As far as your comments go about the dynamics of the relationship of the youth to education, that's all good information. When I refer to an ambivalent attitude toward education, I am not just speaking about the youth--it is a problem that exists among us across generations, in my experience. The young people have it because they have learned it from the older folks.

As for the media issue, there has obviously been a long tradition of negative portrayals of blacks in American media (i.e. minstrelsy), but it is important to understand that the early minstrelsy stuff was done by *whites* in blackface, not blacks.

What has happened today is that the people in the entertainment industry don't *need* whites such as Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor to make us look like fools, because there are *blacks* who are quite willing to portray even the most ignorant stereotypes about us.

Before anybody brings up the example of Amos 'n Andy, or anything like that, they need to remember that those cats *had* to do that if they wanted to work at all--there was no other choice in those days. Nowadays, the country has supposedly 'come so far' in dealing with overt racism--so why does so much of current black entertainment continue to resemble a modern version of Amos 'n Andy--but worse? It's even worse because while Amos 'n Andy were portrayed as buffoons, they weren't glorifying violence, drug dealing, or the prison life.

To be sure, the situation has *never* been good for us in the media, but anybody who is old enough to remember knows full well that the situation has become much worse in the last 10-14 years or so. I think that this is the biggest part of the 'generation gap' part of this issue--the gap occurs because people who are younger than a certain age don't really have any direct knowledge of a time when blacks were *not* portrayed in the negative way that they are today, so they can't understand why somebody like Cosby takes such exception to what is going on.

The fact is that 30 or 40 years ago, while there were negative portrayals of blacks that could be seen in the media, blacks were more *invisible* than anything else. For example, You didn't really have sitcoms or serialized TV shows specifically about blacks, with large all-black casts and stereotypically 'black' content, until the 1970s.

Again, younger people who patronize these so-called 'black' movies today probably are not aware of the reaction to Spike Lee when he began to make his presence felt in the late 1980s. He initally ran into great resistance from the establishment in the film industry, not so much because he was considered 'militant', but because many people in the industry were strong in their conviction that there wasn't really a viable market for films dealing with black youth culture from a black perspective. They didn't think it would work, but Spike proved them wrong with films like 'School Daze' and 'Do the Right Thing'.

The people in the industry obviously saw that filmmakers like Spike and John Singleton were onto something, and this opened the floodgates for all of these 'black' movies, from 15 years ago to the present time. It also opened the door for TV shows that explicitly celebrated aspects of urban youth culture and hip-hop, like 'In Living Colour'. If it had come out 25 years ago, 'In Living Colour' would *never* have been on network television in prime time--at most, it would have been a much lower profile show that was aimed primarily at blacks only, like 'Soul Train', for example.

My point is that this heavy, specific exploitation of black youth culture (particularly the whole 'thuggish' aspect) in the entertainment industry is very recent. While it has its historical antecedents, the current state of things only extends back about 15 years or so--when you start going back 20 years and more, it was a very different situation.

I mean, you couldn't really even *hear* much rap on the radio in most of America until the early to mid-90s--there were no such things as major-market commercial radio stations with an all hip-hop format before then.

If you go back and listen to the lyrical content of the music on black radio from, say 20 years ago (I'm talking about lyrical *content*, not musical style), and compare it to some of the stuff you hear today, you would think that the people who produced these musical expressions were two compeletely different groups of people *who have almost nothing to do with one another*. The fact is that while certain things in this country have worsened in the past 20 years, things haven't changed *that* much. The content of the commercialized cultural products associated with black youth has become *much* more negative than it once was, and there is a specific *reason* for this that goes beyond internal changes in the black community itself.

It is true that some things are worse in the community today, but many things are better--so why is all of this extreme negativity so prominent? It is important to remember that the overall content of the products that are referred to as 'black youth' or 'hip-hop' culture are largely controlled by *whites*, on a business level. Many of the people who are so loud in their alleigance to the current 'hip-hop' and 'black' youth culture would drop it like a bad habit if the whites that ultimately control hip-hop and commercialized black youth culture through their ownership of the motion picture studios, television networks, major record labels, film and record distribution networks, cable music video stations, movie theaters, radio stations, clothing companies, etc., pulled their money out.

This music (and the culture generally) has become a different ballgame in the last 15 years from what it was before--and it is not a coinidence that it has become much more negative as it has moved further and further into the white-dominated mainstream of the entertainment industry.

In fact, there have always been thuggish elements in our community, but until recently, they were *not* the ones that set the cultural tone for the lifestyle and public image of the community as a whole. This has occurred in the present day largely through the exploitation and dissemination of 'black' youth culture by the mainstream entertainment industry.

My point here is that the decison to emphasize the most thuggish components of our community as representative of the "real' essence of black American life and consciousness has come from *outside* of the black community itself. Black people don't control the industry, so they are not the ones who ultimately decide what does and does not get marketed and promoted. All blacks can do is respond to the demands placed on them by the people that *do* control the industry, in terms of the content of their music, movies, etc.

My point, in short, is this: whenever there are large business interests at stake, there are *also* political dynamics in play as well. If people think that the emphasis on the negative and the thuggish in current commercialized black youth culture is 'just entertainment', with no larger political and social agenda whatsoever, they are very naive indeed.

The fact is that a Civil-Rights type movement similar in thrust to the one in the 60s would be *completely* impossible today, largely because whites today are very resistant to the notion of viewing blacks as victims of an oppressive American system. There is plenty of evidence of this shift in the way that whites view black problems and issues in many posts by whites on this very board.

