Bruce Gordon of the NAACP is upset. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney used the phrase “tar baby” in talking about the Big Dig catastrophe in Boston. Sadly, the NAACP has not been as quick to criticize black rappers who routinely glorify the thuggish lifestyle of gang leaders and drug dealers while rapping about bitches, “ho’s”, and cop killers.
Where are their press statements criticizing MTV or BET for playing such songs or the Grammy Awards for celebratingthem? This is just one example of how many civil rights leaders have wasted the moral legitimacy that they earned from their brave battles for equal rights.
NPR correspondent and Fox commentator Juan Williams has written a book looking at how many black leaders today are letting down the black community. The title says it all: “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It.” Williams is a brave man. He is also an angry man.
Building on the speech that Bill Cosby gave two years ago on the 50th anniversary of the historic Brown decision, Williams looks at the state of the black community today and dares to say that the causes of these problems are not white racism. Instead he calls on blacks themselves to build on the tradition of black leaders from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, who stressed self-determination in fixing these problems themselves.
Williams feels that leaders today such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton should stop waving the bloody shirt of civil rights battles from 40 years ago and focus on the crises in the black community today.
Close to 70 percent of all black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 50 percent of black students entering the ninth grade will graduate with a regular diploma. Blacks account for 37 percent of violent crimes and most of their victims are other blacks.
These are the problems that civil rights leaders should be focused on, not calling for reparations for slavery or worrying when a politician uses a metaphor — “tar baby” — that has a secondary meaning blacks find insulting.
When black teenagers think that high achievement in school is “acting white,” this is a problem that only a change in culture can address. The black community, after the Civil War and at the height of the Jim Crow era, valued education and, as Williams reports, in the 30 years from 1880 to 1910, the black literacy rate rose from 30 to 70 percent despite segregated, undersupplied schools and violent intimidation of any blacks who tried to vote.
If they could manage to learn despite KKK attacks then, what is the excuse today? As Cosby said, “What the hell good is Brown if nobody wants it?” The answer is to stress the importance of education from the moment a child is born and to let children know that his or her parents expect high achievement.
When black students are asked how many hours a week they work in order to get ahead, they replied that they did an average of four hours of homework a week. White students answered five and a half hours a week, while Asian-American students studied for seven and a half hours.
These are discrepancies that black leaders should be shouting about from the rooftops, but that would stress self-reliance rather than government spending. As Williams says, “Incredibly, civil rights leaders have not focused on the message that by turning off the TV, by demanding good grades, and by going into the classroom to work with the teachers, black families have the power to improve the education their children get from big-city schools.”
After the Civil War, Douglass addressed the question of what the freed slaves wanted from whites. His answer was, “Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. … And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”
This message of self-reliance has been lost as civil rights leaders encourage blacks today to look to the government to solve their problems and blame those frightful statistics on births to unwed mothers, education and crime on white racism.
Bill Cosby and Juan Williams are trying to resurrect those values by stressing a different agenda that resonates for everyone: Stay in school even if it’s a bad school. Take a job and keep it. Wait to get married and don’t have a baby until you’re married.
Blacks who follow that advice can cut their chances of being poor by two-thirds. That is a message that needs to be heard.
Betsy Newmark is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at betsyspage.blogspot.com/.
