John McWhorter with some good points -- and a nice shout out for KIPP and one of the REACH schools, Frederick Douglass Academy:

For example, Pete Rock grouses that "library broken down is lies buried," while Dead Prez tells us that high school is a "four year sentence" with teachers "tellin' me white man lies." Message: black people should be wary of education. Deep. "Politics." Sounds good set to a beat.

But how wary are we to be of the 57 KIPP charter schools, putting four out of five of their poor black and Latino students in college? I guess it's profound when Pete Rock yells, "I'm aware of segregation!"

But KIPP students are excelling despite segregation, just as they are at the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, where almost all students are from the hood and almost all go to college — despite less money than lesser schools nearby.

The proper politics here is to support charter schools and the vouchers that get children into them. The only sense in a "politics" treating education as the enemy or insisting that black students can't learn unless white ones are around is a basic commitment to being oppositional for its own sake, without constructive intent.

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'Conscious' Hiphop Fallacy

By JOHN McWHORTER
June 12, 2008

www.nysun.com/opinion/conscious-hiphop-fallacy/79820/

In Great Britain during World War II, with cities pockmarked by bombings, good-thinking planners wanted to take the opportunity to bless the British population with the glories of suburban living.

Goodbye to crowded cities. Why not spread people outward where they could take deep breaths and stretch their legs? This sounded like wisdom incarnate.