JUNK CULTURE............

"Last week's gangland execution of 15-year-old Billy Cox sparked a frenzy of interpretation
which tried to explain the child's cold blooded murder. David Cameron inveighed against absent
fathers, blaming them for youth crime as they have failed to give there sons decent role models.

But that idea suggests boys are murderous by nature, and require corrective parenting in order to
become otherwise. The mere absence of a father does not automatically result in gangsterism and
bloodshed. Poor white people also have a high rate of single-parent households, yet gun crime is not
endemic among them as in black communities.

Young black people are enticed into antisocial behaviour by a popular culture that fetishises the most vulgar,
ignorant, bandit elements of their community, holding them aloft as the epitome of blackness. Watch any
music channel and you will see how black youth is portrayed as violent, promiscuous, coarse and stupid.

This moronic pantomime is the mainstream concept of what it is to be authentically black, and many black
kids flush there lives down the toilet emulating a lifestyle that will get them nowhere. "Keeping it real" is a racist
blueprint for keeping them firmly in their place.

The brilliant African-American critic Stanley Crouch correctly indentifies gangsta-rappers as post-modern
minstrels who undermine and insult the black community. Making millions from popular entertainment, they
exert a powerful negative infuence on black youth.

At school, I knew intelligent black kids who failed because they bought into the apathy, resentment and
delinquency that defined them in popular culture. One friend of mine was a west African whose parents
were respectable folk with high hopes for him. But in his teens, to fit in with his peers, he started speaking
a Caribbean patois he'd never spoken before and acting like he was too cool for school. Studious black kids
would be accused of "acting white" for wanting to pass exams and do well.

The main consumers of this junk culture are white. No rapper makes his fortune selling records solely to black
people. Cosseted in the suburbs, white kids long for a life of rebellious, animalistic abandon. This fantasy is
catered to by the pernicious mythology that surrounds young black people.

It is time for black kids to see through the garbage that is peddled to them. Today, rather than believing in
education, many think the authentic career for them is in sport or music - ie industries devoted to entertaining
white people. Someone needs to show them how fraudulent it actually is to make a point of "keeping it real""

Nirpal Dhaliwal