XPost: alt.fan.julia-roberts, alt.culture.ny-upstate, alt.fan.j-garofalo 
 XPost: alt.atheism 
 From: dmiddleton@N0TSPAM.0RG 
  
 Liberals Push Filth to Black Kids!!!!!!!!!! 
  
  
 Black teen girls don't get much respect, not even from each other. 
 That's just one of the startling findings of a recent study of the sex 
 and gender attitudes of low-income black teenagers. It offers new 
 evidence, as if we needed it, to me and to other parents of black 
 teenagers that the standards of "black authenticity" promulgated in 
 hip-hop culture are not only too narrow but downright dangerous. 
  
 With funding from the Ford Foundation and the California Endowment, 
 MEE (Motivational Educational Entertainment) Productions Inc., a 
 marketing firm that specializes in the buying patterns of urban 
 youths, conducted a 10-city research study of teens aged 16 to 20 
 years old. 
  
 The study found black urban youth from households earning under 
 $25,000 a year to be remarkably untouched by positive messages from 
 schools, parents, the media and health-care providers about 
 responsible sexual behavior. 
  
 But the teens did display attitudes consistent with the cool macho 
 pose of hip-hop rappers. Their mottoes: "Use or be used," among 
 others, and "Get it while you can." 
  
 And, consistent with a culture that uses "bitches" and "ho's" as 
 labels for every woman but one's mama, the study reveals, "Black 
 females are dissed by almost everyone," including other black females. 
  
 Compare, for example the half-dozen slang nouns in the study's 
 glossary that are used to describe males ("Dog... homeboy... playa... 
 lame... sugar daddy... payload") with some of the words used by both 
 teen boys and teen girls in the survey to describe women: "skeezer... 
 'hood rat... 'ho... trick... freak... bitch... gold digger... hoochie 
 mama." 
  
 The study of the "hip-hop generation" fails to pin down the big 
 question: Does rap music and other hip-hop culture influence teens or 
 merely mirror the culture that teens already have created? The answer 
 is probably 
 both. 
  
 Born since the mid-1980s, today's teens grew up awash in hip-hop and 
 so did their parents. The sad consequences have been a narrow and 
 distorted view among many black youngsters, among others, of what it 
 means to be black. 
  
 It was back in the 1960s, I painfully recall, that "authenticity" 
 began to replace the more generalized "cool" as the standard for 
 acceptable tastes and behavior among black youths. It was a period 
 marked by big Afros, dashikis, bib overalls, jungle combat boots and a 
 propensity for greeting each other with defiantly raised fists. Ah, 
 youth. 
  
 Such was the "authentic" look among black college students, of which I 
 was fortunate enough to be one in the late '60s. The "authentic black" 
 came to define a person who did not "sell out" to bourgeois 
 middle-class standards, the same values that enabled our families to 
 prepare us for college in the first place. 
  
 Even if we aging black Baby Boomers no longer buy that narrow notion 
 of blackness, a lot of our kids and grandkids do. In 1986, Signithia 
 Fordham and the late John Ogbu shocked many with a landmark study of 
 "oppositional cultural identity" in black teens who derogate academic 
 achievement by their peers as "acting white." 
  
 Still, there are signs of hope. Among those who expressed some pretty 
 raunchy attitudes in the MEE study, some also praised certain hip-hop 
 artists as more "positive" and called for more "message" in pop music. 
  
 And in another section headlined, "Wish I woulda waited: The secret 
 allure of virgins," many sexually active youths said sex wasn't all 
 they had hoped and that they wish they had waited until they were 
 married or at least older. 
  
 And many of the young men, in a reflection of times past, in the study 
 still showed significant respect for virginity they would not express 
 outside the group. Girls who don't "give it up" are males' top choices 
 for 
 long-term partners. 
  
 What is to be done? Pardon my dangling prepositions, but like other 
 generations, today's youths probably are just looking for someone to 
 look up to and something to believe in. 
  
 We, their elders need to provide it. We need not only to reach out and 
 show the world a broader vision of what black culture is all about, 
 but also to reach back and mentor our least-privileged youngsters. 
 They're not going to learn life's valuable lessons from CDs alone. 
  
 -- 
 Left-wing liberals are EVERYTHING they accuse the right of being. They 
 are mean, vicious, hateful, greedy, cold-hearted, closed-minded, 
 selfish, intolerant, bigoted and racist. 
  
 Liberals HATE America! 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)