes,
March 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
A Poverty of the Mind
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Cambridge, Mass.

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the
tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American
mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of
social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability
to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it. The main cause for
this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social
science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any
explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes its distinctive
attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its
members and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors
like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one
of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is
due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time
when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and
the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black
males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic
drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of
withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who
do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies "amount to
a tax on earnings." His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B.
Mincy of Columbia, the author of a study called "Black Males Left Behind,"
and Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is "pumping out boys
with no honest alternative."

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer
the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school
that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know
that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to
the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966,
have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of
education a young man remains illiterate. Nor have studies explained why,
if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does
not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India,
but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children--several of
them--which they have no resources or intention to support? And why,
finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?
What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts
seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who
takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory
power. Thus it's doubly depressing that the conclusions they draw and the
prescriptions they recommend remain mired in traditional socioeconomic
thinking.

What has happened, I think, is that the economic boom years of the 90's
and one of the most successful policy initiatives in memory--welfare
reform--have made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture. The
Clinton administration achieved exactly what policy analysts had long said
would pull black men out of their torpor: the economy grew at a rapid
pace, providing millions of new jobs at all levels. Yet the jobless black
youths simply did not turn up to take them. Instead, the opportunity was
seized in large part by immigrants--including many blacks--mainly from
Latin America and the Caribbean.

One oft-repeated excuse for the failure of black Americans to take these
jobs--that they did not offer a living wage--turned out to be irrelevant.
The sociologist Roger Waldinger of the University of California at Los
Angeles, for example, has shown that in New York such jobs offered an
opportunity to the chronically unemployed to join the market and to
acquire basic work skills that they later transferred to better jobs, but
that the takers were predominantly immigrants.

Why have academics been so allergic to cultural explanations? Until the
recent rise of behavioral economics, most economists have simply not taken
non-market forces seriously. But what about the sociologists and other
social scientists who ought to have known better? Three gross
misconceptions about culture explain the neglect.

First is the pervasive idea that cultural explanations inherently blame
the victim; that they focus on internal behavioral factors and, as such,
hold people responsible for their poverty, rather than putting the onus on
their deprived environment. (It hasn't helped that many conservatives do
actually put forth this view.)

But this argument is utterly bogus. To hold someone responsible for his
behavior is not to exclude any recognition of the environmental factors
that may have induced the problematic behavior in the first place. Many
victims of child abuse end up behaving in self-destructive ways; to point
out the link between their behavior and the destructive acts is in no way
to deny the causal role of their earlier victimization and the need to
address it.

Likewise, a cultural explanation of black male self-destructiveness
addresses not simply the immediate connection between their attitudes and
behavior and the undesired outcomes, but explores the origins and changing
nature of these attitudes, perhaps over generations, in their brutalized
past. It is impossible to understand the predatory sexuality and
irresponsible fathering behavior of young black men without going back
deep into their collective past.

Second, it is often assumed that cultural explanations are wholly
deterministic, leaving no room for human agency. This, too, is nonsense.
Modern students of culture have long shown that while it partly determines
behavior, it also enables people to change behavior. People use their
culture as a frame for understanding their world, and as a resource to do
much of what they want. The same cultural patterns can frame different
kinds of behavior, and by failing to explore culture at any depth,
analysts miss a great opportunity to re-frame attitudes in a way that
encourages desirable behavior and outcomes.

Third, it is often assumed that cultural patterns cannot change the old
"cake of custom" saw. This too is nonsense. Indeed, cultural patterns are
often easier to change than the economic factors favored by policy
analysts, and American history offers numerous examples. My favorite is
Jim Crow, that deeply entrenched set of cultural and institutional
practices built up over four centuries of racist domination and exclusion
of blacks by whites in the South. Nothing could have been more cultural
than that. And yet America was able to dismantle the entire system within
a single generation, so much so that today blacks are now making a
historic migratory shift back to the South, which they find more congenial
than the North. (At the same time, economic inequality, which the policy
analysts love to discuss, has hardened in the South, like the rest of
America.)

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of
young black men? They aren't always obvious. Sociological investigation
has found, in fact, that one popular explanation  that black children who
do well are derided by fellow blacks for "acting white"  turns out to be
largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race
schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went
back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black
girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys
either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she
found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and
going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what
sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply
too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug,
hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply,
sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that
almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best
entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said,
it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also
explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young
black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all
ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they
were doing in school.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to
note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not
disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful
support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional
basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white
Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when
it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book. For young
black men, however, that culture is all there is or so they think. Sadly,
their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural
mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and
self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the
socioeconomic mainstream.

Of course, such attitudes explain only a part of the problem. In academia,
we need a new, multidisciplinary approach toward understanding what makes
young black men behave so self-destructively. Collecting transcripts of
their views and rationalizations is a useful first step, but won't help
nearly as much as the recent rash of scholars with tape-recorders seem to
think. Getting the facts straight is important, but for decades we have
been overwhelmed with statistics on black youths, and running more
statistical regressions is beginning to approach the point of diminishing
returns to knowledge. The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a
time-slice of a deep historical process that runs far back through the
cataracts and deluge of our racist past. Most black Americans have by now,
miraculously, escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth languishing
in the ghettos is the remains. Too much is at stake for us to fail to
understand the plight of these young men. For them, and for the rest of
us.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is the author of
"Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries."