Winning the Race

So I'm hardly an expert on African-American history or culture, but I was struck by three separate articles that I saw this morning.

First, the rapper 50 Cent is in a dispute because he apparently stole his name from a gangster who "terrorized the streets of Brooklyn in the 1980s." Noting that admired the gangster and took his name as a tribute, 50 Cent has promised "to pay for a memorial to the late gangster in honor of his violent ideologies." Um, is this sick or what? Why should a gangster be a role-model whose identity you should want to usurp? And why should his family be indignant? If my son/father/brother/cousin was a notorious gangster, I'd like to think that I'd be ashamed of him, not proud.

Second, police in Berkeley, CA have arrested the men they believe murdered a rookie police officer in 1970. The officer was the first Asian-American ever hired by the Berkely Police Department. The motive for the murder? To prove to the local Black Panther group that they were tough enough to join. Again, this is disgusting. I understand that relations in the 1960s between police and African-American were tense, to say the least, but what happened to Officer Tsukamoto was cold-blooded murder, nothing more. That people to this day speak of the Black Panthers as if they were some sort of high-minded social organization is ludicrous (the professor at Oakes College who ran the community service program was a former Black Panther).

Third is an article that makes me far more hopeful, an op-ed written by John McWhorter in this morning's New York Times. McWhorter is one of my favorite writers, and this article shows why, extolling the virtues of the African-American community, rather than its pathologies. McWhorter argues, convincingly I think, that the silent majority of African-Americans agree with him and Bill Cosby and others, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of Blacks now strive for and achieve the same middle-class life as other Americans. But the popular culture perception lags far behind, viewing most Blacks as ghetto gangsters, and celebrating that culture. I think this is starting to shift, thanks in part to people like McWhorter.

UPDATE: Berkeley police don't have enough evidence to charge the men arrested for the murder of Officer Tsukamoto. But my point about many Blank Panthers being little more than cold-blooded murderers stands.