Barbara Kay writes:
According to black women, black men are thuggish, ignorant, workaverse, disrespectful liars. “They don’t step up,” sneers one woman. Black men complain black women are shallow gold diggers with attitude problems. In response to a specific query on sexuality, black women estimated that about 25%30% of black men were closet homosexuals (“on the down low”), when the actual number is no more than 5%.
Most sadly, when asked, “Are there more black men in jail or in college?” virtually every answer — from men and women — is, unhesitatingly, “jail.” In reality, in the relevant 18-24 age demographic, there were 864,000 black men in college and 106,000 incarcerated in 2005 — a 4:1 ratio. (…)
The film’s gravitas derives from many interspersed frank and intelligent ruminations by a stellar array of black public intellectuals. Calling for change from within the black community itself, all pour disdain on infantilizing government paternalism and such official, but useless bodies as the self-serving NAACP.
