Hey, He's Right

I rarely read Oliver Willis, and when my attention has been called to something at his blog, it's usually been because he's written something mean-spirited, ill-informed, or frankly stupid. So I have no idea if, reading him at his worst, I'm reading him as he typically is. Such is the nature of this medium.

Today, though, courtesy of Sullivan, I was directed to a Willis piece that says something bold, frank, and sensible.

I think it’s past time for there to be a changing of the guard in black leadership in America. People like Farrakhan, Sharpton and Jackson are no better than hustlers, bigots, and crooks. There are hundreds of black leaders who believe in improving the lives of black Americans, and America in general, but the media keeps giving time to the Axis of Irrelevancy.

First time in a while a breath of fresh air has almost knocked me out of my chair.

Down in the comments section, Willis adds:

Real black leadership, leadership that wants black Americans to go forward and fix its own problems can be found with folks like Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, and yes - Oprah. Though I have a strong distaste for the brand of empowerment he sells, even a guy like Russell Simmons is more useful and uplifting for black Americans. Even a guy like Colin Powell is a decent leader, if he hadn’t been led around on the nose by a guy like Bush. Sadly most of the black “leaders” on the right are simply front groups for the same caucasian funders on the right who would prefer for black people to roll over and play dead (BOND, Jesse Lee Peterson and that crowd).

I personally fall into the Bill Cosby camp. I think America has a legacy of racism that, while marginalized, still exists to this day. But I think we’re at the point where black Americans have a whole lot more to say and do about the future of black Americans than white Americans do. I think a culture that values dirty rap, sneakers, and basketball players is dooming itself to mediocrity. Until that changes, black Americans are screwed - and if we’re screwed, so is America.

And he even defends the people of Christian faith for the amount of good they do.

So now I can either assume he's always off the mark, and that when I agree with him, I must be, too, or that he's occasionally clear-headed, and when he does, he writes a good, forceful statement.

I'll have to bump him up my hierarchy, into the class of liberal commentators who reflexively bark at the Republican man in the moon, but for whom the moon sometimes sets or slides behind the clouds long enough to allow their natural intelligence and lucidity to make an observation.

E.J. Dionne is another. He recently wrote:

But liberals also need to seize the initiative by speaking candidly and not defensively about the social causes of poverty. These include family breakdown and the heavy concentration of very poor people in a small number of neighborhoods in our big cities. Just because some conservatives are tempted, wrongly, to blame all poverty on problems in the family doesn't mean that liberals should shy away from talking about the difficulties faced by children in fatherless homes.

As a starting point, I'll overlook the whiff of snark and take it.