Juan Williams Labeled 'Black Ann Coulter'

Juan Williams Labeled 'Black Ann Coulter'
By Ronald Kessler

Since writing a book about the need for African-Americans to take responsibility for their own problems, Juan Williams is now being labeled a "black Ann Coulter" and a turncoat by black leaders and media personalities.

PBS host Tavis Smiley "was going on about how I'm demeaning black people, which I find so incredibly stupid," Williams, an NPR senior correspondent and Fox News commentator, says. "Al Sharpton called me the black Ann Coulter," says Williams.

Williams, who is black, decided to write Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It after Bill Cosby called upon blacks to stop blaming "the white man" for their problems. In the book, which was on The New York Times best-seller list on Sept. 17, Williams comes out swinging against "phony" black leaders and a black "culture of failure."

He lashes out at leaders like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who create support by focusing on "victimhood." "That says to an individual, ‘You can't help yourself; you can't help your family; and therefore all you can do is wait for the government to do something for you,’" says Williams. "I think it is a message of weakness and ineffectual thinking that is absolutely crippling the poor and especially minorities in the United States." The criticism generally comes from "people who think they are being exposed or from academics who just want to pick a fight," Williams said.

His first interview about the book appeared on NewsMax.com on July 27. Williams says he has gotten tremendously positive reaction from people who come up to him and thank him for starting "an important debate." But Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times calling Williams a "posturer" who forgets that the federal government, which was "at best, ambiguous about black equality," failed right along with black leaders.

Williams responded with a piece saying it was easier to blame him than to deal with the "hard fact of a dropout rate now at about 50 percent nationwide for black and Latino students." He said the average black student who graduates from high school reads and does math at an eighth grade level. Williams also cited the fact that 44 percent of the nation's prison population is made up of black people, and blacks account for 37 percent of violent crimes, even though they make up only 13 percent of the population.

In a talk in Washington, for the BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt Foundation, Williams made the point that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are far more successful than blacks who have grown up in America. He attributed that to a self-defeating black culture of victimhood, one that says doing well in school is a cop-out and that the way to be successful is to come off as threatening.

Williams said a recent Pew Research Center poll found that two-thirds of black Americans agree with 75 percent of white Americans who say too many black people are overly dependent on government programs. "In other words," Williams observed, "a clear majority of the nation, including most black people, are saying that the poor need to look in the mirror and halt self-defeating behavior."