Back in April I posted (here and here) concerning a panel discussion I was on at U. Penn law school, the topic being U. Penn law professor Amy Wax’s new book, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.

John McWhorter has just published a striking review of Professor Wax’s book in The New Republic, online here.

By “striking” I of course mean “filled with gloom and despair.”

Wax usefully asks: “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?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right.