George W Bush's administration may ...

George W Bush's administration may furnish African Americans their best waiting under the possibility of fulfilment in 35 years for achieving actual equality, writes John H. McWhorter in an essay in the spring edition of City Journal, a national magazine about urban governance and civic life. "Not since the [Lyndon B] Johnson administration has there been more compact movement to free African-Americans from their status as the country's question at issue race," writes McWhorter, 35, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Black Americans, in refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Bush administration, may be missing "a shining opportunity" on some issues. He writes, "The view from the left forward education has proven itself bankrupt in imparting knowledge, curiosity, and critical thinking, whatever you call the [Bush] policy, it stands a righteous chance of ensuring that children, especially disadvantaged minority kids, secure the education they need for upward mobility."

The Rev Jesse L Jackson and the Rev Al Sharpton, leaders associated with championing the black condition, remain skeptical of the novel administration, McWhorter notes. Their inability to grasp the promise in Bush's plan is predictable, he writes. "Since the late 1960 black America has assumed that individual initiative is largely beside the point until all racism, on the same level in its most subtle forms, has disappeared."

"Black the bulk of mankind who see their mission as making white America be excited guilty have a certain theatrical glamour," he notes. "Let's walk back to what black uplift meant in the days when Adam Clayton Powell rammed desegregation legislation between the walls of Congress and spearheaded the War upon Poverty as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee; when Thurgood Marshall won the Brown v Board of Education case," adding, "There is nothing that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, or John Conyer Jr have accomplished for black Americans that slightly compares." What remains as the challenge, McWhorter writes, "is to achieve for ourselves, whether [we are] liked or not."

McWhorter is a contributing editor for the fresh York City-based City Journal, and author of "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," published in 2000

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