Let me cite just a few paragraphs of his conclusion for a summation of the book and McWhorter's thesis:
My impression is that many readers came away from my Losing the Race wondering why black America took the turn it did in the sixties. People often took the message of that book as being "Black people need to look inward and help themselves." I have no major problems with that proposition, but my aim was to show why we had gotten to the point that this that this would be considered news at all. As far as I am concerned, we can leave it to the eight-hundred-word newspaper editorialists to just proclaim that something is wrong and leave us with a final sentence along the lines of "Maybe it's time for black America to wake up."
In this book I have tried to make clearer ust what made the difference between black America in 1960 and black America today, and what this means in terms of where we go from here and why. Specifically, I hope to have shown that the nut of this issue is that black America turned upside down in a particular ten-year period, from 1960 to 1970, and that this era has left us a legacy much more damaging today than anything racism has left us.
My argument has been that it is not true that the reason for modern black America's ills is racism. The reason is a cultural shift now forty years old, that manifests itslef in the form of a meme. This meme took hold of blacks and whites in the wake of the antiauthoritarian atmosphere of the countercultural revolution. After that revolution and the specific things that sparked it were over, the meme piggybacked on human psychology and stuck around. Namely, opposition as an identity gives a sense of purpose to people deprived of one for any number of reasons and is a handy way of refreshing even an identity less damaged. The result has been especially tragic in black America: a way of responding to the world and forming judgments that correspond fitfully to reality, if at all. To not understand this is to not understand black America's past, present, or future.
Question: is anyone in evangelicalism today saying such things? If not, why not?
