'We Got To Do Better'

My latest guilty pleasure is an independent website called hotghettomess.com. I turn to it whenever I am fed up with the Serious Debate on African-American Personal Responsibility taking place among black writers, academics and politicians and the entertainment crowd that mingles among them. There are no big-time black intellectuals to be found on hotghettomess, no policy wonkery tricked out in hip-hop meter as favored by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson. No, at hotghettomess you get the nitty-gritty version of the debate.

But before you go clicking over to it, be forewarned: It is not for the faint of heart. And before you look, a primer is in order: The nature of the debate (a k a "How Come We Still Have Millions of Blacks Mired in Poverty and Self-Destructive Behaviors?") is best described as complex and enervating, centered as it is on a slippery mix of history, cultural beliefs, institutional inequities, politics and values.

The Serious Debate is not new; Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois clashed over it, as have Black Panthers and civil rights activists and comedians like Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Sinbad and Dave Chappelle--most recently, in the last case, over blacks' use of the word "nigger." Whites have chimed in too, notably former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who caught hell from all sides in the 1960s by suggesting that the notion of black personal responsibility had a role in the public-policy debate over welfare. Throughout, the debate's rhetorical contours most closely resemble a snake eating its own tail.

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