R.I.P. Sean Taylor

Jason Whitlock believes that the death of football player Sean Taylor was a result of the black KKK. He believes that black people target black people.

His main point is that the black KKK "wants to keep black men in their place — uneducated, outside the mainstream and six feet deep."

I have to disagree with Whilock in this case. I know we have different vantage points because I am white , while he is black. I believe that Sean Taylor was not targeted because of his race, but because of his social status. Several athletes have been murdered in the last year, and I do not believe that it is coincidence. I do agree that hip hop music does encourage this type of behavior, however black people are not targeted because of their skin color, but rather poor members of society, white or black, living a rough life in the innercity will target rich people like athletes.

Whitlock does use parallelism in this article, he says, "I blame hip hop for playing a role in the genocide of American black men. When your leading causes of death and dysfunction are murder, ignorance and incarceration, there's no reason to give a free pass to a culture that celebrates murder, ignorance and incarceration." Hip hop and rap music definitely celebrates murder, ignorance, and incarceration and he does a good job paralleling the rap music to the social order of the typical urban black man. He uses parallelism to give a reason of why he believes that the black KKK targets other black men. Without this parallelism, it would just be his thought of why murder rates are high among black men is abnormally high. But by blaming rap music, he shows the readers an example of a factor that increases murder. However, the murder rate is not a product of black people targeting black people, but rather a consequence of hard economic times and a bad situation, a factor that is independent of race.