There are many Americans who regardless of the intelligence or the profound political persuasion of a figure will never vote for a black man. Not all of them are racists; some are skeptical, and some are suspicious.

Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.

The consequences of whiteness are particularly lethal right now. And the ignorance about it, especially on the part of white people themselves, makes them unavoidably complicit in a system that has to be unmasked, unveiled, undressed in order to be reformed or destroyed.

If your experiences suggest to you that poor black folk are lazy, then you must be true to those experiences - except, however, as your experiences are pressured by empirical investigation of complex phenomena. I suspect that even when you control for variables of individual laziness, you'll see that what you see before you masses of black poor people unwilling to work hard to get better will not be as simply concluded as you might at first believe. Continue your good work.

America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.