The statistics on African-American underperformance in school are depressing and familiar, but just in case you've forgotten:

o       Only about half of African-American students who enter high school graduate;

o       Those who do graduate from high school test at the same level as white students graduating from the 8^th grade;

o       The National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency that tracks education scores across the nation, recently reported that "Black-white gaps in mathematics and reading achievement appeared at every grade studied…Compared with white children, blacks scored lower on mathematics tests at every grade level studied between grades 1 and 12.  Black-white mathematics gaps were usually similar in size for both boys and girls…Compared with whites, blacks also scored lower on reading tests at every grade level studied between grades 1 and 12.  Black-white reading gaps did not differ consistently for boys and girls."

This situation is a looming disaster for African-Americans, one that threatens to undo all of the progress we've made since the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement.

McWhorter (a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and contributor to The Root) is a controversial thinker whose work has not been accepted with universal acclaim by African-American scholars and commentators.  Many experts who have studied the academic underperformance of African-American students point to racism, poverty, teacher expectations, school funding and other external factors as causes.

But no one who has spent any significant amount of time with African-American teenagers over the past 20 years can fail to have observed that far too many of our children see the behaviors that lead to success in school as fundamentally foreign to their conception of authentic blackness.

McWhorter may well be a bit glib in his dismissal of the still-present external factors to the achievement gap.  But it is impossible to dismiss his thesis that a "cult of anti-intellectualism" is a major contributor:

"The main reason black students lag behind all others starting in kindergarten and continuing through graduate school is that a wariness of books and learning for learning's sake as 'white' has become ingrained in black American culture…To be culturally black, sadly, almost requires that one see books and school as a realm to visit rather than live in," he writes.

America is entering a moment in history when, for the first time, our future prosperity, if not survival, will depend more on our intellectual capital than on our military might.  That makes Jacoby's argument that we are slowly succumbing to the weight of a new and virulent American unreason especially pertinent.  And it makes the cult of African-American anti-intellectualism profoundly disturbing, so much so that I marvel at our willingness, as African-American adults, to accept it without more protest.

Harold J. Logan is a businessman, writer and social entrepreneur who lives in Atlanta. A former metro and national reporter of the Washington Post, he is a cofounder of the W.E.B. Dubois Society.