No peace with gangsta rap

“Peace on earth, good will to men!” This Christmas message somehow rings hollow in a community where the youth have surrendered to nihilism. The growing murder rate in Boston’s black neighborhoods is extolled by the decadent values of the hip-hop generation.

The classical human struggle to attain moral ascendancy is described as the battle between good and evil. The strategy of those espousing evil values is to characterize them as a higher good. Rap artists have been able to do this by asserting that they speak for the tribulations of youth, a period which unfortunately also extends to those lost in eternal adolescence.

Many of those intoning their sinister recitatives became popular figures, capable of generating substantial wealth. That brought out the amoral businessmen to advocate for the rappers’ right to spew vulgarity and the condonation of violence. The scope of the First Amendment of this nation’s Constitution provides legal protection for even the most unsavory communications.

Mayor Menino demonstrated recently that the people are not entirely without recourse. He used the power of his office to induce local merchants to remove the distasteful “Stop Snitchin’” T-shirts from their shelves. We now need a similar campaign to encourage music stores not to sell gangsta rap. Radio stations should remove records with offensive lyrics from their play lists. If they refuse, then their advertisers should experience the wrath of the public.

Outkast’s “Ain’t No Thang” demonstrates the violence of some lyrics:

“I’d do it if I have to, bustin caps with this a heat and load it clip up

After clip

I’m packin my gauge, if I feel it

The glock, the gat, the nine, the heaters

See I be bustin caps like my amp be bustin speakers …

From my hollow clips, I’ll send you to an early grave”

The youth are waiting for their parents and the adults to intervene and stop the insanity. So far the response has been inadequate. Until the adults step up there can be no “peace on earth,” at least not in the ‘hood.

Capital punishment or race control?

The execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams in California raises once again the issue of capital punishment in the United States. The constitutionality of executions has been a constant subject of litigation. In 1976 the US Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment is not “cruel and unusual punishment.” Since then, 1,004 prisoners have been put to death.

Death is final! The increasing number of prisoners who have been exonerated by DNA tests suggests that a number of innocent defendants must have been put to death. It is a severe miscarriage of justice for the state to deprive the innocent of their liberty, but it is unacceptable for the state to execute the wrong person.

Blacks have to be especially concerned about capital punishment since 34 percent of those executed since 1976 have been black, while only 12 percent of the nation’s population is African American. Forty-two percent of those on death row are black, and 45.5 percent are white. One could reasonably conclude that capital punishment is a strategy of those in power to control blacks and poor whites.

Melvin B. Miller

Editor & Publisher
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