Juan has had Enough

Betsy has an interesting report on Juan Williams new book, Enough.

Williams has taken on a different type of battle with his new book that will come out on Tuesday. The title tells you of Williams' new struggle for black America: Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It. From what Williams told us about his goals in writing this book, he's taken on a huge task. He was inspired by the speech that Bill Cosby gave on the anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision. You can listen to excerpts from that speech here and read the transcript. The introduction gives you an idea of what is so horrifying Cosby and Williams.

Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to ask you to seriously consider what you’ve heard, and now this is the end of the evening so to speak. I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, “David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing."

Ladies and gentlemen, these people set -- they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have 50% drop out. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.

I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?

Williams has picked up the baton in his new book and, boy, has he decided to open the floodgates by blaming black leaders today and black families themselves for the terrible statistics on the black drop out rate, the gaps between black and white students on tests, as well as the incarceration rate for young black men. He contrasts the brave fighters for black civil rights from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Martin Luther King who had a message of self-reliance and were fighting to give blacks an equal place at the starting gates. But now, Williams argues that a culture that derides hard work in school as "acting white" typifies the skewed mindset that is creating those depressing statistics.


Imagine how a man like Marshall would react to some mouthy rapper. It is good to see people like Williams and Cosby take this on...someone needs to.