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The hopes of black America ride on his shoulders.

"Black America" (and by that, I mean the 52% of blacks who have decided to be "African-Americans" rather than being Americans) will be forever bitter and disappointed until the day that it's hopes ride on it's own shoulders. No charismatic liar is going to wash away the self-applied stigma carried by a group that lives in the past, blames The Man for every problem they continue to accept in their own communities, and that thinks Rap Music is cool.

A big chunk of black society has wonderfully struggled, learned, achieved, and succeeded, and gone on to be Americans. Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Bill Cosby, and others should be heroes to black youth, if the world made sense. Instead, the failed part of black culture teaches them that these impressive people are actually "too white" (which implies that somehow, a significant group of their culture seems to think achievement is "not a black thing", which darn near makes me weep.)

Black America, however you define it, has got to adopt a higher standard for itself, and expect more of itself. What would impress me was if I heard the REVERAND Jackson and other black preachers saying, "Drugs will make you broke, steal from your family, and kill you. The unwed mother is not to be abandoned, but the behavior is not to be accepted. Black children need a strong father, and if you can't find a man who will behave responsibly and marry you first, it is better if you didn't have sex. Blaming someone else because you dropped out of high school is stupid. Get a job and work hard at it until you succeed; don't complain that the jobs that will hire you don't pay enough while you wait for a check from the government.

There have been endless brave, smart, and kind black people in the past who have earned my respect. And our "Great Society" handout, the multi-billion dollar Reparations program we have flushed down the drain-hole of history has done what generations of bigots, Nazi's and Klansmen could never do...destroyed the black family. As a white person, I apologize for all the money we spent trying to make ourselves feel better about slavery; we should have set it up so that we expected something back in exchange for all the checks. And I am sorry that most white people are scared to admit this, and are willing to go right on writing the checks, when we should be expecting some kind of thanks instead of Reverend Wright's blustery anti-Christian hatred.

If you teach a man to fish, he will go get a job as a fisherman and feed his family for life. If you give a man a fish, he will endlessly complain that it isn't fresh enough, is the wrong kind, wasn't cooked the way he likes it...and anyway, yours is bigger!

Every February I am educated about dozens of impressive blacks of the past who, rightfully so, earned my respect by advancing science, healing the the sick, and creating Jazz, Rock, Swing, R&B and Gospel. And then I look around today, and see thugs making millions calling women "hoes" and getting shot because after becoming millionaires, they continue to hang with the same loosers and act like petty criminals.

I am appalled at my kids' infatuation with hip-hop. And it's not as though they've had no contact with good music. Before this they enjoyed a wide variety of music, and even liked gaelic and country music. I told them, look, these guys like to act like they're really tough guys and what do they do? They challenge each other to a poetry contest. I draw attention to the lack of melody, the lack of good rhythm, the lack of joy, the over-abundance of anger, the near-complete focus on self-gratification, the degradation of women (the lollipop song, for instance), the hand gestures and body language that look like a neurologically spastic condition, the use of third-world sweatshop labor to make clothing products pushed by the "artists," the way those wearing these clothes have to walk down the street holding the front of their pants to keep them from falling down but only end up looking like they can't keep their hands off their own dicks.

I pointed out that over the centuries hemlines and necklines have gone up and down, that there have been long pants and hip-hugger pants, shorts and short shorts, even pants with the butts cut out. The gamut has been run. The only thing left was to just wear the pants halfway pulled up or halfway pulled down but that that hadn't been done in all these centuries because it didn't look like being dressed, just halfway between getting dressed or undressed. That's not being in fashion; that's just being indeterminate.

So now we have an industry devoted to folks who can't sing, who cannot, for the most part, read music or actually play any musical instruments, who, for the the most part, cannot even rhyme very well, who choose a tent-like clothing ensemble that looks as though a five year old has raided his daddy's college sports wardrobe and his mother's box of costume jewelry, who sport expressions like they're bored, angry, depressed, or in the middle of a painful bowel movement, who choose names like Ludacris, Dr. Dooom, and Fannypack. How could we not expect their fashion sense to be equally defective?