Nearly a decade after having been written, Losing the Race remains a rich and powerful account of the contemporary American racial divide.

McWhorter makes it clear that, although we often tend to imagine that many (perhaps most) African Americans are poor folks suffering in inner cities, in fact only 1 in 4 African Americans can be considered "poor" on any metric and only 1 in 5 makes their home in "the ghetto". Thus, McWhorter's main task is to address the following question: Why, 40 years after civil rights, are middle and upper class black folks still achieving less than their Asian and Caucasian analogues?

McWhorter offers a compelling thesis: The majority of black Americans have failed to bridge the academic/intellectual gap not because of any overt racism or oppression on the part of white folks nor because of any innate intellectual inferiority but rather because the LEGACY of segregation/oppression led to a culture wide sense of insecurity that is cashed out in terms of eternal victimhood. McWhorter argues, convincingly to my mind, that the role of eternal victim has been subconsciously internalized by mainstream African American society and has been the impetus behind the currents of separatism and anti-intellectualism found therein.

This thesis is certainly controversial, but McWhorter provides us with strong arguments and a good dose of empirical data in support of his position. A review is no place to run through all of that, but, suffice it to say, the major positive contribution of McWhorter's study is this: rather than campaigning against racist boogeymen and arguing for special preferences, the best way for the black community to address the achievement gap is to look inward and combat the pervasive and (at this point) often unjustified sense of victimhood and separation found in many of its subsets.

My only gripes with the book are fairly minor in the grand scheme.

First, I think McWhorter may down play to amount of racism that still infects the white community and thus effects the black community. I agree with his contention that things are getting better every day, but one wonders if, ensconced as he has been in think tanks and ivory towers, McWhorter has had as much experience with the casual racism that still exists in many communities. Now, he is correct to say that this is still not a sufficient excuse for the very real and very troubling achievement gap, but I still think he might've downplayed the lingering effects of racism.

My other major gripe is that the book can get very repetitive. Now, this may've been necessary if the goal was to beat the point home to an audience that was expected to be rather unsympathetic the the ideas being discussed. Nonetheless, I think at least 50 of the book's 275 pages probably could've been edited out without changing the book in any substantive way. ( )

A controversial look at three areas plaguing black America -- the cult of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism. A great book for teachers to understand the culture and psychology of African American students. ( )