Crouch and Fire

Three cheers for black conservative Stanley Crouch. Like Spike Lee, whom I also admire, he has the spirit to notice, and write, that black popular culture has managed to apotheosize the same stereotype of African-Americans as “bullying, hedonistic buffoons” that D.W. Griffith portrayed in "Birth of a Nation." He's disgusted by hip-hop music’s “neo-Sambo … mugging or scowling” with “gold teeth, drop-down pants, and tasteless jewelry.”

[H]e sees the real danger in a wider cultural trend, one more to do with “authenticity anxiety” than race. That trend is the belief, slipped into circulation by the liberal intellectual elite, that what is most “real” is what is most base, most closely allied to the loutish ways of the lower orders.