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Republicans Don’t Think Culture is a Problem All of the Sudden
In 2004, the NAACP invited Bill Cosby to speak on the 50th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. Cosby informed the audience that black Americans could no longer blame white racism for high unemployment, mass incarceration, and poor academic achievement. Cosby stated that Black America has its own culture to blame for these undesirable outcomes.
Cosby’s speech sparked what became known as “the culture argument.” And it goes like this: Black conservatives argue there are negative aspects of black culture that are barriers to black advancement. While black liberals argue that there is nothing wrong with black culture, the systematic injustices that black people confront impede their progress.
Any honest person would recognize that “the cultural argument” is a false dichotomy. Two things can be true simultaneously without contradicting each other. Instead of black conservatives and liberals attempting to determine which problems were caused by cultural factors and which were byproducts of “the system,” the opposing camps only wanted to demonstrate why their side was right and the other was wrong.
Republican politicians who believed America was not a racist society reiterated the black conservative position, preaching that blacks were held back by cultural issues such as…