RESPONSIBILITY IS POWER. Thus notes Juan Williams in Enough, an extended commentary on Bill Cosby's famous speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education that provides a bonus Book Review No. 51 for 2006. Mr Williams is the author of Three Lives for Mississippi, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, and Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 and holds sufficient civil rights credentials to be able to comment on the hijacking of the civil rights movement by "phony leaders, dead-end movements, and culture of failure" without being mau-maued as a sell-out.

Image from the I AM A MAN online exhibit
courtesy of the Reuther Library at Wayne State University.

Mr Williams is not happy with what has happened to the poorer quarters of Black America since the end of segregation, and, while acknowledging the continued existence of white racism and accumulated disadvantages, he has scorn for self-inflicted impediments such as Hip-Hop Nation. Consider pp. 135-136.

The rappers also argue that their rank depictions of black women and glorifications of violence are simply a reflection of the "authentic" black experience. Oh, so why is it that the biggest consumers of rap music are white men? Why are 80 percent of all hip-hop music customers white?

Statistics show that black men, black women, and white women don't buy even half of the rap music purchased by white men, mostly high-school and college-age boys. The attraction of the music is its crass, pornographic approach to sex and its crass, racist indulgence in stereotypes of black people. This is an invitation for immature white males to indulge their basest feelings about women and blacks. Advertisers will do anything to penetrate [c.q.] this lusty, beer-drinking demographic even if black women get crushed along the way. White women are not exactly queens in this fantasy world, either. But they can at least join their boyfriends in the pleasure of rebelling against their parents by losing all restraint, sowing their oats with wild partying to rap. And white women have no vested, personal interest in arguing against images of black people as oversexed, overly violent, and overtly stupid. After all, those are black performers in the videos, not white people in blackface.

It's difficult to disagree with his characterization of rap as the contemporary minstrel show, given that I have sometimes suggested Springer is the contemporary morality play. At the same time, I flagged the reference to "penetrating" a male audience to highlight the book's somewhat distracting lack of editing and tightening. Perhaps it's supposed to be a stream of consciousness polemic. But it might have been more effective as an essay in American Prospect or Harpers or Commentary with each point made once and made tightly. I noted several uses of the same Bill Cosby quote to make several slightly different yet connected points in different chapters. Yes, "Dogs, water hoses that tear the bark off trees, Emmett Till. And you're going to tell me that you're going to drop out of school?" Powerful words, particularly as a reproach to the National Leadership that may have acquiesced in squandering the gains of the late 1950s and early 1960s. But Mr. Williams, you're not on Crossfire. We'll believe you even if you don't shout.