Anyone familiar with this blog or the radio program of the same name is probably aware of Mr. Starks’ catch phrase, “the unattractive truth.” After reading the responses to a commentary by famed graphic novel scribe, Christopher Priest (best known for his work on Marvel’s Black Panther run, pictured above) it appears that many folks really are not ready to accept the unattractive truth. I have to give kudos to our resident commenter, "Fred" for pointing out Priest’s diatribe. Priest was responding to a question concerning the validity of Black pathological behavior. After reading his response, I could not see any failed logic with his statements. What was truly disturbing was how quickly, the respondents dismissed his words as a case of bitterness or better yet another example of a Cosby-esque rant. His analysis of BET, Black societal impotence and the gangsta/minstrel faction of hip hop was dead-on. So I want to give our readers the chance to give their opinions on Priest’s commentary. Is he wrong? Or is he delusional? Let’s hear your thoughts. Check out the Priest’s op-ed below:
Question: I don't see what's so uniquely pathological about the black community. Are you pathological?
About many, many things. And I do, in fact, blame the black community for being pathological in the sense of remaining silent while poisoning their own children with negative images and stereotypes. For financing things that undermine us as a community and destroy our children’s future. Every time you pay your cable bill, you finance corporate interests grown rich off of calling us “niggas” and “ho’s” and promoting stereotypes and lifestyles that are destructive, that make a virtue of under-achievement, criminality, misogyny and intellectual cowardice. I consider it pathological that black parents blast this music, with its foul language and negative stereotypes, from their stereos all hours of the day and night while their young children ingest these messages. I consider it pathological when young black mothers abandon their toddlers—toddlers—in front of BET and similar programming where they are fed a steady diet of “gangsta” imagery, where such imagery is accepted as normal and appropriate. It is neither. I consider it pathological when any group of people or, heck, animals or reptiles for that matter, promotes and finances the repression and degradation of its own race.
Most urban culture, black gangsta rap in specific, can indeed, be described as self-destructive. I'd like to think it's just that I've outgrown it. That my disdain for much of the hip-hop culture is borne out of generational differences and the arrival of middle age. But, by any rational objective standard (or any religious model— Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu), the main thrust of the urban black culture is anti-moral and, ultimately, self-loathing. It advocates the ontological rape of black women by black men; a de-humanizing of black women into momentary sexual diversions and stage props. It imposes an anti-intellectual standard on young black men while incongruously defining their existence by an unsustainable standard of material wealth, sexual acuity, controlled substances and binge drinking. Failing to achieve or sustain that lifestyle, especially in the absence of a quality education, leads many young black men into often unrecoverable spirals of low self-esteem, while many black girls binge and purge and starve themselves to look like the hoochies in the videos, hoping to attract the hardened, gangstered “rough necks” who will inevitably abuse and neglect them. The patterns are, by any reasonable and objective standard, pathological; a race subsumed with self-genocide.
And for the commenters responses to Priest, click on the link below:
Hudlin Entertainment Forum-Christopher Priest's Commentary
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