NAACP stoops still lower

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views July 16, 2001]

As if it isn't enough that decades ago vast numbers of black men opted to absent themselves from the lives of the sons they fathered, thereby consigning these boys to undisciplined and rootless childhoods; and as if it isn't enough that such boys feel compelled to seek out their own peculiar forms of power within their fatherless worlds, we now have the Great Black Leader confirming the rule of boys over men. For surely this is what Kweisi Mfume succeeded in doing at last week's NAACP convention, when he granted the organization's official sanction to the repulsive, undeveloped music genre of "hip-hop." (There seems something almost indecent in identifying this collection of expletives as "music.")

By praising several of the young "rappers" of this musical form for "charting a different course," and by encouraging the convention's audience to do the same, Mfume slapped the faces of all the men and women who have labored to expose to the young the worthlessness of this vulgar form of noisy self-indulgence. This coarse musical contrivance is little more than children exploding their anger and contempt directly at the adults who left them flailing around on their own. It has been described by black culture critic Stanley Crouch as "pornography disguised as 'keeping it real.'"

It is the sorrow of the age that there inevitably would be a host of cynical adults eager to produce this noxious noise for public consumption, thus rewarding these young people with vast sums of money for behavior that would rightfully be constrained or even punished by caring parents.

If there were any doubts left about the mediocrity of Mfume's ridiculous "civil rights" organization, that spends most of its time searching for crusades to endorse, the embrace of "hip-hop" ought to dispel them.

-- EW

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