With no disrespect meant to the estimable John McWhorter, it’s sad that “Winning the Race” (Gotham Books, 432 pages, $27.50) even had to be written. The book’s basic arguments are straightforward and unobjectionable, as are its prescriptions.

But the debate it contributes to is so poisoned that Mr. McWhorter’s ideas will doubtless be treated by many as they usually are – either as fundamentally facetious or as evidence that he is advancing a racist agenda at the behest of shadowy conservative forces.This is a shame. Mr. McWhorter is conservative mainly in the sense that he believes culture matters and that individuals are responsible for their own affairs, and it would be a good thing if he were treated not as a novelty but as a thinker.

Though it contains impressively argued refutations of various myths as to the source of the ills plaguing black communities across the nation, the main argument in this book is basically positive. It’s that culture matters, and that the change in American culture that took place in the 1960s – rather than the long legacy of racism in this country – is the cause of the unemployment, crime, and breakdown in basic social structures seen today in inner cities.

This argument can be taken too far. While Mr. McWhorter knows that hiphop is largely performance shtick, his lengthy assault on the music’s “in-your-face nihilism” is completely unconvincing. Despite his awareness that it isn’t to be taken at face value, he does so anyway.

Viewing art through a sociological lens is always silly. The nihilistic hiphop of clowns like Tupac Shakur is ridiculous because it’s bad music, not because its politics are absurd. In short, the effort Mr. McWhorter spends mocking those who claim to find revolutionary zeal in hip-hop would be better spent elsewhere.

Generally, though, Mr. McWhorter’s analysis is sound, resting not on vague notions of oppressive forces, but on concrete description. In dismantling the notion that Indianapolis’s black inner city descended from working-class to underclass because of the flight of jobs from downtown, for instance, he notes that the vast majority of the jobs went either a bus or car ride away.Why, then, did unemployment rise drastically?

There are two possible answers. Either black people were incapable of getting on buses and cars, or moving to the exurban areas where the jobs were, or they chose not to do so. A great many people will go to great lengths to explain why the first explanation is true, but it isn’t. Mr. McWhorter, in acknowledging that the second explanation is true and trying to puzzle out why it might be so, is just being intellectually honest.

Yet his approach is very different from that of most who write on these issues, and so he is able to write clearly about the cultural differences between the sort of people who will ride a bus to work and the sort who won’t – and, more important, their cause, which he states plainly: “I cannot help but see a connection between the fact that poor blacks took their bad turn exactly when a new sociopolitical consensus took over the country as a whole, including new governmental policies that encouraged poor blacks to build lives around it. Poor blacks drank in a new orientation towards traditional assumptions of what was normal.”

There is no easy way to turn back the clock to undo the damage done by the change in social norms – the rise of what Mr. McWhorter aptly calls “therapeutic alienation” – that took place in the 1960s and led to what we see in black slums today. Damage done by a change in culture can only be undone by another change in culture, and that’s not something that can be carried out by government programs, blue ribbon studies, academic panels, or even penetratingly blunt books on America’s racial crisis.

Mr. McWhorter, thankfully, is more than ready to acknowledge this. He argues that the crisis will only recede when individuals free themselves from the grip of alienation and begin the slow,patient work of building communities and establishing decent social norms. The better-off can help by not passing counterproductive laws and academic policies that blame problems on the white racism of the past and by instead insisting on individual accountability. But the badly off need to fix their own problems.

This sounds cold, but it isn’t. It’s just an acknowledgement of the difference between economic and cultural issues. If the problems of broken families and criminal behavior could be fixed by giving people money, they would have been fixed by now. Mr. McWhorter, simply by writing truthfully about what is still the most pressing problem in our cities – the persistence of an underclass consigned by bad policy, bad politics, and an ill-founded sense of righteous indignation to permanent ignorance and poverty – is doing more to solve that problem than a thousand activists agitating for money for the poor.

tmarchman@nysun.com