Readers and writers blog

Robert Lashley, a young black writer, calls himself a ‘literary thug.’ I bumped into him in one of those narrow streets of the blogosphere where you’re lost and can’t remember how you got there. All to my good fortune.

Lashley is no thug, although he grew up in a neighborhood in Tacoma, Wash., where there were plenty of them. But he definitely is literary — in his interests, his outlook and his writing. And so The literary thug is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

If you visit him and do nothing else, read the entry I saw first at the top of his site — his June 13 post titled ‘In The Kingdom Of Crack Rap.’ Walking through the pleasant neighborhood where he now lives in a suburb of Bellingham, Wash., Lashley spots a Cadillac Escalade carrying two youths — one black, one white — and belching a mixtape of crack rap. He explains the musical genre:

Led by Young Jeezy, T.I, Lil Wayne, The Clipse, Rick Ross, Cam’ron and various members of the Dipset, it is a form of rap where MCs brag about doing gruesome things to other black people and make it seem shiny and attractive to suburban teenage boys.

In fact, Lashley says, white teens from comfortable homes are the major market for crack rappers:

Their gruesome tales get little play in majority black radio stations, and they are often referred to by black intellectuals — and even many black hip hop fans — as social lepers for their tales of black-on-black violence.To the boys who listen to them, however, the random corpses that these rappers brag about going over — the snitches that they brag about destroying, the women they viciously dispatch in multivarious forms, or the mother or wife tormented over losing a son or a husband — have absolutely no consequence. To these young men, crack rappers are businessmen, successes in their field, and to quote Jeezy himself ‘go getta(s)’ . . .

This, along with numerous other things, is the reason that millions of black people want to throw Young Jeezy through a brick wall.

In the end, he wonders, “why is this horror on wax the only thing that black men and white men can bond over?”

Lashley describes himself as a devotee of classic literature, classic soul and moderate politics, and he writes intelligently about a wide range of topics in those areas — writers from Emily Dickinson to W.E.B. DuBois to John Updike to Rita Dove, singers from Kelly Price and Mary J. Blige to Stevie Wonder, Teddy Pendergrass and Michael Jackson and social issues like affirmative action and reparations. Not to mention his own tough childhood — ‘The ethics of making it without a father,’ Dec. 31 — and the stepgrandfather who became a central male figure in his life:

His feat — to overlook the misery that his stepson had caused in his life to try and heal my own — is proof in my eyes that there is a god. And although I have health issues and the road with me is sometimes still a bumpy one — ask anyone who knows me or has corresponded with me, I am no day at the beach — I am a student at Western Washington University and my GPA is a 3.0 (a 3.8 since I went back to school), I am trying to be the man my grandfather is, and if you read me, sometimes I fail. However, I must say that I have come a long ways since he took me in and I know where I need to go as well as how to get there.

Lashley’s writing has a grammatical problem here and there and an occasional malaprop, but none of that detracts from the power of his narrative.

By the way, before I stumbled into his weblog, I skimmed through some other sites by African-American writers that I found notable — Raw Dawg Buffalo, Blogdangit and She’s Just Not Feeling You — but their occasional lapses into colloquial language made them less accessible to me than Lashley’s. But that’s just because I’m an old white dude.

All of them are worth a visit.

– Sid Leavitt