Terminal Degeneration
Ghetto Culture is Now Completely Depraved... and Black Culture = Ghetto Culture
The ballot or the bullet, some freedom or some bullshit
Will we ever do it big or just keep settling for lil' shit
We brag on having bread, but none of us are bakers
We all talk having greens, but none of us own acres
If none of us own acres and none of us grow wheat
Then who will feed our people when our people need to eat?
So it seems our people starve from lack of understanding
'Cause all we seem to give them is some ballin' and some dancin'-’Reagan’, Killer Mike
If you work with kids, chances are very high you’ve heard “6-7!!!” along with the stupid little hand motion they do. This is the album that their mantra references. If you doubt the nihilistic savagery of modern ghetto culture then go ahead and watch the music video. Try and find something interesting or redeeming therein. Keep in mind: this is a tame offering, universally familiar to fifth graders.
I teach middle school. Most of my students are black (although they’re first generation American, most of them from Haitian immigrant families, so they’re not fully saturated in the “hood” culture that a lot of this country’s black kids are). But I see the culture that’s available to young people these days. We have quietly stood by and watched while a strange and sinister trend has enveloped us. Ghetto culture emerged and was assiduously marketed and spread and validated. Ghetto culture became black culture. Now it’s the culture of the entire underclass, to some extent, and efforts are afoot for it to swallow culture (especially youth culture) entirely. All of this is being done in the shadow of family collapse and community disintegration. The one thing simply could not happen without the other.
And no one says a word. An endless legion of parents, educators, journalists, academics, bureaucrats, writers, and musicians all happily go about their lives, as millions of children are submerged in filth and nonsense, and as the warning signs of deep community dysfunction blare louder and louder.
I imagine that a lot of the older readers of this essay are thinking of 90’s gangster rap right now, or the explicit ballads of Janet Jackson or the ribald humor of a Tyler Perry film they saw long ago. No. The modern youth culture is so far beyond this, so saturated in nihilism and adult content that it is literally unimaginable to older people. And with the cellular, self-reinforcing echo chambers of the modern digital landscape, they never will. Ideally parents would be monitoring this. But what parents? The mothers who let their kids miss 45 school days and jack cars in Anacostia? The aunts who wail on camera about good boys and the honor roll when their nephews are gunned down in Chicago or New Orleans? And even if there are two engaged parents in a home (a profound unlikelihood in all but the most privileged black communities these days), so what? A smart phone is a personal, private portal into any degenerate material that a child might want to view. Again, and again, and again, and again.
I won’t overload you with examples. You’ll just have to take my word for it: ghetto culture is now thoroughly saturated with references to sex acts, gun violence, drugs, and crime. The barrier between this content and children is completely gone, and respectable white people don’t seem to realize it. Or perhaps they just don’t like to talk about it.
One example: King Von. King Von (now deceased) is universally known and (somewhat) admired by black and even many white kids these days. He’s far more recognizable than a minor figure like, say, Joe Biden. If you don’t know who he is, he was a Chicago hip-hop artist suspected of murdering dozens of people (and investigated for murdering three - a complete lack of interest on the part of the Chicago Police Department plus threats and murder committed against potential witnesses means he was never found guilty). He was openly affiliated with the Black Disciples street gang in Chicago, and laced his lyrics and posts and speech with references to gang life. This isn’t Tupac and Biggie in the early 1990’s. This isn’t even criminal-adjacent drug addicts like DMX or Lil Wayne making music. The artists that kids are listening to today are openly advertising a nihilistic life of brutal violence, and the more bodies they have on their name the better and more marketable they are. King Von died after being shot at age 27 at an Atlanta club, which is now treated as a kind of entertainment news item and not an indictment of our entire culture.
We should be indicted for bullshit we incited
Hand the children death and pretend that it's exciting
We are advertisements for agony and pain
We exploit the youth, we tell them to join a gang-’Reagan’, Killer Mike
It can be somewhat difficult to interpret his broken, semi-legible X.com posts, but he was infamous for shooting at people, posting about it on X.com, and getting into online beefs with opps (= “opponents,” better rendered as enemies). He even developed a kind of teasing, online romance with a female member of an opposing gang… before she was slaughtered while standing on a Southside Chicago front porch. It was widely believed that he had participated, perhaps even pulling the trigger.
