I just read Bernie Hayes’ column in the July 7 edition of The St. Louis American about self-hatred and crime in the black community. I thought it was outstanding in its honesty and candor, and it has motivated me to write a few comments you may find pertinent.
I am a (white) former State of Missouri corrections officer. I was interested to observe that, in the prison environment, young African-American offenders spend a lot of their leisure time listening to hip-hop and gangsta rap music filled with lyrics that glorify drugs, guns and violence and demean women, and the race itself. They also spend time writing new lyrics of their own creation along similar lines.
In reading their outgoing mail (which is of course censored), I notice the young offenders writing to multiple females, some their wives and/or mothers of their children, and some just girls they know, using the same offensive and demeaning terminology, and of course not revealing to each of their correspondents that they are but one among many.
Among the probationers and parolees in a minimum-security work-release facility where I served, from whence the young offenders can leave during the day, I noted a propensity to spend more money than one might assume they had honestly acquired on very expensive baseball caps (labels still attached to prove them “genuine”) and pricey jeans (fit to allow the inevitable sagging), genuine leather jackets, etc.
What to make of this? I expressed these comments to a very respectable African-American lady of my acquaintance and she replied, with some bitterness, that these young men do not know the history of their people, of its heroes, of its struggles for civil rights. The only heroes they know, she said, are of the likes of L’il Wayne, and that is whom they emulate.
Curiously, to me at least, I never once heard mention in prison of President Barack Obama as an African-American leader or role model.
I understand that the young African Americans in prison are not wholly representative of the entire demographic. Still, it seems to me that the responsible adult leadership of the African-American community needs to wage a campaign both to de-legitimize the aura cast by the L’il Waynes – their lyrics, fashions and lifestyle – and, as you yourself pointed out in your column, make sure the youth understand that it wasn’t the L’il Waynes who marched in Selma and Birmingham and Montgomery and Memphis.
