It's nice to see liberal oxes gored in a magazine for liberals. John McWhorter has a good review of Amy Wax's book "Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century" in TNR. I would say that overall, McWhorter underestimates the effect of discrimination (current and past) on black culture. However, that is not what I want to talk about. McWhorter begins by recounting a parable from the book:
Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience—and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”Accepting this for argument's sake, how can you reconcile this with Wax's rhetorical question:
“Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?”Now think back to the pedestrian analogy. Does anyone else see a problem?
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