John H. McWhorter has seen black America, and it is not pretty. It is a place populated by a people so seeped in pathology that a young girl is urged to smack a toddler who has the temerity to know how to spell the word "concrete." It is a place where nearly all African Americans, middle and upper class as well as poor, are unable to admit how much has changed since the days of segregated bathrooms and "Negroes need not apply." It is a place where African Americans have turned their back on education, convinced they can get by with shoddy scholarship and a smirk. It is a place where McWhorter has spent his life struggling against the prevailing thought.