The souls of American folk.(books, arts & manners)(Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do about It)(Book review)

Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, by Juan Williams (Crown, 256 pp., $25)

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I DOUBT Juan Williams likes the company he seems to be keeping these days. His new book, Enough, appears to be selling well. But get on Amazon and look at its list of other books bought by the readers who have purchased Enough. Among the authors are Ann Coulter, Patrick Buchanan, and Shelby Steele--hardly his crowd.

Williams is a senior correspondent for NPR and a strong liberal voice on Fox News. And yet he's poured his heart and soul into delivering a heroic message that is deeply at odds with dug-in liberal orthodoxy. (Or rather, with the orthodoxy of the chattering classes; ordinary black folks are another story.) As Williams himself has said, "You become some sort of leper if you don't lock-step your opinions in line with white liberals. They run the programming of CBS, NBC, and ABC, and they don't want you to rock the boat of received opinion."

Enough is a brave and wonderful book. It is also rather unusual; in effect, Bill Cosby is the co-author. I cannot think of another work quite like it. Williams is Cosby's translator. As he acknowledges, his aim is to explain and defend The Cos, who gives speeches but does not write. Cosby is a beloved actor and comedian. But on May 17, 2004, in a speech to a glittering black-tie crowd celebrating the Golden Anniversary of Brown v. Board, he wasn't funny and endearing. He delivered remarks from which his old friends in the civil-rights community (who have been substantial beneficiaries of his philanthropic largesse) have yet to recover.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "the lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal"--the deal being rights, accompanied by responsibility. Too many young men are dropping out of school, fathering children from whom they "run away," and populating prisons. "We cannot blame white people," he went on; the problem is the underclass culture. "Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads.... These people are fighting hard to be ignorant."

It was a speech full of anger--and pain. The civil-rights community was not amused. Up on the podium after the speech, its representatives looked "stone-faced." University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, in a fury shared by other black academics, decided to write an entire book titled, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? "In its views of the poor and its support of Cosby's sentiments, [it has] lost its mind," he concluded.