>you literally just made my point
>
>collectively at this moment in America, Blacks are "better
>off" materially, than at any other point

Better than who???? Are we keeping pace w/the other racial groups in terms of education and wealth building?

>
>BUT by every metric they are still near the bottom of, or most
>effected by systems such as the prison industrial complex,
>quality education, under and unemployment, high-wage earning,
>police brutality, social stigmas

And how do WE as a ppl unknowingly or willingly participate in our own destruction. Many of our youth especially play right into the social traps set by society
>
>Rap has little to do with anything

You and others keep rap as if HipHop is exclusively abt the music - HipHop, unlike other *music* genres, is a CULTURE...and CULTURE has everything to do w/how we see ourselves and the world around us...and it does influence the behavior of many youths in all the wrong ways...
>
>one, this position you been taking doesn't give the most
>marginalized of America's poor communities any sort of agency

The position I'm taking??? I'm the one who says we have to start being accountable for the things we can control within our community and that in and of itself will alleviate a lot of the problems we're still faced with from without...

>two, denies the fact that mainstream rap is just as vapid,
>insipid, materialist, dumb, violent, and disposable as ever
>other American cultural production

And the music right now is in large part responsible for dumbing down today's youth moreso than any other social institution in America...
>
>and three, does nothing to account for the white and non-Black
>consumers of rap and how it effects them

Because I don't interact wthose groups on a regular basis therefore I can't say how it affects them...and at present, those groups are not my immediate concern...

I'm concerned Negroe's plight...