.
If it’s not white racism that keeps black kids from getting good grades, what else could it be? How about a culture that denigrates doing well in school while romanticizing and rewarding violence and crime?
A Harvard study, in fact, ties rap “music,” now euphemistically termed “hip-hop,” to a drop in reading and math test scores among black youth a decade ago, just as they were narrowing the gap with white students [22]. Citing a radical change in after-school habits, Professor Ronald Ferguson of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government noted, “There was a tremendous progress in the 1980s in reading and math scores for black youth. Sometime between 1988 and 1990 the progress stops” [23]. Ferguson said he was struck by the way the halt in progress coincided with the rise of hip-hop’s popularity. He noted that in 1988, 40 percent of black students questioned said they regularly read for pleasure, but by 1992 that figure had dropped to just 14 percent [24].
Hip-hop, rap, Gangsta Rap, or whatever you term it is nothing more than acid on the fabric of our culture. It helps draw young black men especially into a nihilistic moral void. One would think that black leaders would be leading the fight against music that glorifies criminality and violence. We know they can do it. There have been innumerable actions by black leaders to get cigarette and alcohol companies to stop targeting blacks. The NAACP threatened to boycott three major television networks if they didn’t include more blacks in programming, noting the impact entertainment images (of the lack thereof) have on self-esteem and confidence.
Yet it isn’t whether or not there’s another black family comedy on the WB network that holds the key to a bright future for a young black man or woman. No, it’s the so-called music that pervades the black community, glorifying everything from murdering police officers to killing your neighbor, that has a deadly affect on black youth. When it comes to the most horrific, the most damning material, the Black Elite, specifically including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, and Louis Farrakhan, systematically support, defend, and legitimize this cultural rot, and all the while they deliver their daily dose of the we’re-all-in-trouble-because-of-white-racism shtick.
[22-24] “Study Ties Hip-Hop, Rap Music to Drop in Test Scores,” UPI (June 26, 200).
Tammy Bruce
Chapter Five, “Enslaving Their Own: Betrayal by the Black Elite”
The Death of Right and Wrong
