Jewish World Review March 26, 2004 /4 Nissan 5764

Clarence Page

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Consumer Reports

Authentically self-hating: Today's standards of being ‘cool’ on a destructive path


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | NEW YORK — Black teenage girls don't get much respect, not even from each other.

That's just one of the startling findings of a recent study on sex and gender attitudes of low-income black teenagers. Among other revelations, it offers new evidence 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 youths 16 to 20 years old.

The study found black urban youths from households earning below $25,000 a year to be remarkably untouched by positive messages about responsible sexual behavior from their parents, schools, the media and health-care providers.

But the teens did display attitudes consistent with the 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 "hos" 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 girls to describe women ("... skeezer ... 'hood rat .. ho ... trick ... freak ... bitch ... gold digger ... hoochie mama ...").

"Old-school thinking about relationships don't fit black urban youth," one subheadline in the study reads.

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The study of the hip-hop generation fails to pin down the big question: Does rap music and other traits of the hip-hop culture influence teens or merely mirror the culture that teens have created? The answer is probably both.

Today's teens have grown up awash in hip-hop and so have 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, 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 in the late '60s. The "authentic black" came to define a person who did not "sell out" to bourgeois middle-class standards, the very same values that had 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, professors Signithia Fordham and the late John Ogbu shocked many with a landmark study of "oppositional cultural identity" in black teens who denigrate academic achievement by their peers as "acting white."

Still there are signs of hope. Although some teenagers 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 for 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, still showed a significant respect for virginity in the study that 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 to show them a broader vision of what black culture is all about. We also need to reach back to mentor our least-privileged youngsters. They're not going to learn life's valuable lessons from CDs alone.

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