Without white sympathy and moral outrage, the movement in the 60s would have gone nowhere. The *reason* why whites today are so unsympathetic to us has largely to do with our portrayal in the media (again, entertainment *and* news media).

This is important because if you're talking about systemic change in this country, you're not going to get anywhere in your appeals for justice if you are seen largely as a *victimizer* and an exploiter, not a victim. What I am saying is that this emphasis on the ignorant in 'black' media portrayals has been *allowed* because it offers *political* as well as monetary dividends for those who promote it.

Another way that this can be seen is that no other group in this country would allow themselves to be portrayed in the way that we are portrayed in the media. If it is so innocuous, and it has nothing to do with any larger political issues, why are other groups so adamant that defamation *not* be directed at them through the media?

The fact is that these other groups understand something that we do not understand about the larger political and social implications of such defamation. We think it's all fun and games and a big joke, but it really isn't--it is deadly serious.

I am not suggesting that whites loved us in earlier times, or that we were treated well in the media in earlier times, but back then, we were definitely not portrayed as a bunch of ignorant, materialistic, borderline criminals who celebrate physical aggression and prison life more than we do the values of education and family. If anything, we were largely invisible and ignored by the mainstream media--and frankly, this is preferable to the current arrangement, in certain respects. If the price of admission for us is that we have to demean and defame ourselves in this way, I would rather that we were not involved with it at all.

>>I think you know a lot more about political infrastructures than me, but in this week of the DNC and criticism of the lack of federal funding behind the No Child Left behind Act, there are certainly people screaming for more aid on the left side of the isle. Wasn't that Bebe Winan with a "help is on the way" sign (LOL)?

W9: Well, my point is that DNC trots the Negroes out when it's time to regain the White House, with all of the 'no child left behind' BS. However, just watch--as soon as the election is over, all of those blacks you saw singing and shouting from the podium at the convention will be put on the back burner--until it is time for the next Convention in '08. Sorry to be so cynical, but this is what I have seen over time.

Our issues and problems are not a secret or a mystery to anybody who has taken the time to study them. The reason that they have not been addressed adequately in the political arena is not because the whites who run DNC don't know about them--it's because they don't really care about us, beyond getting our vote once every four years

>> I do think that a fine line can be drawn here and the race issue can be avoided if you make that some of those arguements along class lines, as John Edwards seems to be trying to do.

W9: Ideally this would be true, but if you look at the history of this country, the white upper classes have been very successful in getting the white working and lower classes to side with them and view us as public enemy #1 in American society (from the days of the KKK up until today). Given that we are disproportionately affected by things like unemployment and the prison industrial complex, there is going to have to be some racially-based aspects of the analysis, and that is where the problems will come in.

The fact is that there is a good deal of support for the neoconservative anti-black rhetoric that paints modern-day blacks as poverty pimps and criminals amongst the white working and lower classes, so there is much to overcome here.

> Why do you think that there are 1 Million black men in
>prison in this country--and that this is not considered an
>urgent or pressing issue by most white Americans? Or that
>there is 50% black male unemployment in New York City--and
>that this is not considered a pressing issue by most white
>New Yorkers? Our public image has taken such a beating
>(thanks largely to the media) that these horrendous
>statistics do not do anything to create concern or alarm
>amongst most whites (other than concern and alarm for their
>own personal safety from us).

>>Is this indifference a new phenomenon? is the media today less sympathetic to these problems than they were 20, 30 50 years ago? Really asking here

The issue of the current white indifference to the prison issue is very significant, because the prison population in this country 35 years ago was *nowhere near* what it is now--it was maybe a quarter of the current population, at the most. While blacks were disproportionately incarcerated back then as well, there were nowhere near 1 million individuals in prison 35 years ago in *total*, much less 1 million *blacks*. My point is that the incarceration of individuals in this country has exploded in the last 25-30 years, and black people have been the hardest hit by this phenomenon.

However, there is virtually *no* discussion of the *reasons* behind this very serious problem, and its disproportionate affect on people of color, in the mainstream American media. Why? I am saying that this has a great deal to do with the differences in the way that we are viewed today versus the way we were viewed before. If we still had the moral high ground, as we did in the 60s, this would be one of *the* issues for black activists to raise in the mainstream. The fact that it is *not* really a major issue for the country in general has to do with the fact that we are no longer viewed as victims, but as victimizers.

The employment issue is significant because 40 or 50 years ago in NYC, while there was certainly unemployment, there was also much more of a separate black economy that served the interests and needs of the black community. In other words, there were more opportunites for black business owners to employ black people in those days, so I don't think that the employment figures were quite as dire as this (unless you want to talk about the Great Depression or something). Nowadays, that black economy is largely gone in the city (along with many of the general industrial jobs that we used to hold), and a lot of brothers have been left hanging.

This is a glaring issue because it doesn't take a genius to see that any white person who is concerned with crime in NYC should be able to understand that having 50% of the brothers in New York unemployed does not exactly help the crime rate, the homelessness issue, or the overall quality of life for residents of the City. Yet, there is no real discussion amongst whites of this as a problem that *must* be addressed, and soon--for everybody's benefit. I think that this is because many whites view the problem as a reflection of the fact that we are simply incorrigible and shiftless as a group, and there is nothing that the society can (or should) do about it.

White predudice toward us is not new, but what *is* new is this perception that there is nothing that society can do to help to alleviate the problems in the black community. The media is a key reason why many whites have basically turned their backs on us in the current era, even when this goes *against* their self-interest, as in NYC.