A quote from Myron Magnet's piece of the above title at City Journal:
With a 50 percent high school dropout rate and a 70 percent illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans committing half the nation’s murders though only 13 percent of the population, black America—especially the poorer part of it—is in trouble. “We cannot blame white people,” Cosby asserted in his incendiary speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. “It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.” As Jesse Jackson used to say, Cosby recalls, “No one can save us from us but us.”
Sure, racism hasn’t vanished, Cosby acknowledges in his 2007 book Come On People, a follow-up to his speech written with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. “But for all the talk of systemic racism and governmental screw-ups, we must look at ourselves and understand our own responsibility.” Even with lingering discrimination, “there are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before in the history of America,” and “these doors are tall enough and wide enough” for just about all black people “to walk through with their heads held high.” So while “there are forces that make the effort to escape poverty difficult,” African-Americans are by no means merely the playthings of vast forces and helpless victims of racism. “When people tell you, ‘You can’t get up, you’re a victim,’ ” Cosby warns, “that’s when you know it is the devil you’re hearing.”
Read the whole thing. There are few things I would welcome more than for black Americans to abandon unhealthy victimhood and its accompanying sense of entitlement, and to feel and believe that they are fully part of this country - with all of the wonderful and exciting challenges and opportunities that everybody else faces in a free American life.
Black Americans are not the only Americans to fall victim to sick, hedonistic, irresponsible or sociopathic subcultures. Plenty of whites do that too - and not just the poor. Wealthy people too: I've seen that plenty of times.
