Sitting in Rush Limbaugh's Attila the Hun chair for a day last September, I gave a present to America's white liberals. I granted them full pardon and amnesty for both their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people. The reason for that magnanimous gesture was to reduce white guilt in hopes that white liberals would stop acting like fools - at least on matters of race.
I shall occupy the Attila the Hun chair again the week after Christmas. There's going to be an entire hour devoted to guilt-reduction therapy for white liberals. Hopefully, President Clinton will agree to be my telephone guest as my first guilt anxiety relief patient. You say, "Williams, why Clinton?"Clinton was selected because of an excellent Washington Post (11/20/93) article by John Ray, a black member of the Council of the District of Columbia. It covered Clinton's speech at the Memphis church where Martin Luther King delivered his last address. Invoking the name of Dr. King many times, Clinton said, "The freedom to die before you're a teenager is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for." As for gang violence, Clinton said, "We will take away their guns and give them books." Then, Clinton called for a church, business and government partnership to revive family values in black youth.
Councilman John Ray pointed out that it is demeaning to insult the "legacy of the civil rights movement by burdening it with the responsibility for the conduct of hoodlums who have no knowledge of, interest in, the struggle for civil rights." Ray says we are witnessing the kind of hard-core gangsterism that this country has not experienced since the days of Al Capone. But here's the kicker. John Ray pointed out, "When Al Capone terrorized the Midwest with mob violence, we didn't send for preachers to counsel him and his goons. We sent in squads of federal, state and local lawmen to kick butt and take names. We went to war against the mob and stopped the violence."
That is not a profound idea; it's just plain common sense. I'm positive Clinton and other white liberals have the brains to come to the identical conclusion about how to stop the wanton slaughter in many black neighborhoods. It's a backbone problem. It's a guilt-induced fear of possibly being called a racist - hence, my therapy session. But I could be all wrong about guilt as a motivator. There is a long-standing tradition whereby if a liberal has an idea that has never worked nowhere nohow, he'll try it out on black people. I don't recall Elliot Ness asking for a church, business and government partnership to deal with the Chicago mobs.
John Ray says, "We can no longer shield, excuse or rationalize outrageous criminal behavior that treats human life as if it were worthless." Councilman Ray's suggestion to Clinton: "Mr. President, the thugs who are plying their deadly trade on America's streets don't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Dr. King. They deserve to be led to a jail cell, not to the promised land." Guilt-ridden white liberals, with their pseudosophistication in psycho-babble probably label John Ray's suggestion "blaming the victim."
White liberals might not need my guilt therapy for a cure. They might just as easily be permanently cured by the requirement that they spend a year or two living in a high-crime inner-city neighborhood.