Quote:Man, you're forcing me to play a card I hate. One of my best long time friends is a black man. Yeah, I know, it's a cliche, but in this case it's true. We lived across the street from each other in Riverside from the late 80s through 2005. Not a ghetto, but not the nice part of Riverside, either.

 

We talked about "Cop Killer", the song most folks are talking about when they claim "all" gangsta rap glorifies violence against police. He explained to me how everyone he knew understood it wasn't advocating shooting cops, it was just sung as a first person's account of resentment over police brutality, a well documented problem in L.A. at the time. He just laughed it off as just another example of "white folks assuming black folks are too stupid to interpret art." As Ice-T once said, "If you think I'm a cop killer, you must also think David Bowie is an astronaut." Since that conversation I've reviewed some rap lyrics and found a lot of things about which I was offended, but very little advocacy of killing policemen.

 

Do you realize how popular gangster movies were decades ago, when Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd were characterized as heroes of the common man?

 

I held a lot of preconceptions about African-Americans before meeting him and his family that were disproven time and again. Maybe I don't know as much as you about other socioeconomic groups, but I know more than you might expect.