This essay discusses a set of interlinked criticisms of black-American culture that have been put forward by commentators who are commonly associated with American conservatism. It looks in particular at the works of Dinesh D’Souza, John McWhorter, and Shelby Steele in light of ethnographic accounts of schooling and in terms of perspectives on rationality drawn from Jürgen Habermas and Dan Sperber. While the conservative assessments have the admirable aim of addressing perceived problems of black academic and professional underachievement, the critiques are often hampered by a lack of nuance, a narrow sense of means–ends rationality, and Platonic assumptions about culture. Nonetheless, these works are worthy of attention, especially in that they stimulate further thinking about the adequacies of anthropological conceptualizations of culture, ideology, belief transmission, and truth.
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