City Journal has an eloquent and thought-provoking article by John H. McWhorter, "Toward a Usable Black History," showing the need of the African American community to repudiate the propaganda that they've been fed for decades, which held back the personal and societal progress that other Americans have come to regard as an entitlement. Here's a typical paragraph:
Only when we understand these lessons—that we can all be the agents of our own success and that the striving of ordinary blacks once created vibrant, successful communities—will the "Blacks in Wax" come alive as useful role models to identify with rather than merely to respect, and as figures who can point us in the direction of feeling American in the heart rather than only in the head. Today's tendency to find visceral inspiration only from black rebels like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael follows naturally from the prevailing conception of blacks as eternal expatriates from Africa, loath to embrace the mores of a "foreign" land whose rulers allow only a token few to rise above poverty. But if we understand that for a century in America blacks created communities of achievement, which nourished both solid citizens and figures of spectacular accomplishment, we can accept the idea of becoming American as business as usual for blacks.
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