In 2004, the NAACP invited Bill Cosby to speak on the 50th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. Cosby informed the audience that Black Americans could no longer blame White racism for high unemployment, mass incarceration, and poor academic achievement. Cosby stated that Black America has its own culture to blame for these undesirable outcomes.
Cosby’s speech sparked what became known as “the culture argument.” And it goes like this: Black conservatives argue there are negative aspects of Black culture that are barriers to Black advancement. While Black liberals argue that there is nothing wrong with Black culture, the systematic injustices that Black people confront impede their progress.
Any honest person would recognize that “the cultural argument” is a false dichotomy. Two things can be true simultaneously without contradicting each other. Instead of Black conservatives and liberals attempting to determine which problems were caused by cultural factors and which were byproducts of “the system,” the opposing camps only wanted to demonstrate why their side was right and the other was wrong.
Republican politicians who believed America was not a racist society reiterated the Black conservative position, preaching that Blacks were held back by cultural issues such as family breakdown, rejection of traditional values, mediocre educational standards, and Black-on-Black violence.
Of course, Democrats and notable left-wing thinkers maintained that the right’s depictions of Black cultural problems were the result of years of slavery, Jim Crow, and structural racism, and that any emphasis on negative parts of Black culture was victim-blaming and racist.
The cultural argument swiftly turned into partisan bickering, with conservatives criticizing Black culture and liberals defending it.
Thomas Sowell, a well-known Black conservative thinker, entered “the cultural argument” in 2005 with his collection of essays, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Republicans expected Sowell to dismantle the left’s defense of Black culture, but his viewpoint puzzled both sides.
Sowell recognized that cultural problems slowed Black growth, but the issue was not “Black culture” per se. It was the “ghetto” subculture within Black culture. More importantly, the “ghetto” subculture was not innate. It was inherited. Sowell explained that “Black ghetto culture originated in the dysfunctional White southern redneck culture that was prominent in the Antebellum South. That culture came from the ‘cracker culture’ of Welsh, Highland Scots, Ulster Scots, and border English, or ‘North Britons,’ who emigrated from Britain’s more lawless border regions in the eighteenth century.”
If Sowell was correct, the difficulties caused by the “ghetto” subculture stood out more among Blacks since they constituted just 13 percent of the U.S. population, but it was also a reflection of flaws within American culture itself.
Both sides rejected Sowell for their own reasons.
The right refused to accept that the “ghetto” subculture was an indictment of American culture in general, while the left disputed that there was any connection between the “ghetto” subculture and redneck culture. Unfortunately, “the cultural argument” lasted more than a decade, with each side talking past each other.
Then, in 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37-year-old tech entrepreneur and first-generation Indian American, ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Ramaswamy remarked that he was not just running a political campaign. He was launching a “cultural movement” to create a new American dream for the next generation.
The year before announcing his presidential run, Ramaswamy, who was virtually unknown, wrote the book Nation of Victims. He stated that the United States was in decline because “America’s inner spirit has been domesticated by a new culture that rejects excellence and embraces victimhood.” Ramaswamy accused both conservatives and liberals of cultivating a political culture of complaint and a social culture of mediocrity.
Since former President Donald Trump was guaranteed to win the Republican presidential nomination, the media paid little attention to the 37-year-old candidate, but Ramaswamy impressed Trump. After winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump appointed Ramaswamy and businessman Elon Musk to lead a new temporary agency, the Department of Government Efficiency. This means Ramaswamy will be in the national spotlight, and the media will closely scrutinize his every word.
Ramaswamy recently remarked that Silicon Valley is hiring more foreign-born engineers since American culture has championed mediocrity rather than excellence. He claimed that the drop in the number of Americans pursuing engineering is due to children growing up in a lazy culture that prioritizes the prom queen over the math Olympiad champion and the athlete over the valedictorian. Ramaswamy argued that America requires a cultural reset, which can only occur when American culture promotes achievement over normalcy and hard work over laziness.
Ramaswamy started another “culture argument,” but this time, Republicans aren’t interested in taking the same stance they did when the “cultural argument” focused on the negative parts of Black culture. Now that the debate has shifted to negative aspects of American culture, Republicans such as Nikki Haley have taken a defensive stance, asserting that there is nothing wrong with American culture.
Suddenly, for Republicans like Haley, culture no longer explains undesired outcomes.
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