The connection between "rap" and "rap sheet."

The clever title is not of our devising, worse luck. The words appear in a depressing account of the sad existence and effect of rap on black youth and the even sadder tolerance of decent society for this execrable art form.

I know. I know. The First Amendment and all . . . and we're helpless, helpless, I tell you, to do something "about" rap.

Perhaps Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and the ever execrable Albert Sharpton can let us know how the idolization of rappers by black youth is that kind of progress to which Mr. McWhorter refers below:

But we’re sorely lacking in imagination if in 2003—long after the civil rights revolution proved a success, at a time of vaulting opportunity for African Americans, when blacks find themselves at the top reaches of society and politics—we think that it signals progress when black kids rattle off violent, sexist, nihilistic, lyrics, like Russians reciting Pushkin.

As Mr. McWhorter says:

[H]ip-hop sends the message that blacks are . . . uncivilized. I find it striking that the cry-racism crowd doesn’t condemn it.

It really is ironic that Don Imus -- whose total on-air objectionable remarks quite likely amount to less than .001% of all his on-air remarks -- is treated as though he were Beelzebubba his own sef when he makes what is easily understood to be an error in judgment. Yet there was no outcry, no sanctimony, no breast beating about racism when the rap pack made a beeline for the sewer . . . which they proceeded to inhabit and roll around in with the joy and abandon of a dog at the discovery of dead skunk.

Donning the mantle of stink.

Is that about it?

"How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back." By John H. McWhorter, City Journal, Summer 2003.