I Love My Think Tank

For eight years after I got my P.h.D, I was a professor of linguistics. I first found myself involved with the media in 1996 when the Ebonics controversy hit. I happened to be the black linguist working closest to Oakland where the issue arose (I was at UC Berkeley), and so the media called me. As the result of a series of chance developments afterward, I wrote a book questioning the leftist orthodoxy on race. Somehow it got national attention, and I started to be asked to write and speak on the topic.This included writing for and speaking at the Manhattan Institute think tank in New York. A few years ago, I decided that I would be able to do my second career as a race commentator better by working for the Institute full-time in New York and doing linguistics research and writing independently (and, still, obsessively).That’s my story, a mundane one, really. I do two things. First, one of them put food on the table. Now, the other one does.Yet many see something sinister in my career move. There is a cartoon stereotype of black thinkers who stray from the left as “sellouts” allowing white plutocrats to ply them with vast riches to get their heartless, racist views into the political discourse disguised by a black face. Because the Manhattan Institute is a conservative organization, then, my working for them is thought of by some as a cynical, traitorous ploy: I “play a conservative on TV,” so to speak.The aforesaid riches, for the record, have eluded me so far. However, I am more interested in clarifying a thing or two else about what it is to work for a conservative think tank. Because I consider my second career a life’s mission, I would prefer that my ideas be evaluated — whether accepted or rejected — without the distraction of juicy street myths.For one, the wording often used to describe my relationship with the Manhattan Institute suggests that there is some secret afoot. The Manhattan Institute is, we hear, my “patron” — a word that implies something below-ground, requiring smoking out. There is a similar air to the frequent wording that I am “supported by” the Manhattan Institute.These terms would seem incommensurate with my regularly billing myself as I do at the end of this column. But to the extent that this is somehow considered insufficiently explicit, I might specify: I am “supported by” the Manhattan Institute just as a middle manager is “supported by” the company she works for. That is, the Manhattan Institute is not my “patron,” they are my employer. They sign my paycheck, just as UC Berkeley used to. The Manhattan Institute is where I go to work. I have a card that buzzes me past the building’s front desk. It’s my job.This brings us to another point. Last Friday I opened the Times to be greeted by a photo of me illustrating a story arguing that conservative think tanks instruct their writers to shill for corporations that give them contributions. My sin was saying on a radio show a year ago (in passing amidst a discussion of several issues) that Wal-Mart provides jobs for lower-income black people. At least the photo was good — black don’t crack! However, the notion that the Manhattan Institute sits its writers down and instructs us to speak in favor of corporations that give us money is fiction.I had no idea Wal-Mart was one of our funders and have never been apprised of a list of such — nor have any of my colleagues. Rather, naturally as someone employed by a free-market think tank, I do not see Wal-Mart as the scourge to humanity that it has become fashionable to claim. The less-than-generous health insurance they offer is a problem, and to me suggests a new discussion about national health insurance. But I said Wal-Mart offers gainful employment to poor blacks because it is, quite simply, true, as plenty of black community representatives have been noting for years.There is nothing sleazy about the Manhattan Institute. Its employees like me are simply people who express what they believe. Again, once, my employer was UC Berkeley and race commentary was a hobby. Now, it’s vice versa. There is no sinister drama in this.There will always be those who see racism as an implacable scourge that ought make all black people indignant radicals. However, at my wedding last weekend — where my wife’s liberal Times-reading relatives laughingly consoled me for being depicted in the article as a right-wing hack they have never seen in me — watching my cousin Buster Thompson cutting a rug with my new aunt Amy Silverberg was the kind of thing that will keep me convinced that we’ve come a lot further than we are often told.Opinions will differ. But when I express mine, it won’t be because my “patron” told me to, and I will say to them loudly: I’m black, I work for the Manhattan Institute, and I’m proud.Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

I Love My Think Tank

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