John McWhorter’s controversial book is nothing if not fascinating. Hard to pin down on the political map (let’s just call him centrist) McWhorter feels that the number one thing keeping African-Americans down in this country is a condition known as Therapeutic Alienation — a holdout from the Civil Rights era. In a nutshell, McWhorter argues that blaming Whitey achieves nothing and (perhaps even more controversial) there isn’t even much to blame him for. Whitey’s worst crime of late (and he’s got the stats, graphs and charts to prove it) are the liberal post-Great Society programs that seemed like a good idea at the time, but may in fact be an example of the cure being worse than the disease. Basically, this is a very well written, thought out, funny-at-times, 400 page arguement against affirmative action. And, yes, McWhorter is black.
