The Black America debate goes public

Associated Press:

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.”

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 Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger