Poverty as Therapy?

There's an excerpt of a book called "Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America" by an black professor named John McWhorter. In the excerpt, he basically argues that life was better for blacks in the 1920's and 1930's because after the Civil Rights Movement, blacks were taught "therapeutic alienation." They adopted the fashionable role of the oppressed, and McWhorter argues that they'll hold on to that role even in the absence of racism. Well, you can read it for yourself, I may not be explaining it all that well...But there's something of it in this picture.