Item: Amid crisp breezes and bright sunshine, Barack Obama took the presidential oath Tuesday afternoon to the thunderous applause of his supporters, the cautious hopes of the loyal opposition, and the well-wishes of all Americans.
Item: Three days earlier, four men were stabbed, one critically, at a Brooklyn party celebrating
Notorious, the new movie about rapper Notorious B.I.G. He released the album
Ready to Die before being killed in Los Angeles in 1997. Rapper Jamal “Gravy” Woolard—who portrays B.I.G.—was charged with misdemeanor assault and harassment against his wife last September, the
New York Post reports. “She wouldn’t stop pushing me, so I snuffed her,” Woolard allegedly said.
Woolard—whose songs include “Drugs, Drugs, Drugs” and “Murder, Murder”—was shot in the left
buttock while awaiting an on-air appearance outside Manhattan’s Hot 97 radio station in 2006. “The ‘interview/shootout’ is rather a Hot 97 tradition,” the
Post has observed. At least 32 bullets have flown outside the West Village FM studio during three confrontations among feuding rap acts. The building’s owners complain of some 50 violent episodes involving the rap station.
Question: Will Obama’s erudition and elegance finally eclipse the corrosive, often deadly scourge of hip-hop culture and the ghetto mentality that gnaw away like an army of starved termites beneath black America’s floorboards?
Until at least 2013, the whole world will watch a debonair black man whose studiousness and diligence transported him from a broken home to the world’s most famous house. He will share it with the magnetic Michelle Obama, his wife of 16 years. Just like her husband, the First Lady avoided the
50 percent black high-school dropout rate, graduated from an Ivy League university, and earned a Harvard law degree. The Obamas’ two lovely daughters know exactly who their father is and enjoy him in their daily lives.
The Obamas are not alone among black Americans. Millions of blacks peacefully stay in school, commute to work, nurture their loved ones, and improve their communities. Alas, industrious black Americans, particularly in the middle class, are virtually invisible in popular culture. Such decent citizens are overshadowed by ubiquitous rappers who too often celebrate violence, degrade women, and perpetrate offstage carnage. Rappers Milton Bruce
Scott, Mac
Minister, and
C-Murder are among those convicted of homicide (although Mr. Murder faces a re-trial).
Like bumble bees buzzing from rose to rose, too many black men serially impregnate women who are not their wives, spawning a
67.8 percent black out-of-wedlock birth rate.
Obama’s daily presence in the White House finally may repel this foul tide. He also may unravel the “Acting White Syndrome,” wherein young black students who do homework and speak proper English are mocked by ghetto-oriented black kids for “acting white.” Light years ahead of white racism, this is the biggest cancer facing black Americans.
Obama himself
told the 2004 Democratic National Convention that America must “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
Scholarly kids sometimes get abused on white schoolyards, too. But white kids call the boys and girls in chemistry class nerds and geeks. They don't charge them with “acting Chinese.” White bookworms and quant jocks are not accused of betraying the Caucasian people. Only black students must endure such vile, malignant rubbish, and at the hands of other blacks, no less.
#page#
My two younger sisters and I endured this treatment at a predominantly black elementary school in Los Angeles.
“Why you actin’ white?” I heard more times than I care to recall, usually uttered by pint-sized hoodlums who spoke exquisite Jive and seemed destined for middle management in the Crips or their arch-competitors, the Bloods.
My sisters and I thank our parents for their advice: “Ignore those stupid kids, and listen to your teachers.” Those words propelled us through grade school, into junior and senior high in affluent suburbs (thank you, voluntary integration), and on to college, and lives as responsible, self-reliant professional adults.
#AD#“When black kids are told they’re ‘white’ to like school, often they stop trying as hard,” says Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Columbia University adjunct professor John McWhorter. “This is key because it’s much of the reason there are so few black American students who qualify for selective schools without racial-preference policies. It’s a quiet sense that being a nerd is somehow ‘not black.’ When you’re black and 14, often you have a choice between doing well in school and having black friends.”
“The simple fact that a black ex-nerd is on TV and our laptops every single day will wash away that background feeling that studying hard isn’t really ‘black,’” McWhorter adds. “A riposte, I highly suspect, will be ‘So, is Barack Obama white?’”
“Shaking the bonds of slavery has never been just about removing shackles,” Charles Payne, Fox News business commentator and founder and CEO of wstreet.com,
said at the
Congress of Racial Equality’s Martin Luther King Day dinner on Inauguration Eve. “Today it’s mental bondage that holds us back as much as the uneven and unfair playing field.”
“Barack Obama can’t elevate any of us to new heights unless we are pulling our own weight,” Payne continued. “We have been asking to be judged by the content of our character for centuries, and that day is upon us.”
Let’s hope that Obama’s example leads young black Americans to stop obsessing about white racism, reject hip-hop and ghetto culture, and embrace intellectual achievement. May a million belts bloom, and baggy trousers stop sliding off black men’s rumps—needlessly making them look foolish. (Obama recommends: “Brothers should pull up their pants.”) May books open, wisdom deepen, and childbirth follow matrimony as a new
era of responsibility envelops America’s ’hoods.
In this respect, President Barack Obama ironically could become a powerful force for socially conservative change.
