The Berkshire Eagle Under Fire for Publishing Perfectly Reasonable Op-Ed on the Breakdown of America's Black Community

Seen just now at Memeorandum, from D.R. Tucker, at the Washington Monthly, "All the Views Unfit to Print."

It turns out that the Berkshire Eagle, a small-town paper in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is regretting its decision to have conservative Steven Nikitas write a bi-weekly column for its op-ed pages. Pittsfield, apparently a progressive New England community, didn't react well to a conservative bringing down the hammer of cold harsh reality on the breakdown of black America, and so there's been a revolt at the commentary pages.

The Boston Globe reports, "Column on race by Berkshires official sparks debate."

And here's the offending op-ed from Mr. Nikitas, "Here's the solution for black America":

After the burning and looting in Baltimore and Ferguson we are seeing endless media hand-wringing that somehow "we" must all do something more to help black America. And "we" means white people, taxpayers, businesses, the criminal justice system, the universities and the government. But blacks must now pull themselves up. "We" have done far too much already with tens of trillions in handouts in the last 50 years, and it has backfired badly.

Conservatives and Republicans have offered sure-fire solutions for black America and they have been rejected repeatedly. Our advice has been for African-Americans to discard the leadership of the Democrat party and charlatans like Al Sharpton. After all, far-left liberalism has obviously failed. The proof is everywhere.

END BLAME GAME

Conservatives have recommended over and over that blacks reform their culture from top to bottom by respecting marriage and the family and the law, returning to their churches, embracing education and hard work, avoiding violence and debased rap music, speaking clearly, shunning drugs and profanity, and pulling up their pants. And to stop blaming all of their problems on everyone else. That is immature, cowardly and counterproductive.

What respectable business owner would hire a young black male from the "hood" who won't even show up for work? What successful enterprise is going to establish itself in crime-ridden inner cities? Isn't looting and burning self-defeating?

Now some media commentators are lamenting that there are too many rundown buildings in Baltimore and that they must be demolished and rebuilt new. That is code language meaning that taxpayers should fund more free housing while the rational response is that blacks must rebuild their Baltimore neighborhoods themselves because self-reliance is their only hope. And it always works. White people in Baltimore are doing it every day.

The violence there is part of a self-destructive pattern that is largely a result of blacks following the wrong leaders. Demagogues like Sharpton merely incite rather than instruct. Democrats have constructed a fortress welfare state that has extinguished black self-improvement while Republicans have warned that it is a dead end and have stressed economic opportunity and a work ethic instead.

The teacher unions and their political cronies control the frightening inner-city schools with an iron grip, while conservatives have sought charter schools, vouchers and educational choice. Liberals say that single motherhood is a valid way of life but Republicans vehemently disagree, with distressing poverty statistics about single mothers and their children to prove the case. And on and on. Yet every day conservatives are vilified as the bad guys of race relations.

Nonsense. The Republican Party was the staunch ally of blacks for 100 years. It was established in 1854 as the anti-slavery party. Evangelical Christians fought in the forefront to abolish slavery here, and in England in the person of the legendary William Wilberforce. Republican president Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves. Every black elected official after the Civil War was a Republican. Virtually all blacks were Republicans up until the 1950s including Martin Luther King and his father.

But in the 1960s white liberals told blacks that they would fight together for "civil rights" and sold them a destructive bill of social permissiveness along with it, buying them off with mountains of taxpayer cash...

There's still more, but you get the picture.

Nikitas is too brutally honest for his own good, and his reward is to be attacked as "racist" by this idiot D.R. Tucker. Note that Tucker doesn't rebut a single point made by Nikitas. Instead he sticks his nose up in the air and declares Nikitas' views outside the realm of respectable "progressive" discussion. Indeed, Tucker attacks the Berkshire Eagle for deigning to give this flyover ruffian "valuable space" on the op-ed pages.

We have here once again a sharp-eyed focus on what's wrong not just with black America, but what's wrong with American politics altogether: Political correctness, and the abject fear of leftists in particular to speak honestly about all that's wrong with the culture. You ask any honest businessman and they'll tell you they just can't employ people who wear sagging baggy pants hanging halfway down past the buttocks. We still have standards of professionalism, amazingly, but to call out such things as part of the solution to black America's woes is "racist."

Nikitas nailed it. We are indeed no longer a single nation united under common shared beliefs. We are a divided nation, being ripped apart by the politicization of everything, the ascendance of regressive depravity as society's moral norms, and by a Democrat Party that cares only about its own power, not about the genuine improvement for the lives of those most endangered by all of this dysfunction.

It's very sad. And indeed, it's why more and more commonsense Americans are turning away from politics, removing themselves to the private realm of family, faith, and local community.

Additional commentary at Memeorandum.