You know our society is jacked up when a person’s death becomes bulletin board material for political platform and less about the individual and more about who he hung out with or the music he listened to? Well such is the case with the late Sean Taylor.

Much has been written about him and the friends that he kept and his troubled past but sports columnist Jason Whitlock went there. (He’s that big black dude who appears on ESPN’s sports reporters from time to time whenever they’re discussing “BLACK STUFF.”) He’s attributing Taylors past indiscretions a result of hip hop music’s influence and calling his killers members of the Black KKK.

There’s a reason I call them the Black KKK…When the traditional, white KKK lynched, terrorized and intimidated black folks at a slower rate than its modern-day dark-skinned replacement, at least we had the good sense to be outraged and in no mood to contemplate rationalizations or be fooled by distractions…

Our self-hatred has been set to music and reinforced by a pervasive culture that promotes a crab-in-barrel mentality. You’re damn straight I blame hip hop for playing a role in the genocide of American black men. When your leading causes of death and dysfunction are murder, ignorance and incarceration, there’s no reason to give a free pass to a culture that celebrates murder, ignorance and incarceration.

Hmmmm. Now I’ve been very vocal about the undeniable crossover dynamic between rappers and black athletes and they’re undying desire to be each other. Whether its Iverson with his short lived rap career, Mike Vick/ DMX and their dogs, ShaqFu, Melo marrying Lala or Winki Wright figthing for Dame Dash. Its an incestuous love affair with black athletes and hip hop.

But to blame hip hop for Taylor, black athletes or black societies problems as Whitlock does would a) say that all Hip Hop music is negative which is crazy. (He indicts the Soulja Boy song so I guess that lipgloss record somehow subliminally promotes nuder huh?!) B) It ignores his killers disregard for human life. And C) to blame hip hop is irresponsible without co-indicting the media conglomerates that house these artists and corporate America who USE Hip Hop to peddle their products…they feed and throw millions of dollars at her.

Plus are we saying Hip Hop is the reason for the problems in black society…Oh ok then. I guess that would mean Martin Luther King was bumping Biggie in the deck and became outraged. Get a grip people, this sh*t has been here for years. If Bush had his way and placed a moratorium on Hip Hop and it vanished from this country we’d still have places like Brownsville, Brooklyn (which is sh*tbox by the way I feel sorry for yall who live there…BedSty’s on the come up...sorry sidenote) We’d still have a rampid HIV/AIDS problem, drugs wouldn’t just vaporize and young black athletes would still aspire to go to the league.

TO WHITLOCK: So I get your KKK analogy however silly it is but as a black JOURNALIST you have to be more responsible than that homeboy. You gotta realize as an individual whose obviously not a Hip Hop fan you can’t go around condemning an entire art form just because the snippets you might catch on the radio while riding in the car with your kids seem offensive. You’re only skimming the surface dukes. I guess you haven’t listened to Fallin off Jay-Z’s American Gangster. Oh maybe you did and assumed he was talking the drug trade and promoting its use and sale. YOU TOO have an audience with your paper and your TV fat boy and people…white people, with clout, do listen. If they see you, as a black man, condemning BLACK people…they TOO will think its ok to do so. Do your research, you gotta read between the lines. First rule of journalism always get the story right. You get an incomplete. Paz.