Pick a Better Country: An Unassuming Colored Guy Speaks His Mind about America

Calling himself "The Black Avenger, " Ken Hamblin insists that America works for anyone who is willing to seize this country's opportunities, remain diligent, and commit to our traditional values of right and wrong. From Hamblin's perspective, all black Americans today share this opportunity. They are no longer victims, and white people should stop feeling guilty about the past. Raised on welfare in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Hamblin knows what it's like to grow up poor. And he faced segregation firsthand, as an Army soldier stationed in the South in the days before the civil rights movement. But he refused to settle for poverty, never making it an excuse for failure or assuming it was his lot in life as a black American. And after joining the millions of other Americans who took down "colored" and "white only" signs in the 1960s, today he is demanding to take his place as a fully vested American. Saying things that "a white person wouldn't get away with, " Hamblin criticizes black trash - if there's white trash, then it follows that there can be black trash. The difference is that we've allowed this sick culture of gangsta rap, drugs, gangs, and welfare to be glorified by some as the only "authentic" black American culture; brood mares - what else can you call young black girls who are having babies, more than 90 percent illegitimate, with no means other than welfare to care for them?; black thugs - they go on crime rampages, claiming to be leading a phony social justice crusade on behalf of their race, but the truth is that they have probably snuffed out more of their own than any white racist group; poverty pimps - these black urban politicians devote their entir political careers to delivering nothing but government welfare to their stagnant communities of isolated constituents; quota blacks - they'll always be second-class citizens because emotionally and numerically they fill outmoded affirmative-action minority slots in the workplace