Black people are inherently inferior. This is not something you would often hear anybody say outright—if at all. That would be racist, and we live in a time when even devout racists get offended if you actually call them “racist.” The closest we tend to get to such utterances is the coded intimations of the Newt Gingriches and Rick Santorums of the world talking about how blacks prefer welfare to actual work. (If that were so, Uncle Sam owes me over 25 years of backpay.)
Yet, the message of black inferiority is still something being transmitted today. Like air, water, and high-fructose corn syrup, it simply permeates the culture. We take no more notice of it than we do inhaling the carbon-monoxide air of our car-driven country.
Television news constantly feeds us reports of black criminality, black underachievement, black addiction. Our entertainment industry gives us a steady diet of black depravity, shoveling pimps and hustlers and playas and thugs down our throats. We can watch them on our televisions, in our movies; listen to them on our radios, iPods, and smart phones; we can read about them on our Kindles and Nooks and even—heaven forbid—actual books and thrill to their tales of violence, greed, and penicillin-resistant promiscuity.
Even science gets into the act. Phrenology may be dead, but so-called studies and statistics thrive. They tell us black kids can’t keep up academically. Drugs consume the ghetto. Jails are overflowing with black misery. Over 60 percent of black men without a high school diploma will wind up in prison. Some even say there are more black men in prison today than were enslaved in 1850. On top of all that, black men are even the least hirable demographic in these here post-racial United States.
Hell, with all these problems, no wonder we are constantly assaulted by those images I mentioned earlier. That we are just as likely to see black thuggery on our TV screens as we were the token black friend in a ‘90s sitcom (whatever happened to those?). That hip-pop (what I like to call ironically “commercial” rap) still pounds us with talk of pimping, hustling, dealing, murdering, and misogynating. That 80 percent of the books published for, by, and/or about blacks is urban or “ghetto” literature. After all, all these portrayals reflect the culture, mirror the reality of life in African-America.
Except, of course, they don’t.
