The essay is titled The Worst Enemy of Black People and it starts off recounting how, despite his very controversial legacy, Malcolm X is very much respected in the African American community.
Malcolm has been called one of the most influential black Americans and schools and streets bear his name in cities across America. Yet despite the homage he has received over the years since his assassination in 1965, Williams writes, there's one thing he strongly believed that has been quietly ignored.
Remember as you read this that as Williams, who is himself black, notes, during the 1960s the word "Negro" was still a respectable term for, and among, blacks.
Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro has is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.Williams goes on to cite some deeply troubling facts:
I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”
Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.Indeed, liberal policies and attitudes are largely responsible for the erosion of the black family. Every urban region with a substantial black population is governed by liberal Democrats, nowadays often black but nevertheless supported by the larger white liberal consensus in the Democratic party. Liberalism has done nothing to reverse the decline of the family in general and the black family in particular and has, on the contrary, done much to accelerate it.
In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.
Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.
According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.
In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.
Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone. Plus, “shotgun” weddings are a thing of the past. That was when male members of a girl’s family made the boy who got her pregnant live up to his responsibilities.
The high crime rates in so many black communities impose huge personal costs and have turned once-thriving communities into economic wastelands. The Ku Klux Klan couldn’t sabotage chances for black academic excellence more effectively than the public school system in most cities.
Politics and white liberals will not solve these and other problems. As Malcolm X said, “our problems will never be solved by the white man.”
Malcolm X saw this clearly, but too few African Americans see it at all today.