Juan Williams Takes on the Black "Leaders"

Juan Williams is a senior correspondent for NPR and a frequent panelist on Fox News (and a frequent punching bag for Brit Hume on the Sunday show). I think Juan's probably a nice guy, just politically wrong, but any differences I might have with him will pale in comparison with the enemies he's likely to make with his new book "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America -- And What We Can Do About It.''

Ruben Navarrette writes a review of the book and its likely impact in the San Diego Union. Here's a portion of that review :

As you can guess from the title of his book, Williams has had a bellyful of African-Americans acting as their own worst enemy. He's tired of black people not having good leadership and instead settling for professional grievance brokers -- Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton et al -- who "misinform, mismanage and miseducate (the black community) by refusing to articulate established truths about what it takes to get ahead: strong families, education and hard work'' and who do all this for their own financial and political benefit because keeping people weak is a way to keep them dependent on their "leaders.''

Can I get an amen?

Convinced that many of the problems that black people face today can be solved by black people, Williams doesn't think the answer is to embrace victimhood, blame all your troubles on racism, and wait for white America to bail out black America in what he calls the "blacks-as-beggars'' approach.

And he's particularly incensed that you don't have more black leaders getting in the faces of black youth and telling them that -- in order to be a success -- you have to stay in school, study hard, speak proper English, stay away from crack and stop defining what it means to be authentically black as someone who is acting like a thug and "dressing like a convict.''

Can I get another amen?

Ned Lamont's new best friends, Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton aren't going to be happy to hear that. Navarrette indicates that part of Williams' inspiration was a tough speech by Bill Cosby:

This should sound familiar. Williams draws much of his inspiration from the now infamous speech delivered by comedian Bill Cosby on May 17, 2004, to a few thousand members of the black elite who gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Instead of basking in how far African-Americans have come in the last century, Cosby lobbed grenades. He talked about dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, drug abuse, high rates of incarceration and other forms of self-defeating behavior that plague the black community, and how no one seemed to be doing anything about it. Cosby was criticized -- not because what he said wasn't true, but because he aired dirty laundry and said publicly things that many African-Americans talk about only behind closed doors.

This is a courageous book from black liberal, and I commend him for having the guts to write it.