Rage Against Reality

For the last several years, whenever I've been asked to indicate my race or ethnicity for survey purposes only, I've checked off African American. In a literal sense, it's true. If "African American" means descended from African people, well, that includes me . . . and, if you're an American, it includes you too since, according to a consensus of anthropologists, the entire human race originated in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of our ancestors just took detours through other continents.

But of course certain dark-skinned residents of the United States would vociferously object to such a classification. I'm sure Bakari Kitwana would object to it since it undermines the raison d'etre of his new book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. In order to take the book seriously, you have to buy into the premise that certain dark-skinned residents of the United States constitute a coherent community of "African Americans" identifiable not by physical appearance (think Derek Jeter or Mariah Carey) or by socioeconomic condition (think Tavis Smiley or Sean Puffy Combs) or by political views (think Amy Holmes or Niger Innis) or by personal preference (Tiger Woods opted out but counts regardless) or even by ancestral demographics (fewer than half of Woods's ancestors would themselves count) but by the fact that they continue to be victimized, whether they recognize it or not, by "institutional racism." It is the common effort to overcome such victimization that ultimately defines blackness. And Kitwana's book examines the ways that blacks born between 1965 and 1984 — what he calls "the hip-hop generation" and in which he includes himself — are variously engaged in "the centuries long African-American struggle for liberation."

Of course, the mere fact that there exists a subcategory of African Americans of this generation who don't acknowledge their perpetual-victim status, or the existence of institutional racism itself, is a real downer for an author whose intent is to delineate the entire generation's struggle against it. Thus, he gives short shrift to black conservatives like New York Post columnist (and NRO contributor) Robert George and former Newt Gingrich speechwriter Charles Ellison, noting only their "wide popularity, regardless of party affiliation" yet neglecting to mention how often of the phrase "Uncle Tom" is hurled at them. He devotes a half page to Shannon Reeves, registered Republican and current president of the Oakland chapter of the NAACP, noting his focus on "self-help and economic development," but adds that the image of Reeves celebrating George Bush's nomination on national television "is hard for many to swallow" — because, of course, no clear-thinking African American could possibly support Bush's policies. By contrast, Kitwana praises Malik Shabazz, national coordinator and legal counsel for the truly demented Million Youth March of 1998, for helping "to keep the march's goals on the pulse of the hip-hop generation."

The pity of it is that Kitwana is an engaging writer who has struck upon an important subject. Black youth culture is currently, without question, the dominant force in popular culture worldwide; furthermore, Kitwana even acknowledges that young blacks have utilized their unprecedented influence, in too many cases, "to strengthen associations between Blackness and poverty, while celebrating anti-intellectualism, ignorance, irresponsible parenthood, and criminal lifestyles." He wants the hip-hop generation to exert their influence in more constructive ways, to question political orthodoxies and raise their own and the nation's consciousness, yet he will not allow himself to depart from the tired lines of thinking that have made a mess of urban communities. "Until there is a serious commitment to economic development, equal access, and a level playing field," he writes, "hip-hop generationers will continue to be subject to inferior schools, limited employment opportunities, and lifestyles out of sync with the best of what America has to offer its citizens."

It's an especially telling passage. Kitwana complains about "inferior schools" and "limited employment opportunities," yet he finds black support for George Bush, who favors school choice, merit pay for teachers, and tax incentives for inner city businesses, "hard to swallow." Even more insidious is the suggestion that young blacks will, in the mean time, continue to engage in "lifestyles out of sync with the best of what America has to offer." In other words, Kitwana is arguing, we'll keep screwing up our lives until the government steps in and takes away our opportunities to screw up.

By prisming every social issue through the lens of race, Kitwana buys whole hog into the myth that black solidarity is identical with, or even compatible with, the interests of the majority of black people. He spends page after page decrying laws enacted in the 1990's that "criminalized black youth behavior" — yet these same laws undoubtedly spared thousands of black lives. Kitwana notes, for example, that from 1997-98 — that is, the two years prior to the infamous shooting of Amadou Diallo by four panicky New York City cops — the NYPD's Street Crimes Unit stopped and frisked 45,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom were black, and effected only 9,500 arrests. But if those 9,500 arrests saved, say, 1,500 lives, a disproportionate number of whom were also black, how should blacks feel about the tradeoff? How many disses is a human life worth? If you doubt the tradeoff is real, consider that when Rudy Giuliani reined in the Street Crimes Unit after the Diallo shooting, homicides in the city, which had dropped precipitously every year since Giuliani first beefed up the unit in 1994, rose for two consecutive years. For Kitwana, and for virtually the entire hip-hop generation, this is a non-question. The dis is the thing that cannot be borne; to admit that it can be borne, or even should be borne, is to sell out the Black Man. The imbecilic — there's really no other word for it — antipathy of black New Yorkers towards the Giuliani mayoralty is the clearest embodiment of this mindset. The fact that Giuliani, in Kitwana's words, "has come to personify today's war on youth" should be weighed against the fact that his policies, which arguably led to the death of Diallo, inarguably spared something like 4,000 black lives from 1994-2002. It's not a stretch to say that Giuliani did more for black Americans than any public figure since Martin Luther King, yet, if not for his heroism in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, Giuliani would have left office more despised by black Americans than any public figure since George Wallace.

The deepest flaw in Kitwana's well-intentioned but thoroughly wrongheaded book now comes to light. If Giuliani is, for the hip-hop generation, the personification of institutional racism, then the struggle in which they think themselves engaged is not with racism but with reality. For in reality, if institutional racism is defined as a concerted effort to deprive African Americans of basic human and civil rights, it does not exist. Let me repeat that: Institutional racism does not exist. Let me italicize it: Institutional racism does not exist. Let me set it apart, a paragraph unto itself:

Institutional racism does not exist.

Certainly, individual racism exists . . . though, like pretty much every other behavioral pathology known to man, it is more prevalent among blacks than non-blacks. And, certainly, vestiges of institutional racism exist; blacks were deprived of rights for so long that their progress into the upper echelons of American society is the work of generations, not years . . . and pretty much every government attempt to accelerate this progress has only retarded it. But institutional racism itself does not exist, and each outcome discrepancy Kitwana cites as proof of it — from black underperformance in schools to black over-representation on unemployment lines and in the criminal-justice system — can be accounted for in straightforward logical ways. (It's no coincidence that in the silliest precincts of white-liberal-guilt-ridden academia, logic itself is occasionally written off as a tool of racist oppression.) "Criminalizing youth" does not equate with institutional racism; rather, it equates with cracking down on anti-social behavior in order to benefit law-abiding citizens — especially law-abiding citizens who live in neighborhoods where such behavior is rampant, a disproportionate number of whom happen to be black.

The underlying irony, which Kitwana mentions but never honestly addresses, is that rap music, which he calls "arguably the single most significant achievement of [his] generation" and "the Black CNN," has, for the last decade and a half, hammered home the message that anti-social behavior is proof of black authenticity. In utter seriousness, he compares the killings of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to the killings of gangster rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. (The temptation to quote the comedian Chris Rock on this subject is irresistible: "President Kennedy was assassinated. Dr. King was assassinated. Tupac and Biggie? Them niggas was shot!") The black critic Stanley Crouch has called the thuggish images propagated by gangster rappers "the new minstrelsy" — a phrase that Kitwana himself cites. Yet in the end he cannot take that final step, cannot critique the reverence such figures command among the hip-hop generation. He cannot bring himself to ask the painful but necessary question, Why are so many young blacks now embracing stereotypes, in their own way, just as offensive and even more insidious than Step 'N Fetchit and Aunt Jemima?