Black Families Hurt by Magazine's War on Conservatives

I do not have high hopes, given the way Ebony treats black non-liberals, that you will review my new book, "Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives, Eight Hours." It is, in the end, about the importance of fathers -- and the damage done to a child who grows up without one.

Why do I know you will ignore my book despite its examination of the most important issue facing "black America"? Your magazine treats black conservatives as if they were the enemy, that they bring nothing valid to the discussion.

Ebony magazine, a monthly staple of American black life since 1945, publishes an annual list of the 100-plus (now 150) "Most Influential Blacks in America." Why not rename it the "Most Influential Liberal Blacks in America"?

Each year, Ebony leaves out conservative, heavyweight black intellectuals like Walter Williams, a distinguished professor of economics and former department chairman at George Mason University. In addition to his 10 books on economics and race relations, Williams writes a popular weekly syndicated column carried in about 200 papers. If another black person ran the econ department at any other major, non-historically-black college or university, I don't know whom that would be! Yet you ignore Williams -- because you think his politics hurt black people.

Williams, for example, is a leading critic of the minimum wage, a policy that he and many economists argue increases unemployment. The late Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize economics winner,called minimum wage law "one of the most, if not the most, anti-black law on the statute books." Even if Ebony disagrees, 90 percent of all economists believe minimum wage laws increase unemployment among those with lower skills -- the very people the laws purport to help.

At 14 percent black unemployment, versus 7.8 percent nationwide and 6.9 percent for whites, Williams calls this an outrage and blames left-wing policies. Even Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, admitted: "As the chair of the Black Caucus, I've got to tell you, we are always hesitant to criticize the President. With 14 percent (black) unemployment, if we had a white president, we'd be marching around the White House. ... The President knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn't to someone white."

Each year, Ebony leaves out Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution. He has only written some 40 books about economics, politics and race relations. His column appears in more than 300 papers, making him one of the most widely read writers in the English language. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet ("Glengarry Glen Ross") called Sowell "our greatest contemporary philosopher."

Sowell writes that government anti-poverty programs cause more poverty while inducing a self-defeating dependency on government. "Liberals," he recently wrote, "try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.

"The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today."

Sportscaster Bob Costas, in commenting on the murder-suicide of a black NFL player, called it a case of the "gun culture." No, it's the "fatherless culture." That player, Jovan Belcher, like so many blacks, was raised without a father.

A disproportionate amount of crime comes from homes with an AWOL dad. Today, 72 percent of blacks, 53 percent of Hispanic and 36 percent of whites are born out of wedlock. Look at the murder stats from New York City, with its population of 44 percent whites, 25 percent blacks and 29 percent Hispanics. Yet in 2011, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 91 percent of the homicide suspects. Unless we are prepared to say that blacks and Hispanics are genetically predisposed to commit crime, it is only sensible to ask what the devil is going on here!

And each year, Ebony leaves out Clarence Thomas, who is one of only nine sitting Supreme Court justices. You leave him out, as you do Williams and Sowell, because you don't like their politics.

How dare you discount these men? Liberal policies of the last 50 years bear no responsibility for causing the nation's black out-of-wedlock birth rate to go from 25 percent in 1965 to 72 percent today? However you feel about "black conservatives," their viewpoint deserves airing.

I once interviewed Kweisi Mfume, then the head of the NAACP. I asked this question: "As between the presence of white racism and the absence of black fathers, which poses the bigger threat to the black community?" Without hesitation, Mfume said, "The absence of black fathers."

Recall the old warning that he who controls the meaning of words controls the outcome of a debate. This was never more true than in the current discourse about being black in America.

When Nobel Prize winning poet Tony Morrison can write an October 1988 New Yorker article titled “Clinton as the first black president” was “Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime,” then what is “black”? When the NAACP calls the black conservative Kenneth Gladney, “not black enough”, and “not a brother” then what is “black”? When Time magazine’s Jack White calls Supreme Court Justice Thomas, “the scariest of all the hobgoblins”, saying “Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy”, than what is “black”? And when Obama, a man whose mother is Caucasian, and whose father was not fully black, can tell us in his autobiography that in his youth he struggled with his racial identity before *deciding* to be black, what is “black”?

When Bill Maher, during a panel discussion on HBO complains that Obama’s policies are “half-assed” “because he’s only half black.” and that “if he was fully black, I’m telling you, he would be a better president.”, and that “there’s a white man in him holding him back”, than what is “black”?

