Eric Holder, America’s first African-American attorney general, hit the ground stumbling with that Black History Month “nation of cowards” talk of his. Too bad he didn’t take his cues from this nation’s first African-American president and focus more objectively on America’s racial disparities.
For openers, Holder should know better than to imply that self-segregation — whether in high school lunchrooms or community churches — is an extension of Jim Crow and part of the legacy of slavery. It’s syllogistic, grievance-card reasoning.
To quote black syndicated columnist and economics professor Walter Williams: “Holder’s flawed thinking is widespread whereby people think that an activity that is not racially integrated is therefore segregated.”
Closer to home is the St. Petersburg Times’ black columnist Bill Maxwell, who’s nobody’s Uncle Tom. He’s from the Bill Cosby school of telling it like it is (sometimes known as ‘airing dirty laundry’) – and not just playing the blame game.
Maxwell mentions the scandalous rates of black children born to unmarried mothers, the counterproductive rationalizations behind black-on-black crime and outrageous incarceration rates and the “deleterious effects” of an “outlaw” hip-hop culture that preaches “anti-intellectualism, anti-authoritarianism and nihilism.”
The racial reality that Holder doesn’t get is all too obvious. It still takes a black spokesperson to speak credibly about any black culpability – and even then they run the risk of being labeled a house Negro – to wax euphemistic.
Obviously, Holder wants to avoid any likelihood of such a label.
The reality is that what Williams and Maxwell said I couldn’t say – to all audiences with the same level of credibility and moral suasion. We’re not there yet.
Cowardice shouldn’t be color coded.