Berkeley professor of linguistics John McWhorter, apparently brought to outcry from his experience of the inferior quality of work done by black students he taught at Cornell, Stanford and Berkeley, risks lynching by other African-Americans for passages like this from his new book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America:

…the time has come for us to reconceive the black college

professor who sits in the trendy new restaurant emoting

about how oppressed he is between forkfuls of gourmet

pasta, his free hand alternating languidly between his

six-dollar glass of cabernet and his white significant

other’s knee under the table, and [who is] about to catch

a twenty dollar shuttle to the airport the next morning to fly to a conference where

he will meet dozens of African Americans just like him, most of whom got special

attention on their job searches because of their color, and most of whose research

has been funded by universities that bend over backwards to shower grants upon as

much minority-oriented research as possible. Okay, four years ago this professor

was driving through a white neighborhood in his Honda Accord and a policeman

pulled him over on a drug check. But why, if ‘Success Runs in Our Veins,’ if we

survived centuries of slavery, if we are so wonderful, does that episode negate the

victory and richness of the rest of this professor’s life? What kind of oppression is

this?

McWhorter appears to courageously confront what he characterizes as the victimhood built into American black culture, rejecting both the “congenital dumbness” argument of Jensenism and the Bell Curve, and the forgiving noblesse oblige explanations of liberals which demand no responsibility from African Americans for countering their oppression. New York Observer