Whats Behind Debate Of Rap Artists Murder?
There has been much hype in the media about the recent death of Tupac Amaru Shakur. The rap artist was fatally wounded in a September 7 drive-by shooting and died a week later. Conservative commentators have used his killing as an occasion to fire some more shots in what rightist politician Patrick Buchanan has termed the “culture war,” by portraying rap music and Black youth who listen to it as the cause of crime. Others, including petty bourgeois leaders in the Black community, have tried to portray Shakur as some kind of revolutionary – another Malcolm X. Both are dead wrong. Thomas Sowell, a conservative columnist who is Black wrote a piece in the September 20 New York Post, where he abhorred the “barbarism being celebrated and marketed to impressionable and immature minds.” He said that “the poorest and least educated segment of the Black population,” who listen to this sort of music, glorify “savage and self destructive behavior.” He then argued, “The 1960s were a crucial decade,
