According to Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal, President Bush is a bad role model for black youth:

For many young black males living in the nation's urban centers, macho means maintaining an image, no matter what the cost.

For some of the men cut off from life's promises, it's a self-made image. In their world, demonstrating sensitivity and emotion is frowned upon. Speaking proper English, a sign of weakness. Going to school, not cool.

It's about adopting what sociologists refer to as the "cool-pose culture," a rigid lifestyle that focuses on the latest clothes and shoes, sexual conquests, hip-hop music, and which, above all, demands the respect of peers.

The cool pose may be an enormous moneymaker in pop culture, admired and even copied by white youth, but it's leading to the slaughter of black youth. African Americans are killing each other at nine times the rate of white youth, often over beefs stemming from nothing more than a perceived slight.

"If you back down, you're a punk," says Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal, who lays out a new, less burdensome model of black masculinity in his book New Black Man. "To negotiate is to be weak. Everything has to be a confrontation."

The message is reinforced widely - from the words and imagery of hip-hop, to the reproachful taunting in sports, even from the White House, Neal tells me.

"Say what you want about [White House] policies, one of Bush's successes was getting across the message that a real man never wavers. You attack first; attack before they attack you. So it's coming from the top."

(Is the professor really praising Bush for "successes"? Can such things be?)

Let's try to be logical for a moment. Whether you like him or not, is President Bush really responsible for the hiphop, gangster-rap, macho culture among young black urban males? Didn't that same culture exist under President Clinton?

Thomas Sowell wrote a book about this phenomenon titled "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." As Sowell sees it, the young urban black macho males of today are the inheritors of specific cultural attributes:

Sowell begins by tracing the origins of black ghetto culture all the way back to the British Isles from which white American Southerners immigrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These particular immigrants, from the socially turbulent regions of the northern borderlands of England and the highlands of Scotland, brought with them a set of pre-existing attitudes, values and behavioral patterns which, as Sowell points out, had nothing to do with the already existing American institution of slavery. These pre-existing attitudes formed the basis of a “redneck” or “cracker” culture, a culture consisting of “an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,… and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.” This was passed down to the white Southern descendants of these northern English and Scottish immigrants, and would soon become the cultural heritage of many Southern blacks.

Sowell points out that although most Southern blacks and whites moved away from the redneck culture over the generations given its destructively counterproductive effects, it survives today among poorest and least educated ghetto blacks and, since the 1960s, has been revered by today’s white liberal elite.

The entertainment industry loves redneck culture (whether the black or the white versions) in all of its manifestations, because it sells. Whether it took the form of the clueless but loveable Clampetts in "The Beverly Hillbillies," malevolent crackers in "Deliverance, or the gangster rap hype being marketed today, Americans are captivated and entertained by redneck culture.

If Sowell's theory is right, I think we can expect the redneck culture to spread once again from urban blacks to northern white youth. (In many ways, I think it already has.)

But what explains the American fascination with redneck culture?

Might there be natural instincts at work? What if the idea of having "real men" as some sort of standard is a basic ecological niche which will be filled by one group or another? Kim du Toit wrote a bracing, eye opening essay about the pussification of the American male, and much of what he said rings true. (Whether anti-pussification resistence should be permissible only among urban black males is at least debatable, but don't ask me! I don't write the "rules.")

Some men will not be pussified, and resistance to pussification sells. The cultural ramifications of this are poorly understood, and I think the implications are profound.

It strikes me as a bit unfair to blame Bush.

(Even if he isn't a pussy.)