Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 4: Blacks on Television
I once appeared on a television talk show with a black professor where as usual I was cast as the conservative voice in opposition to his liberal one. As we chatted during a commercial break, I asked him, 'What kind of thing leads you to think that racism

Chapter 4: Blacks on Television, Part 2
In its original radio incarnation, Beulah had been played by a white man, and for all of the discomfort this arouses in us today, Marlin Hurt's portrayal is a guilty pleasure. Few could resist laughing today hearing his uncannily accurate giggles, laughs.

Chapter 4: Blacks on Television, Part 3
A far cry from Beulah in the Hendersons' kitchen. Yet amid it all, throughout most of the 1960s there was not a single 'black show' proper on national television. This changed in 1968 with Julia, starring Diahann Carroll.

John McWhorter is one of the most original and provocative thinkers on the issue of race in America today. In Authentically Black McWhorter argues that although African-Americans stress hard work and initiative in private, they have assumed the mantle of victimhood in the eyes of the public and have thereby created a distorted meaning of what it is to be "authentically black." McWhorter takes on this mentality and its debilitating implications in topics ranging from rap music to the reparations movement, to the portrayal of African-Americans on television to racial profiling injecting new ideas and a fresh approach into the nationwide debate on race. Authentically Black is a powerful and important book that will inform and influence the opinions of Americans across all racial and political spectra.

John McWhorter is the author of the bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, and four other books. He is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor to The City Journal and The New Republic.

	Home \| Forum \| Search
Health Parenting Personal Growth Relationships Religion & Spirituality Career & Money