At Hansen's request, Hubert reads comments he originally posted on NPR's website:
"We organized. We marched. I was a public television producer and did shows with black activists...we were optimistic - not anymore. Today, what do many black kids get? A chip on their shoulders and nothing but a long list of grievances. Black politicians insist on their Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks boulevards, but ignore those black kids, or defend them when they mess up...."At this point I was pretty disgusted. "We organized. We marched." ??? Am I seriously supposed to believe this reactionary racist ("their Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks boulevards") organized and marched for Civil Rights? Does Hansen challenge him to prove his claims? Does she challenge his gross generalizations of all "Black politicians" and "black kids"? Not a bit. Hansen simply states, "Thanks for reading that Hubert, you said you were once a bit of an activist for civil rights, and now you sound disillusioned, what happened?"
Hubert is off and running again:
"I think an opportunity was missed...at that point [after the assassinations of King and Kennedy] the challenge was to make something out of their legacies and - rather than do that - black leadership, the supposed voices of the black community and to a large extent many black persons squandered that legacy....they have promoted the victim mentality and the perpetual grievance mentality and they have tried to instill the notion in the black community...they should remain angry...and needy in perpetuity"Is this the most complex discussion of race NPR could dredge up? Wouldn't it be amazing if NPR had someone on who might reflect on the fact that the US had slavery and violent Jim Crow for over 300 years of its history, that civil rights laws weren't even passed until the mid 1960s, and that affirmative action wasn't even 20 years old when it began being dismantled in the Reagan revolution?
