Debates among blacks go public

NEW YORK -- The reader outcry was loud and long.

Late last year, essayist John Ridley wrote an article for Esquire magazine, using an in-your-face style to rip the black underclass. He went on to describe famous blacks who've excelled in recent years -- Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell -- and argued that the whole group benefited from their work. It's up to us, he wrote, to emulate their success.

It quickly became clear that irate readers weren't much concerned with Ridley's argument. They were derailed by the fact that a black person had blasted other blacks. In a national magazine. With a mostly white audience. Using the N-word.

Reaction among blacks included "I KNOW you just did NOT trash black men in public" and "Why did Esquire magazine publish this mess?"

And those were not the most strident responses, Ridley said.

"They were angry and belligerent," he said. "They didn't even get into the meat and potatoes of the piece."

For generations, blacks have bickered over what's wrong with black America. But mostly they've done it in places other ethnic groups weren't listening: around dining room tables, within lecture halls at black universities, from black church pulpits and in the black press.

Until now.

Ridley wrote that blacks need to stop being victims.

Oprah Winfrey recently told Newsweek magazine that she built a $40 million new school in South Africa instead of in a poor American neighborhood because "kids in inner city schools" are unmotivated -- the "need to learn just isn't there."

Such voices, while a minority among blacks, are increasingly vocal and pointed. They are shattering the unwritten rules of black solidarity: Let's all work together. And if we can't, let's at least keep our fights within the family.

"Black conservatives have had to go to the mainstream and make their arguments there because there is no place in the black community for those arguments to be made -- not the black church or anywhere," said Shelby Steele, an award-winning author and a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

"Liberalism is exhausted," he added, but that idea "will only be taken seriously if it's in the mainstream."

The conservative tag Steele uses for those who share at least part of his vision is slippery. Some identify as Republicans, but others are independents and Democrats -- or eschew political labels.

But a common theme is individualism. Each must take responsibility for the future, they say, and stop focusing on racial bias as a barrier. Instead, work harder in school, build businesses and accumulate wealth, power or both.

Rice is a model. In interviews, she shrugs off the stark racial segregation of her childhood, then gets back to work as secretary of state.

Chris Rock was among the first to go on the attack in public.

More than a decade ago, he famously -- and angrily -- joked in his standup act about the difference between black people and those he called the N-word. The latter, he said, boast about taking care of their children and not going to jail. "What do you want," Rock demanded of them, "a cookie?"

It's a sentiment others agree with, such as those involved in the push within the black community for marriage. Organizers of the fourth annual Black Marriage Day -- set for March 25 -- lament that nearly seven in 10 black children are born to unmarried parents. Most single parents have less time and money than married ones, they say, and children can suffer.

Ridley said many were furious that he used a racial epithet in a white publication. "They couldn't get past the word," said Ridley, a longtime screenwriter and novelist based in Los Angeles.