The Black America debate goes public

Betrayal or frankness?
Ebony would not have considered the Ridley piece, he said. “The frame would have been different before we even assigned the piece,” he said.

Ridley and others have a right to freely express their views, Walters said, because the civil rights “struggle has not been to build a wall around the black community. It was to liberate people.

“But the expectation was that, once liberated, they would be sensitive enough to our tradition not to betray us.”

Journalist Juan Williams said he, like Ridley, is often accused of betraying black America because he publicly criticizes other blacks.

“There’s always a concerted effort to undermine anyone who wants to say something different than the orthodox methods of the civil rights movement,” said Williams, a regular commentator for National Public Radio and Fox News. “It’s like hitting a nerve. You didn’t just step on somebody’s toe, you stepped on the nerve center.”

For Cosby, no laughing matter
Long a proponent of education and self-reliance, Bill Cosby provoked similar reactions when he gave black America a tongue-lashing during a May 2004, speech in Washington. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the key anti-segregation ruling from the Supreme Court.

Cosby blasted blacks for chronic problems: imprisonment, dropping out of high school and births out of wedlock. “What the hell good is Brown vs. Board of Education,” he ranted, “if nobody wants it?”

Some in the audience cheered their approval. Some cringed — partly because the national media were recording every word. Since then, Cosby has given dozens of similar speeches around the country.

“There’s always been a norm in the black community that self-criticisms are conducted within the black community,” said Michael Dawson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

“Malcolm X said you don’t wash your dirty laundry in public. A group that feels it’s under attack and oppressed wants to present a united front.”

That norm long united a politically diverse community.

Old attitude gaining ground
Around the turn of the 20th century, urban black Americans often criticized other, typically poor blacks who were moving en masse from the rural South into big, northern cities, said Mary Pattillo, a political scientist at Northwestern University.

Ric Francis / AP Comedian-actor Chris Rock in July 2005, in Beverly Hills, Calif. Rock framed the black-white debate in stark terms more than a decade ago.

In a sort of noblesse oblige, the National Urban League even published gentle advice to the newcomers on how to fit in — for instance, don’t spit in the streets.

“Of course, this was not published in Esquire,” she said. “It was in our black newspapers and Ebony and all that.”

Today, that’s changing, Pattillo said. “We are now having our internal discussion publicly.”

Why now?

For starters, many who bemoan the changes say it’s because Cosby, Ridley and others are repeating the views of conservative whites, which helps promote them to a wider audience.

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