Keepin' Down Wid Da Joneses

An NYU graduate student, Thomas Chatterton Williams, penned a WaPo opinion article today condemning hip-hop as a destructive force in black culture. While his premises are fair enough, he does not do a particularly good job in assigning blame to artists or producers. If, as he argues, black youth culture is derived from the street up, the efforts of wealthy - if popular - Hollywood figures to change the culture are more likely to result in their alienation from the culture than their alteration of it. This does not, of course, excuse millionaires from posing as street thugs. However, I am unconvinced that hip-hoppers are really the key to the problem.

One paragraph of Williams' perhaps suggests a different approach, with a scientific approach to a well-known phenomenon:

A 2005 study by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard University crystallizes the point: While there is scarce dissimilarity in popularity levels among low-achieving students, black or white, Fryer finds that "when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA, clear differences start to emerge." At 3.5 and above, black students "tend to have fewer and fewer friends," even as their high-achieving white peers "are at the top of the popularity pyramid." With such pressure to be real, to not "act white," is it any wonder that the African American high school graduation rate has stagnated at 70 percent for the past three decades?

What's truly shameful in this debate is that some black leaders claim "acting white" doesn't exist. Their view does not appear to be shared by the actual young people in question.