Frank said: Who could deny that our racial problems would be less significant if we had been wise enough to welcome blacks into our culture sooner instead of forcing them to adopt the counter culture that plagues us now.

No one "forced" the hip-hop culture on anyone. . . that is, assuming that's what you meant, since this is ostensibly a thread about changing moral values and their latest impact on mass media. Hip-hop is one of many outgrowths of a couple of centuries of "counter-"culture that spent its last few decades increasingly urbanized by economic considerations - so is Jazz.

On the other hand, your premise - that the phenomenon is mostly, if not entirely, racial - makes no mention of the adoption of hip-hop by suburban white kids. Where I live now, the pounding sub-woofers and the profane language are coming from cars driven by (mostly) children of European descent. Go figure . . . It might be a little like the adoption of swing and be-bop by disenchanted white Wartime jitterbuggers (who were either your contemporaries or my parents, too young to volunteer); or rock-and-roll (arguably "a black thang" first) by your younger/my older siblings; or "the Motown sound" by my own generation.

Tom said: If it were actually true that racism is the root cause of black cultural problems, one would think that the statistics for things like out-of-wedlock birth, crime, broken families, educational problems, literacy, and many other issues like this would have generally improved as civil rights and racial relations improved in this country.

"[T]hings like out-of-wedlock birth, crime, broken families, educational problems, literacy, and many other issues" are economic, not racial. I lived for seven years in an almost exclusively white rural Appalachian area where all of those problems, and all you might imagine to be related, were rampant. You can add: little or no pre-natal care (with resultant low birth-weight and other neonatal distress); fetal alcohol syndrome and alcoholism generally; physical abuse and abandonment of women and children; a propensity to other so-called "addictive behaviors" such as gambling; poor diet and obesity, with diabetes, heart disease and related health issues . . . shall I continue?

It is, however, an unavoidable truth that poverty among black folks (urban and otherwise) is more related to racially-based denial of opportunity than it is any other consideration. If you spent your formative years in a city where the black voters were a numeric majority but a political non-entity (for example: where 12 years passed between Brown v Topeka, KS Board of Ed. and its enforcement in the local schools), you might understand this.

Put another way - in the best of all possible worlds, Frank's idea of true social integration sooner than it happened (if, indeed, it has happened at all) might have relieved the "secondary" economic origins of a separate culture.

On the other hand, there's no predicting what kids might do - except that you can take "pissing off their parents any way they can think of" to the bank.
;-)