The Great African-American Awakaning

The City-Journal is one of those publications TMR loves to hate and often loves to love. The magazine often makes eloquent arguments for conservative viewpoints and does so with a compassion that many liberals think is devoid in conservative ideology (just as conservatives think liberals are fantasy chasing idealist (and people who don't allow themselves to be pigeonholed into narrow ideological labels think those who do are dragging this country into the sewer faster than Ann Coulter can bang on Al Sharpton for playing the race card)). Anyway, this City-Journal article is an interesting examination of what Myron Magnet sees as a new era in African-American leadership.

The three weaknesses of the article are that it relies too heavily on two books, its repeated attempts to tie the thugs in US urban centers to terrorists in the Middle East and its (inevitably) superficial understanding of rap and hip hop. Although this passage provides an interesting angle for the argument against rap:

Of course, white kids listen to this music and see these videos, too, including kids who will grow up to be corporate America’s bosses, and it affects the way they see black people, Williams says. They will come away with an image of black women as indiscriminate sluts, and black men, as African-American journalist Stanley Crouch puts it, as “monkey-moving, gold-chain-wearing, illiteracy-spouting, penis-pulling, sullen, combative buffoons.” “Who would hire such a person?” Williams asks. “Who would want to live next to them?” This $4-billion-a-year industry, in which blacks are the performers, the designers, and many of the executives, presents African-Americans to the entire world in terms the Ku Klux Klan would use. Where are the civil rights leaders?

All in all well worth the read, particularly considering this seminal moment in American politics.

On another note, congrats to the McCain campaign on a genius political move sending that farce of an editorial to the New York Times knowing full it wasn't up to the editorial boards standards. More on this tomorrow.