Beyond the pale. (Letters to the Editor).

William Jelani Cobb ("White Negro, Please!" January issue) and The Progressive could have served the hip-hop community a lot better by listing the "great" CDs that we should be buying instead of (or along with) Eminem. I've just found out about Eminem, and I feel that a whole new type of music is opening up to me. I find that exciting. The fact that a white guy did it doesn't bother me. Too bad it bothers Cobb so much! Eminem may be a yawn to a whole lot of people, but he moved me in a new, kind of uncomfortable, way.

Victor Przysiezny
Highland Park, Illinois

How ironic that William Jelani Cobb's smug evaluation of Eminem should follow an interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca. Like Baca, Em found his way out of poverty and racism through words. The credibility of both of these poets is grounded in their backgrounds of violence and oppression. And both know that the critics wouldn't fawn quite so much if their ethnicities didn't make them stand out in their respective fields.

Cobb scoffs at "the important questions [Eminem's] ascent raises." While Cobb holds Eminem up to the highest musical standards, he holds him to an even higher moral standard than he would Em's colleagues. Cobb shrugs off the "colorful death threats" of black gangsta rappers, and calls Eminem "beyond the pale." If one is to pass judgment on an artist for the personas he creates, one cannot employ a double standard.

"It's fitting that Eminem hails from Detroit," Cobb yawns. Detroit's not that simple: It's a city with painfully complex racial dynamics. These issues--and the insatiable hunger of white audiences to be invited to the party--haven't been adequately addressed.

Miriam Weisfeld
Detroit, Michigan

My kids and their friends have been listening to Eminem for quite a while--long before he was discovered by The New York Times or showed up on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

There are a lot of images in hip-hop that are disturbing. There is a lot of Eminem's work that is disturbing. There is a lot of stuff on the street that is a whole lot more disturbing. I grew up an Irish kid in the Bronx in a gang (an interdenominational and interracial gang--we were very forward thinking). My friends were a lot like Marshall (and Dre). They thought and talked like him. Most of them were dead or upstate by the time I was twenty. So I hear a familiar voice when I listen to him. I hear a lot of stuff I like. And I hear a lot of stuff I really dislike from regular, middle class folks couching their hate, intolerance, and war fervor in civilized chat.

I'm not going to stop enjoying Eminem because it's not correct or because the cannibals at Time magazine have discovered him. And my kids certainly aren't, either.

I love listening to him do "White America," a song which puts forth much more clearly some of the things expressed in Cobb's incredibly patronizing and condescending article.

My kids, who are half white (Are they only half wrong?), will continue in their wrongheadedness and skate off with their (Indian) friends into the warm embrace of night on the Rez with their headphones singing, not realizing how misled they are. As for me, to paraphrase Shady, you can kiss my ignorant, white ass.

Sean O'Grady
Cherokee, North Carolina

The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive. All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness, and may appear either in the magazine or on its web page. Letters may be e-mailed to: [e-mail]. Please include your city and state.