When it becomes a minstrel show.
At least that's the reaction some had recently after reading a Dec. 2 column in the Naples Daily News satirizing the speech patterns of rap fans in an effort to describe a hip-hop concert that failed when the promised headliner didn't show.
Writer Brent Batten decided to tell the story using hip-hop slang and providing what he called an "English translation" as "a public service."
A sample:
"See, da brotha had some phat new school playaz lined up. Cris was in da house but 5-0 came down hard, wit Macs an' dogs sniffin fo' bud so da peeps all bailed."
His "translation": "The promoter had assembled an impressive lineup of popular hip-hop artists, featuring headline act Ludacris, but a heavy police presence, complete with guns and drug-sniffing dogs, deterred many would-be attendees."
According to a column written by Daily News editor Phil Lewis, the article didn't get much reaction in Naples, where rap shows draw a crowd of mostly white teens. But once the story circulated on the Internet - including on Jim Romenesko's Media News, a journalism Web site presented by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which owns the St. Petersburg Times - readers from across the country responded, including me.
Eventually, the National Association of Black Journalists wrote a letter to Lewis calling the column "patently offensive, intellectually condescending and journalistically unfocused." (Full disclosure: As a longtime association member, I provided feedback on the issue to the group's leadership before it drafted the letter.) ***
We have many reasons to be afraid, but two that should cause the most alarm are the low number of black men in college and the low number of black men who are graduating from college.
Nationally, a mere quarter of the 1.9-million black men between 18 and 24 attended college in 2000, the last year the American Council on Education reported such statistics. By contrast, 35 percent of black women in the same age group and 36 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds were attending college.
A grimmer statistic, according to the American Council on Education, is that the graduation rate of black men is the lowest of any population. Only 35 percent of the black men who enrolled in NCAA Division I schools in 1996 graduated within six years. White men, on the other hand, graduated at a rate of 59 percent; Hispanic men, 46 percent; American Indian men, 41 percent; and black women, 45 percent.
Where are the black men, why are so few on our college campuses and why are so few graduating?
"In 1999 there were 757,000 black men in federal, state and local prisons," according to the Autumn 2003 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. "In 1999 . . . there were 604,200 African-American men enrolled in higher education in the United States. Therefore, there were 25 percent more black men in prison in the United States than were enrolled in institutions of higher education. Today, black men make up 41 percent of the inmates in federal state, and local prison, but black men are only 4 percent of all students in American institutions of higher education."***