Books, Arts & Manners: See No Evil

THE CURRENT crime wave among rap singers brings Malcolm X to mind, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Last summer a friend and I had gone to see Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in company with a crowd of upper-middle-class whites on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. We walked out the door after the first ten minutes, but this had nothing to do with the film itself: rather, owing to an uncorrectable glitch in the projection room, from opening credits onward the sound level was literally painful. The odd thing was that we were the only people in that theater to complain to the manager, and the only ones to leave. No doubt the next morning four hundred New Yorkers woke up with tiny blood spots on their goose-down pillows—material proof of their sophisticated racial views. When it comes to black pop culture, whites like the ones in that theater feel bound to hold their tongues, even when confronted by the most obnoxious manifestations of that culture, and even when the obnoxiousness is the result of a faulty projection machine.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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THE CURRENT crime wave among rap singers brings Malcolm X to mind, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Last summer a friend and I had gone to see Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in company with a crowd of upper-middle-class whites on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. We walked out the door after the first ten minutes, but this had nothing to do with the film itself: rather, owing to an uncorrectable glitch in the projection room, from opening credits onward the sound level was literally painful. The odd thing was that we were the only people in that theater to complain to the manager, and the only ones to leave. No doubt the next morning four hundred New Yorkers woke up with tiny blood spots on their goose-down pillows—material proof of their sophisticated racial views. When it comes to black pop culture, whites like the ones in that theater feel bound to hold their tongues, even when confronted by the most obnoxious manifestations of that culture, and even when the obnoxiousness is the result of a faulty projection machine.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.