John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, is hard on us in public in his new book, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America." He attempts to call a spade a spade, and more power to him. If only his reasoning weren't sometimes so reductive. The result is a collection of half-thought-through ideas that never bothers to truly tackle the complexities of post-civil-rights era America.

McWhorter reminds us of what every other black conservative has been reminding us of for decades: There exists within our community what he terms a "cult of victimology." McWhorter and his ideological forefathers Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell feel that a passive sense of whiny self-pity so pervades most of the rest of us black people that we've stopped trying to excel and instead wait around for whites to give us things (like entrance into elite universities).

He and his mentors are not completely wrong. There certainly are black people whose perception of the degree to which the white world is arrayed against them is several years out of date. It's the "Jew eat" effect. In "Annie Hall" Woody Allen is convinced the network executive he was meeting with said, "Jew eat," instead of "Did you eat?" What's lovely about this exchange in the movie and maddening about it in real life is that yes, the Woody Allen character is paranoid but, no, that doesn't mean he doesn't live in a world still steeped in anti-Semitism.

The main flaw in McWhorter's thesis is the extent to which this "cult of victimology" affects the vast majority of black people today. Proof of the flaw comes from McWhorter himself. In his "Article of Faith Number One: Most Black People Are Poor," he reminds us that three-quarters of African-Americans are not poor. We blacks and whites just think of black folks as a people of the poor.

So if we're no longer poor then what "race" are we "losing"? How many of us are "self-sabotaging" if most of us hold some sort of job and have had some sort of schooling?

For the corollary to McWhorter's "cult of victimology," he echoes Steele and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom by saying that the white majority has encouraged this black victim mentality "out of a sense of moral obligation." The Thernstroms obsessed over this notion in their immense and confused work, "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible," and McWhorter scrupulously follows their party line. McWhorter believes that a majority of white Americans are "cowed by the insistence of so many black people that the country is still a racist war zone."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"