NEW YORK (AP) - Essayist John Ridley wrote an article for Esquire magazine late last year, using an in-your-face style to rip the black underclass in the U.S.
He went on to describe famous blacks who've excelled in recent years - Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell - and argued that the whole group benefited from their work. It's up to us, he wrote, to emulate their success.
Readers were irate, and not because his thesis was poorly argued. They were derailed by the fact that a black person had blasted other blacks, using the n-word, in a national magazine with a mostly white audience.
African-Americans have bickered for generations over what's wrong with black America. But mostly they've done it in private: around the dining room table; at black universities; from black church pulpits and in the black press.
But things are changing, and Ridley is just one of several African-Americans to go public recently about problems within the community.
Oprah Winfrey recently said she built a new school in South Africa instead of in a poor American neighbourhood because "kids in inner city schools" are unmotivated - the "need to learn just isn't there."
Such voices, while a minority among African-Americans, are shattering the unwritten rule of black solidarity: if we can't all work together, let's at least keep our fights within the family.
"Black conservatives have had to go to the mainstream and make their arguments there because there is no place in the black community for those arguments to be made - not the black church or anywhere," said Shelby Steele, an award-winning author who characterizes the tradition of not speaking out as a liberal idea.
The conservative tag Steele uses for those who share at least part of his vision is slippery. Some identify as Republicans, but they cross the political spectrum.
Their common theme is taking individual responsibility. Instead of focusing on racial bias as a barrier, work harder in school, build businesses and accumulate wealth, power or both.
Chris Rock was among the first to go on the attack in public, more than a decade ago, when he famously joked in his standup act about the difference between black people and those he called the n-word. The latter, he said, boast about taking care of their children and not going to jail. "What do you want," Rock demanded of them, "a cookie?"
Ridley's Esquire piece, titled "The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger," started with: "Let me tell you something about niggers, the oppressed minority within our minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can't catch a break. Notoriously poor about doing it for themselves."
It quickly made its way around the online world, sparking heated, sometimes anguished debate.
Ridley said many were furious that he used a racial epithet in a white publication. "They couldn't get past the word," said Ridley.
Ronald Walters, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, said several offended colleagues e-mailed him the article. "If this was in Ebony, it would have been really different, but it's in Esquire," Walters said. "That's not a legitimate part of the African-American dialogue, the intra-group dialogue."
Bryan Monroe, vice-president and editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines, said Ebony was founded "to lift up the black community and to shine an important spotlight on the black community - and some of that is tough love - but we can do it from a point of authenticity. It's us talking about us. ... It's an authenticity that the white media often can't have."
Ebony would not have published Ridley's essay, he said. "The frame would have been different before we even assigned the piece," he said.
Ridley and others have a right to freely express their views, Walters said, because the civil rights "struggle has not been to build a wall around the black community. It was to liberate people.
"But the expectation was that, once liberated, they would be sensitive enough to our tradition not to betray us."
Journalist Juan Williams said he, like Ridley, is often accused of betraying black America because he publicly criticizes other blacks.
"There's always a concerted effort to undermine anyone who wants to say something different than the orthodox methods of the civil rights movement," said Williams, a regular commentator for National Public Radio and Fox News. "It's like hitting a nerve. You didn't just step on somebody's toe, you stepped on the nerve centre."
Bill Cosby provoked similar reactions during a May 2004 speech in Washington on the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the key anti-segregation ruling from the Supreme Court.
Cosby blasted blacks for chronic problems: imprisonment, dropping out of high school and births out of wedlock. "What the hell good is Brown vs. Board of Education," he ranted, "if nobody wants it?"
Some in the audience cheered, some cringed - partly because the national media were recording every word. Since then, Cosby has given dozens of similar speeches around the country.
"Malcolm X said you don't wash your dirty laundry in public," said political scientist Michael Dawson. "A group that feels it's under attack and oppressed wants to present a united front."
Around the turn of the 20th century, urban blacks often criticized other, typically poor, blacks who were moving en masse from the rural South into big, northern cities, said political scientist Mary Pattillo. The National Urban League even published gentle advice to the newcomers on how to fit in - for instance, don't spit in the streets.
"Of course, this was not published in Esquire," she said. "It was in our black newspapers and Ebony and all that."
Some say that Cosby, Ridley and others are getting such good press for their criticisms because they're repeating the views of conservative whites who blame black failings, not white racism, for blacks' problems, says political science professor Melissa Harris Lacewell.
"The story goes something like this: 'Wow, that black person - John McWhorter, Armstrong Williams, Shelby Steele - they are really brave and independent thinkers because they're willing to say something that counters what most of black America would agree with,"' Lacewell said.
"'They're willing to counter the traditional civil rights message. They must be so smart.' Well, I sort of think they're big suck-up cowards who are willing to beat up on poor and marginalized people."
There's also a generational factor.
Most political analysts agree that younger blacks, especially those in the middle class, are more politically conservative than earlier generations. Maybe they take the gains for granted because they're too young to have witnessed the gruesome realities of the pre-civil rights era. The emphasis on individual success, especially becoming wealthy, also could be part of a wider trend.
But the most prominent critical black voices are middle-aged.
They say that the country's race relations have greatly improved, and many of today's racial challenges are more subtle than separate-and-unequal schools. The old tactics, they insist, often don't fit modern realities and it's time to reconsider them.
Williams, 52, who last year released "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It," thinks post-civil rights blacks are maturing and gaining the confidence to speak out.
"When many of us were in our 20s and 30s, we were still deferring to the grandeur and accomplishments of the civil rights leaders of the'50s and '60s," said Williams, whose book was inspired partly by Cosby's speeches. "Now they're finding their own voice. There's a new energy in search of ideas and a willingness to discuss them openly that was previously unseen in black America."
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