My prayer is that all black leaders strive to be truthful in their words.

I know Chris Farley.

We met at Harvard. I admired Chris. He was a highly competitive student, even at Harvard. He came from an amazing black family. His father chaired the economics department at an upstate New York university. Indeed, his father stood to become the leader of a South American county but for unfortunate miscalculations. His mother served as an African-American studies professor. Together the two professors produced four black young men. All four sons would graduate from Harvard. The Farley story should be the aspiration for all African-American families.

And so my mouth dropped when I came across a reference to Chris in the latest hot read, 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. I remember Chris as being highly intellectual with a very proper, almost British touch, to his voice.

But that’s not the Chris Farley I read about in Enough.

You may remember the brouhaha that erupted in 2004 when Bill Cosby spoke truth about lame behavior in the black underclass. Cosby spoke the truth. And in return he received scorn, criticism, and even a full-length book treatment by Professor Michael Eric Dyson. Sad and expected.

As I thumbed through the pages to decide whether to buy the book, I saw Chris appear on page 15. Now surely the Chris Farley I knew would see the truth behind raising children in two-parent households with a strong emphasis on education. I was naïve. What I read disappointed me:

Christopher Farley, a Time magazine cultural critic, also complained about Cosby scolding young black people for not speaking proper English. Great black writers, ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, wrote literature using black dialects.
— Enough, page 15.

Time stood still for a moment.

I could not reconcile that position with Chris’ upbringing. The son of a London School of Economics graduate and the grandson of a Jamaican school headmaster, Chris never knew a day of “black dialect” in his home. I can assure you.

Never.

I tried to find thoughts for my disbelief but Cosby beat me to the punch:

(Cosby) pointed out that Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes spoke classic English and chose as a matter of art to write in dialect and create scenes of poor back life that had morphed into fascinating subcultures. And he added a sting to the defense by noting that Farley, the Time magazine writer, did not write in black dialect in Time or speak in black dialect when he voiced his critique on Good Morning America.
Enough, page 17.

Why would Chris take a position that his own parents would never apply for their children? Several reasons come to mind.

First, Chris does not know black people. Let me explain. Chris grew up in a predominantly white community, much like my white community in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The difference, however, is that Chris lived in a white neighborhood where he could not take blackness for granted. I grew up in a black neighborhood and grew to know all of the ups and downs and mysteries of things like The Black Table. Chris was disadvantaged in this regard. As a result, he learned about the black experience in school and from books. Black people lived in the city. They were foreign, alien, and unsafe. Chris grew up in the white suburbs where the lived experience was, well, white.

Second, Chris is the child of immigrants. All second-generation immigrants want to assimilate into American society and that is a good thing if that’s your thing. I do not judge. The rub, however, for Chris, is that learning to become a black American meant reading Native Son and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And I am sure that this radicalization continued at a faster pace at Harvard. So, Chris doesn’t get the real need to speak like everyone else to make it. In a sense, he was born speaking the King’s English. And so he romanticizes “black dialect.” There is nothing romantic about losing that job with the County because you can’t speak well and greet the public.

Third, Chris is not of the South. 55.3% of black Americans are southern. And so where does Chris gain the moral authority to applaud “black dialect,” a manner of speaking born of the South? (See Cane by Jean Toomer and Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell.) Race authorizes Chris to speak on something he has no lived knowledge of. And that is a problem with race in America today. If Chris had been white with his same upbringing and background, his comments would not have been considered in the national debate. Skin color alone, and nothing else, delivered a platform for Chris as a non-southern, immigrant black to challenge Cosby.

I like Chris. And I am pleased to know a national “black leader.” With leadership comes responsibility, however. Chris will not suffer tonight because a poor black kid heard that Good Morning America show. The silent victims who took their cues from Chris will blame the man and ruin their own prospects for success.

Chris has a wonderful backstory. The story of his grandparents and parents offers genuine value. Instead, we hear a defense of the indefensible. Shame on you, Chris.

I began this essay by writing that I knew Chris. 

But I also know of someone who has been truer to the black American spirit than Chris. And she would be Oseola McCarty. Unlike Chris, Ms. McCarty grew up in the segregated South, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They don’t serve tea in Hattiesburg. What Ms. McCarty received servings of were segregated, inferior schools and an education that ended in the third-grade. I suspect she wanted more schooling but her parents pulled her out of school to wash dirty clothes for a living. She worked all of her life washing clothes. If ever a black woman should have screamed “black liberation” with a southern accent, that woman would have been McCarty.

But she did not.

What she did do was save her money for seventy-eight years. Year after year, she washed clothes day and night. She saved what she could. She did not marry. She did not have children out of wedlock. And at the end of her days, Ms. McCarty gave all of her life savings, $150,000, to create a scholarship for black students. 

Towards the end of her life, someone asked Ms. McCarty what she most wanted. She offered the hope that “children won’t have to work so hard like I did.”

Those are words of truth.

May all black leaders strive to be truthful in their words. That is my prayer.