Indeed, on October 20, 2011, Pam Spaulding at Firedoglake wrote about two prominent Republicans who happen to be black:

“But back to race. I’ll never understand Herman Cain and his relationship to the GOP establishment; like former puppet Michael Steele, they don’t see (or don’t care) how rancid race-based politics in the Republican party has become… [T]he Republican leadership has made its bed with the fundamentalists and nativist know-nothings, making Cain and other black Republicans curious cases that border on self-loathing.” In this context, what exactly is “black”?

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien writes of a private meeting in 2007 with Jesse Jackson in her book, “The Next Big Story.” During the meeting, Jackson complained to O’Brien, whose mother is a black woman from Cuba, that there weren’t any black anchors on CNN. She wrote, “He looks me in the eye and reaches his fingers over to tap a spot of skin on my right hand. He shakes his head. “You don’t count,” he says.” She closed the section with “[t]he arbiter of blackness had weighed in. I had been measured and found wanting.”

When the results of an August 2010 Missouri ballot proposition directing that state to protect its citizens from being forced into ObamaCare were announced and the voter sentiment scored a record for being such a lopsided adoption of the provision. In one county the vote was 92% in favor of the provision. Juan Williams complained on Fox News this was really about race.

Later, in a January 30, 2012 article in The Hill, Williams wrote that when conservative candidates use the words “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution”, they are speaking in code. He said that when a candidate suggests that black people should demand jobs instead of food stamps, that he is “ “dog whistling” at certain white audiences”, saying this was “the same rhetorical technique of the segregationist politicians of the past...” This begs the question, if a person reveres the Founding Fathers, what race does Williams presume he is?

Dr. Cornel West, whose official web site describes him as “a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual”, was the subject of an article in the May 18, 2011 Washington Post. Reporter Krissah Thompson opened with, “Scholar Cornel West’s scathing critique of President Obama’s liberal bona fides in a series of recent interviews has ignited a furious debate among African American bloggers and commentators.”
More recently, in a review of the movie “Django” published in the December 25, 2012 Boston Globe, critic Wesley Morris complains:

“The movie is too modern for what [Samuel L.] Jackson is doing to be limited to 1853. He’s conjuring the house Negro, yes, but playing him as though he were Clarence Thomas or Alan Keyes or Herman Cain or Michael Steele, men whom some black people find embarrassing.”

The December 18, 2012 New York times carried an opinion piece by Adolph Reed, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. The occassion was the appointment of Tim Scott, an African American, to fill a vacant Senate seat. The title of the piece was The Puzzle of Black Republicans.

Of Scott, Reed wrote, “...his politics, like those of the archconservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, are utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans. Mr. Scott has been staunchly anti-tax, anti-union and anti-abortion.”

References to race, and especially to “black”, in all these diverse contexts, is clearly not about “race”. It is about ideology, or more exactly, about socialist ideology.

President Andrew Jackson was the son of an Irish woman who married a black man. Andrew Jackson was such a high percentage black that his oldest brother may have been sold as a slave. President Jackson was at least as black as Barak Obama, but since Jackson was not a socialist, he could not be “black”, at least according to the way the guardians of popular culture define the word.

As far as I am concerned, we are all made in the image of God. I agree with Martin Luther King, that people should be judged on the content of their character and not on the color of their skin. With respect to people, it is not about their genetic heritage, it is about the ideology they advocate and support. It is not about being “black” at all, it is about how thoroughly red that people who call themselves “black” must be or they are not “black” in the eyes of the guardians of our culture.

I have friends and family who have bi-racial children who posted on Facebook or commented that they were so glad that they could show their kids a President that “looks like them.”

I asked how in the hell is that NOT racist? And to say that statement on Monday, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. day was REALLY a travesty!

When you hold someone UP or DOWN due to their color or race, then you are doing them and those you espouse to, a GREAT DISSERVICE! I told them if you want to praise his creating more debt in four years than all the other past President’s combined - go ahead, if you want to praise his stance that babies who, by the GRACE OF GOD, survive an attempted abortion should still be KILLED - go ahead, but to praise him because of his “looks” is as about as RACIST as you can possibly get!

Of course, they just said they were proud of their heritage. I said, good, then when I say the same thing when a white President is elected, will you all support me in my proud heritage? Of course, then came the “that’s not the same” BS!

I simply said, “I proved my point!” And walked away!

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