it comes in pints?

Speaking truth to power

Juan Williams delivers a stinging op-ed in the LATimes today. Registration is required, so I'm excerpting more than I probably should.

The Hard Facts of Black America
A journalist decried as a turncoat by community leaders defends his views on African Americans helping themselves.

By Juan Williams, JUAN WILLIAMS is a senior correspondent for National Public Radio, a Fox News analyst and author of "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America"

October 12, 2006

WHY NOT just go ahead and call me an Uncle Tom and a sellout? Why bother with trying to put a new coat of paint on the same old personal attacks by saying that I am "demeaning black people," that I'm the "black Ann Coulter" and a turncoat against the cause of racial progress for black people in the United States?

That's a sampling of the nastiness flying at me since I wrote a book that holds today's civil rights leaders accountable for serious problems inside black America. I've suggested that many poor people are capable of helping themselves by graduating high school, keeping a job and having children when they're married and ready to be parents.

It is easier to attack me than to deal with some hard facts. Here I go again, but let's look at the facts.

One hard, unforgiving fact is that 70% of black children are born today to single mothers. This is at the heart of the breakdown of the black family, the cornerstone of black life for generations...

It is easier to attack me than to deal with the hard fact of a dropout rate now at about 50% nationwide for black and Latino students...

And what about the tragic fact of a 25% poverty rate among black Americans? That's more than twice the 12% national poverty rate and more than triple the poverty rate among whites.

My critics are busy blaming racism for all this poverty. But that tactic is losing its punch because so many people of color, including black people from Africa and the Caribbean, arrive in this country and outperform native-born black people in educational achievement and income...

The core group of black people trapped in poverty today is not defined by lack of opportunity as much as by bad choices. Black youth culture is boiling over with nihilism... "Keeping it real" and "street cred" in that destructive world require gunshot victims, the "N-word" and treating women as "bitches" and "hos." There is no arguing that this is a sick mind-set...

Yet I'm condemned for asking why today's prominent civil rights leaders, such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters, are not dealing with these problems. They prefer to call for more government programs and more white guilt.

And yet a poll done by the Pew Research Center a week after Hurricane Katrina found that two-thirds of black Americans agree with 75% of white Americans who say that too many poor people are overly dependent on government programs. In other words, a clear majority of the nation, including most black people, are saying that the poor need to look in the mirror and halt self-defeating behavior...

These are the facts, whether or not you call me a Tom — and whether or not I write them.

Posted by Ken S at October 12, 2006 07:50 AM | TrackBack (0) |