Attacks on critics of hip hop culture

Juan Williams:

It started with Bill O'Reilly's grandmother. And it blew up into charges of O'Reilly being called a racist and me being attacked as a "Happy Negro" (read that as a lackey or Uncle Tom).

O'Reilly, controversial host of the top-rated TV cable talk show on Fox News Channel, interviewed me on his radio show about a woman-hating, N-word-spouting rapper being hired by McDonald's for a celebrity endorsement. O'Reilly has been on a crusade against big companies legitimizing a crass, hateful and pornographic popular culture by putting stars like Snoop Dogg, the pornographer/rapper, in their ads.

Sad to say, but a lot of today's rappers fit the bill.

They make their name by bragging about how many people they've killed, how many times they've been shot and how many "bitches" they've abused. And those rappers, along with no-talent black comedians who use the N-word and profanity constantly, are creating a very negative image of black people in music, in music videos and in the movies.

So, O'Reilly says to me that the reality to black life is very different from the lowlife behavior glorified by the rappers. He told me he was at a restaurant in Harlem recently and there was no one shouting profanity, no one threatening people. Then he mentioned going to an Anita Baker concert with an audience that was half black, and in sharp contrast to the corrosive images on TV, well dressed and well behaved.

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The most pernicious damage being done by the twisted presentation of black life in pop culture is the self-destructive message being beamed into young, vulnerable black brains. Young black people, searching for affirmation of their racial identity, are minute by minute being sold on the cheap idea that they are authentically black only if they imitate the violent, threatening attitude of the rappers and use the gutter language coming from the minstrels on TV.

The lesson from the rappers and comedians is that any young brother or sister who is proud to be black has to treat education with indifference, dismiss love and marriage as the business of white people and dress like the rappers who dress like prisoners — no comb in the jail so they wear doo-rags all day, and no belts so their pants hang down around their butts.

That was the heart and soul of the conversation between O'Reilly and me. The point of the whole exchange was to defeat corrupt, untrue and racist images of real black people.

So imagine how totally astounded I was when I heard O'Reilly was attacked on the basis of that radio conversation as a "racist." He was slammed for saying he went to a restaurant in Harlem and had a good time. He was slammed for saying the audience at the concert was nicely dressed. The suggestion was that O'Reilly had racist preconceptions about the restaurant and the concert crowd.

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O'Reilly and Williams were victims of the leftist hate site Media Mutters which has as it objective the distortion of the debate on issues so as to brand conservatives as racist, bigots and homophobes. It has also launched a grossly distorted attack on Rush Limbaugh by truncating his discussion about a phony soldier who had been glorified by the left. The group is part of George Soros' attack on America and is also associated with the Clintons. It is an auxiliary to their politics of personal destruction projects.