On Nigerians and Combating the Culture of Poverty…
Completely agree with your comments, and thanks for that. Nigerians are one of the groups highlighted in Amu Chua and Jed Rubenfeld’s book The Triple Package, which has as its topic what makes for a culture of success vs. a culture of failure.
Speaking anecdotally, I was first exposed to Nigerians in significant numbers as an undergrad at Yale, where many of the black people there (including one of my college roommates who’s still one of my best friends) were not African-Americans but Nigerians (other “black” people at Yale were often from the Caribbean or, if American, wealthy blacks from expensive prep schools, etc, which is why I always have to snicker when institutions like this start talking about their commitment to racial diversity, as if they’re out there in the vanguard extending a helping hand to poor kids from the ghetto). Since college I’ve run into more than a few Nigerians in New York, and every single one of them, without any exceptions that come to mind, has been an example of what you’re talking about. I’m sure there are many uneducated, stupid and bad Nigerians out there (someone has to be sending out those Nigerian spam e-mails, right…?), just like people from every other group, but at least within the émigré community here (not a representative sample, but still….), those negative categories seem pretty absent. And, yes, the fact that Nigerians have been so spectacularly successful in the U.S. and elsewhere is great evidence that the issue with African-Americans is about a combination of a cycle of poverty and a culture of poverty, not race (or racism). This may not be the politically correct approach certain people want to hear, but it’s the approach that’s actually in accordance with what the evidence keep telling us.
We’re never going to solve the problem we have here until we muster the political and personal courage to start talking about it frankly. In lieu of all those virtue-signaling, self-flagellating “frank conversation about racism” that elite white institutions like to conduct, what we need is to start having a frank conversation about the depravity and self-destructiveness of ghetto black American culture. When I refer to “the depravity and self-destructiveness of ghetto black American culture,” which is what I was describing in my article, I’m sure that nearly every American, including those who live in the ghetto themselves, knows exactly what I’m talking about, and yet they’re scared to raise the issue, or they make excuses for it, or they try to sugarcoat the situation by pointing out how vibrant and creative such culture has been in this country, even while blaming the obvious bad aspects of it (anti-intellectualism, thuggery, sexism, unrefined sexuality, vulgarity, materialism, violence, crime, promotion of drug use, etc.) on slavery, Jim Crow and continuing racism. What they don’t get is that it doesn’t matter anymore what led to the situation. Yes, slavery, Jim Crow and racism played a big role in the past. But so did the creation of a system of dependency on handouts and government benefits, the downside of Lyndon Johnson’s (not-quite-so-)Great Society. Most importantly, however, whatever its original causes may have been, this kind of culture has taken on a life of its own, and now we’re here, at this low point, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to go rifling through the past and disentangling who’s to blame for what and to what extent. That’s not going to solve any problems. As I’ve argued here, we need to stop being slaves to the past and start focusing on how we can fix the problem and create a better future. And all those whites cowering in fear on the sidelines aren’t doing any of us any good.
