vinemaple

The key to understanding McWhorter is that he's a nerd, and because he's a nerd, he can't be black. Nobody likes black nerds! The only black nerd in popular culture is Geordi LaForge, who, after Picard and Data, was the 3rd best character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whose irreplaceable engineering saved the day in about half the episodes. And for that Levar Burton earned a Most Embarrassing Black Person Special Hall of Fame award in The Boondocks. Oh yeah, and Urkel. Look at all the trouble Sean Combs (attended Howard) and Tupac Shakur (went to an arts high school, like on Fame) got into to overcome their nerdiness and establish ghetto cred. Sure, there's the Malcolm X/Chuck D style nerd, but they get a pass because they only talk about being black. Everybody else gets to be a nerd. You can be a white nerd, you can easily be an Asian nerd (try not to), you can be a Hispanic nerd, but you can't be a black nerd.

Let's take another look at McWhorter's main point:

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn't be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly "authentic" response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.

The thing is, in America, the only way to move up the economic ladder is to be a nerd. And rap music is the only art form in America that says otherwise. I mean, bluegrass doesn't condemn those who fail to keep it real. Now, I don't know if the lyrical content of rap is the way it is because it reflects the opinions of most young black Americans, or if it's because that's what the mostly non-black market is interested in buying. It doesn't matter. I think a positive step would be to stop pretending that popular gansta rap has serious or productive political content. It's not like the Irish, Jews, and Italians worked their way out of the ghetto because the pop music of the late 1800s told them to go to school, so we know that it's not necessary for gansta rap to be transformed into some kind of simpering self-affirmation life-coaching. Of course, the black middle class grew rapidly in the '90s. At the very best you can say rap's irrelevant. Anyway, it was the macho posturing at KFC that really bugged McWhorter, and it bugs me too. I don't like it from drunken frat guys or anybody else.

As for wiggers, I hate macho posturing from anybody. Is that what you're asking yourself, why do I give macho posturing from black kids a free pass? (Hank Hill once asked, "What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?") Or maybe it's just the desperate trying-to-be-ness of wiggers that bugs you.