He posted hundreds of tweets celebrating his total lack of remorse, worrying about the fact that he suspected that he was getting addicted to killing people, and mocking the friends and families of those from around the way who’d just been killed. This was an individual who was clearly steeped in profound psychopathy, and he was also a very successful recording artist who appealed almost exclusively to minors.
We could spend a hundred pages pouring over the bleak and complicated drama around O-block (King Vonn’s hometown, so to speak) and the ongoing urban war between the Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples, but there’s little point.
One interesting aside: Michelle Obama was born and raised (for a time) around O-block (that’s not the origin of the name; it comes from Odee Perry, a popular Black Disciples gang member was shot and killed there in 2011). Her parents moved her out around the time that the former denizens of public housing came flooding in, as the mammoth and fetid public housing blocks that had become chaotic monuments for the progressive agenda were demolished miles away. How many statements has she made about her former neighbors and their troubles? How much energy has she expended in trying to save the lives of hundreds of black men and boys from murder and life imprisonment? None, as far as I can tell. The Obama Presidential Library recently opened less than 10 miles from all of this. It cost $850 million to build. The entrance fee is $30. How many of those millionaire donors are engaged with this issue, or would even acknowledge that this is a matter of cultural concern that requires open discussion?
Generations of money-hungry, lazy, impulsive, aggressive young black “men” have been shooting each other. The death toll at this point must be well into the thousands.
I will be emphasizing this point throughout this essay, but keep in mind: this is an invisible problem to policymakers, the media, and cultural producers. If 20 immigrants died in ICE custody this year it would be a national scandal. If 5 unarmed black people were killed by police again our cities might well burn, and leftist vultures might eye the moldering corpse of our selfish civilization, circling the mass with hopes of revolution. Instead, thousands of black teenagers are shot and not a word is said. And when you talk to white people about this (as I have) you realize that it’s not ignorance of the matter that motivates their silence. It’s merely a kind of awkward fear of sounding racist (even though race is not really the generative factor here, merely a kind of unpalatable correlation). How many black people would have to die to surmount this anxiety? 10,000? We almost reach that in a normal year. 20,000? 100,000?
I suspect that there is no number high enough. Respectable white people care about their neighborhoods and their kids’ schools and their home values. They care nothing for the wasted lives in the ghetto. This is the same reasoning that drives their reluctance to criticize ghetto culture, even when it comes screaming into their neighborhoods and their kids’ schools. It’s nothing but cowardice, and it’s been the defining feature of the white liberal for 70 years now.
It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that I could pick almost any artist with hood credibility (even the mainstream ones: Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Durk, Yung Miami, Ty Dolla $ign) and show nearly any video and it would wholly unsuitable for any child younger than 16. The idea that there’s some kind of boundary, some filter that protects kids from this content is laughable, given the cultural atmosphere today. I remember I was waiting for a bus in Harlem about 12 years back. Rihanna was and is about as mainstream as it gets (with songs like S & M and Birthday Cake, which is not about the celebratory bakery item) and I heard a little girl (5-6 years old?) singing the lyrics to one of her songs (Rude Boy): “Come on rude boy boy can you get it up? Come on rude boy boy is you big enough?” Delightful. Responsible parents would shut that kind of thing down pretty quickly of course (or wouldn’t allow the exposure in the first place). Most of these kids don’t have responsible parents. This is another problem (less acute than the wholesale intertribal black slaughter on the streets of American cities, perhaps, or the epidemic of carjackings by chronically unsupervised youths, but ultimately no less damaging) that white people simply aren’t willing to talk about.
Rather than report on the complete disintegration of lower class black culture and families, the New York Times would rather write approving profiles of black “artists”… like BigXthaPlug (a “plug” is a drug connection). The black cultural elements focused on marriage, educational attainment, and incremental financial improvement are derided and marginalized by the Times and its readers. There’s little opportunity for ideological exploitation or patronizing sympathy in such themes. Feeling pity for another group both positions yourself above that group and gives you an internal, warm “good person” glow.
And of course, this kind of transgression is thoroughly marketable. That, and the complete spiritual void at the center of black community life, is why this phenomenon exists.
