As I was walking through Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill Barnes and Noble with one of my favorite professors, the one and only William Massey, I was introduced to the phenomenon of mathematics novels, memoirs, theses, and literature that wasn’t academic textbooks or journals. I ended up buying a book with a title I feel resonates with the reason I decided to pursue a PhD in the first place: Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
The other book I bought has more general day-to-day relevance for most Americans. Juan Williams’ new book is one of several books I’ve seen in recent years to critique the notion of victimhood chronically and systematically appealed to by African-American leaders [the others I’ve seen and read are Debra Dickerson’s The End of Blackness and John McWhorter’s Losing the Race]. Dickerson and McWhorter have also written at length about Black American appeals to victimhood. Unfortunately, some who have discussed these books with me accuse these authors of criticizing blacks in front of whites for personal gain… I guess you could say these authors’ arguments might have been lost on the general public.
So, what is victimhood? I should answer this before continuing… Essentially, victimhood is relying on, or encouraging others to rely on, white people and the general powers that be to do for black people what we should be doing for ourselves. Now, that is by no means the official definition, but it describes this notion pretty robustly.
Juan Williams’ book, titled Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It is so attractive to me because I’ll read pretty much anything that will not allow us as Black Americans to shirk our responsibilities to solidify our families, educate our children, pursue our own economic empowerment, and make our sociopolitical mark on the American and global landscapes. I haven’t read this book yet, but the excerpt I have seen and some of the book’s criticism lead me to believe I will not be disappointed.
The book focuses on the shortcomings of Black leadership, and I believe it’s focus is well-placed. I can still remember the first time I thought our leadership might be slow in understanding that Black demographics are changing (e.g., economically and intellectually more powerful, etc.), and that our needs are less homogeneous. While at Howard, it was at a political forum where a campus group was trying to encourage students to attend the Congressional Black Caucus meeting where I asked what our leaders are doing to change their strategies to deal with the changing needs of Black folk. I remember being surprised I did not receive an acceptable answer. Well, it seems that Juan Williams and Bill Cosby have observed the same things:
Critics often charge Bill Cosby, in his Brown anniversary speech, with beating up on an easy mark: poor black people. Wrong. The critics are the ones who veer off target. Cosby repeatedly aimed his fire at the leaders of today’s popular black culture, which is often not just created by black artists, but marketed and managed by black executives. He was talking about current black political leaders and, most of all, about the civil rights leaders who time and time again send the wrong message to poor black people desperately in need of direction as they try to find their way in a society where being black and poor remains a unique burden to bear.
Cosby’s point is that lost, poor black people have suffered most from not having strong leaders. His charge is that these leaders–cultural and political–misinform, mismanage, and miseducate by refusing to articulate established truths about what it takes to get ahead: strong families, education, and hard work. Every American has reason to ask about the seeming absence of strong black leadership….
It is perhaps most important to point out that our missing leadership subverts the power that we do wield as Black Americans:
Strong black intellects and personalities are leaders in media (Richard Parsons, the head of Time Warner, and Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek), securities firms (such as Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch), global corporations (Kenneth Chenault of American Express, Ann Fudge of the public relations firm Young and Rubicam), academic institutions (Ruth Simmons, Kurt Schmoke, Henry Louis Gates, Ben Carson), religious organizations (Floyd Flake, T. D. Jakes), and national politics (Eleanor Holmes Norton, Artur Davis, Barack Obama, and Colin Powell).
We as Black Americans as a group are the wealthiest and most powerful Black people on the planet… An arrogant statement, nonetheless, it is true and we have a tremendous responsibility to the rest of the Black diaspora. How can we fulfill our responsibilities if we are so concerned with what American whites aren’t doing for us?