How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back

At least some elements of the Black community are beginning to come out of the closet about the effect of rap music on the behavior of it's youth, or at least some elements therein, as this piece by John H. McWhorter in the City Journal shows so elegantly. This is not written by one of the right-leaning voices from that community, nor from a right-leaning publication. It therefore bears more than a cursory look. Far be it for me to dissect the work; as a conservative libertarian Jew, I have no standing. But as McWhorter says:

Sadly, some black leaders just don’t seem to care what lesson rap conveys. Consider Savannah’s black high schools, which hosted the local rapper Camoflauge as a guest speaker several times before his murder earlier this year. Here’s a representative lyric:

Gimme tha keys to tha car, I’m ready for war.
When we ride on these niggas smoke that ass like a ’gar.
Hit your block with a Glock, clear the set with a Tech . . . .
You think I’m jokin, see if you laughing when tha pistol be smokin—
Leave you head split wide open
And you bones get broken. . . .

More than a few of the Concerned Black People inviting this “artist” to speak to the impressionable youth of Savannah would presumably be the first to cry out about “how whites portray blacks in the media.”

But McWhorter does not blame the whites. He's speaking within his own community.