Mark Steyn: Keepin' it real is real stupid

Whatever good it might once have done, America's racial-grievance industry is now principally invested in its own indispensability. Lavishly remunerated panjandrums such as the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have a far greater interest in maintaining racism than any humdrum Ku Klux Klan kleagle, assuming there still are any. One consequence is that so-called black "community leaders" will talk about anything rather than what's really screwing up their "communities." In 2003, congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee was reduced to complaining about the racist nomenclature of hurricanes. If I recall correctly, her argument was that blacks were being discriminated against because hardly any devastatingly destructive meteorological phenomena are given African-American names. Apparently, the black community can't relate to some white-bread wind like hurricane Andrew blowing in and tearing up the joint. Why are there never any hurricane Leroys or Latifahs? It's deeply racist and insulting to imply that only forces of nature with effete WASPy appellations are capable of inflicting billions of dollars of coastal damage. In fairness to black leaders, they did not reprise this line of attack when Katrina swept in a year ago, preferring to argue instead that not merely the name but the very hurricane was racist, deliberately deployed by Karl Rove's offshore Republican wind machine to total only black neighbourhoods.
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At the heart of Enough is a sad but unarguable proposition: "We've made it taboo," says the writer Shelby Steele, "to talk about the words 'black' and 'responsibility' in the same breath." Four decades of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society as mediated by the presidents-for-life of the white-guilt shakedown industry have destroyed the black family and mired it in a culture of self-victimization. From the present wreckage, there are two ways to go: the black leadership can pursue the mirage of slavery reparations, which is a kind of über-welfare and would likely prove just as destructive; or blacks can sideline the present "phony leaders," as Williams calls them, and begin the hard work of rebuilding their families and communities.