The Black America debate goes public

updated 4:50 p.m. ET Feb. 18, 2007

Editor's Note: This story contains language some may find objectionable.

NEW YORK - Late last year, essayist John Ridley wrote an article for Esquire magazine, using an in-your-face style to rip the black underclass. He went on to describe famous blacks who’ve excelled in recent years — Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell — and argued that the whole group benefited from their work. It’s up to us, he wrote, to emulate their success.

The reader outcry was loud and long.

It quickly became clear that irate readers weren’t much concerned with Ridley’s argument. They were derailed by the fact that a black person had blasted other blacks. In a national magazine. With a mostly white audience. Using the n-word.

Reaction among blacks included “I KNOW you just did NOT trash black men in public” and “Why did Esquire magazine publish this mess?”

And those were not the most strident responses, Ridley said in an interview.

“They were angry and belligerent,” he said. “They didn’t even get into the meat and potatoes of the piece.”

For generations, African-Americans have bickered over what’s wrong with black America. But mostly they’ve done it in places other ethnic groups weren’t listening: around dining room tables; within lecture halls at black universities; from black church pulpits and in the black press.

Until now.

Ridley wrote that blacks need to “send niggers on their way” and stop being victims.

Oprah Winfrey recently told Newsweek magazine that she built a $40 million new school in South Africa instead of in a poor American neighborhood because “kids in inner city schools” are unmotivated — the “need to learn just isn’t there.”

Shattering solidarity
Such voices, while a minority among African-Americans, are increasingly vocal and pointed. They are shattering the unwritten rules of black solidarity: Let’s all work together. And if we can’t, let’s at least keep our fights within the family.

“Black conservatives have had to go to the mainstream and make their arguments there because there is no place in the black community for those arguments to be made — not the black church or anywhere,” said Shelby Steele, an award-winning author and a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“Liberalism is exhausted,” he added, but that idea “will only be taken seriously if it’s in the mainstream.”

The conservative tag Steele uses for those who share at least part of his vision is slippery. Some identify as Republicans, but other are independents and Democrats — or eschew politcal labels.

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