It's getting to the point where celebrities have to take a number to trash Cincinnati. Last week, actor and singer Harry Belafonte joined the pile-on by saying “plantations exist all over America,” and Cincinnati is one of them.

“If you walk into South Central Los Angeles or you walk into Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati,” he said on Larry King Live, “you'll find people who live lives that are as degrading as slavery had ever produced. They live in economic oppression, they live in a disenfranchised way.”

He is accidentally right.

The real slaves

There are slaves in Cincinnati. Slaves of drugs, ignorance, teen pregnancy and crime.

They are enslaved by victimitis, a disease spread by Mr. Belafonte and Jesse Jackson every time they open their mouths. For them, “racism” cancels personal responsibility. Riots? Blame racism. Unemployment? Racism. Black men killing black men in black neighborhoods? The white man's fault, of course.

Mr. Belafonte is also right about plantations. The biggest one is the Democratic Party, which has given 40 acres to the civil rights leaders in return for 90 percent of the black vote.

Blacks who stray from the liberal fields are hunted down and punished.

Maybe that explains why Mr. Belafonte called Secretary of State Colin Powell a “house slave.”

Mr. Powell has worked his way to the highest rank ever held by a black man in America. Mr. Belafonte is famous for singing the Banana Boat song — a wealthy celebrity obsessed by imaginary oppression.

Which one is enslaved?

In his book, What's So Great About America, Dinesh D'Souza brings the clear vision of an immigrant to the race debate.

As a self-described “person of color,” the Bombay native says he is continually amazed at how little racism still exists in America. But civil rights leaders keep the wound open, holding America to an impossible utopian standard of perfection.

Meanwhile, immigrants move up, proving the barriers are gone.

Profoundly silly

The United States was the first nation to fight a war to end slavery. Cincinnati led the Underground Railroad. Mr. Belafonte knows this — he's an honorary board member of Cincinnati's National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Museum.

And that makes his remarks profoundly silly.

The response from most of Cincinnati was just as goofy: “Well, we don't agree, but he has a right to say it.”

Of course he does. And the rest of us have a right to tell him he's full of ripe bananas.

“Our executive committee meets Thursday and they will be discussing” the remarks by Mr. Belafonte, said Freedom Center President Ed Rigaud.

“I don't know how the board members are going to look at this,” he said. Will they dump Mr. Belafonte? “Some board members feel that way.”

They should. So should the rest of us. Or call us Bengaltown, America's doormat.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com, or call 768-8301.

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