I Agree

I've been known to express a similar opinion of Juan Williams, NPR and Fox News commentator. Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants says of Juan:

I think of Juan Williams as breathtakingly stupid

But he's apparently written a good book:

The question of whether racism or cultural failings are more to blame for the crisis in black America has been much debated in recent years.

In 2004, Bill Cosby weighed in on the side of personal responsibility. Then the "hip-hop intellectual" Michael Eric Dyson, a humanities professor at the University of Pennsylvania, replied with a book, "Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)," arguing that Cosby was in a long, sorry tradition of better-off blacks blaming poorer blacks for their own plight -- and letting white society off the hook.

Now comes Juan Williams and 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."

"Bill Cosby was right, but he only told a portion of the story," Williams writes. "This book picks up the baton to continue the race."

I may read the book. But I still have to turn off Fox News when Juan is a commentator.

That was on August 15th. Today, Juan published this op-ed in the Washington Post today. Dean Barnett called it one of the most important such pieces of the year.

I don't know if it is that, but I do know that it is a refreshingly honest and different accounting from someone in a position to know:

Cosby asked the chilling question: "What good is Brown " and all the victories of the civil rights era if nobody wants them? A generation after those major civil rights victories, black America is experiencing alarming dropout rates, shocking numbers of children born to single mothers and a frightening acceptance of criminal behavior that has too many black people filling up the jails. Where is the focus on taking advantage of new opportunities to advance and to close the racial gap in educational and economic achievement?

Incredibly, Cosby's critics don't see the desperate need to pull a generational fire alarm to warn people about a culture of failure that is sabotaging any chance for black people in poverty to move up and help their children reach the security of economic and educational achievement. Not one mainstream civil rights group picked up on his call for marches and protests against bad parenting, drug dealers, hate-filled rap music and failing schools.

Where is the civil rights groundswell on behalf of stronger marriages that will allow more children to grow up in two-parent families and have a better chance of staying out of poverty? Where are the marches demanding good schools for those children -- and the strong cultural reinforcement for high academic achievement (instead of the charge that minority students who get good grades are "acting white")? Where are the exhortations for children to reject the self-defeating stereotypes that reduce black people to violent, oversexed "gangstas," minstrel show comedians and mindless athletes?

Indeed. Where is black leadership? Well, Al Sharpton--who you'd think wouldn't have an ounce of credibility anywhere, much less the black community--is throwing bricks at the media, while appearing with his erstwhile mentor Jesse Jackson aside the empty suit, Ned Lamont. Very helpful, both.

Meanwhile, Williams and Cosby push the envelope and struggle to nudge the black community awake to it's current failings and it's future declineunless it wakens. Will they heed Williams message?

I don't know. They should though. As for myself, if it's as good as some are saying, it'll have to end up on the reading list.