By Larry Elder
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Dear Ebony,
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.
What if they don't?
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.
Ebony does the black community a disservice by ignoring
it.
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."
Sincerely yours,
Larry Elder
Former subscriber
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