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.

Something similar is going on, I think, in the way upper-middle-class whites--the ones who predominate in the media--have been treating the more, ah, volatile rap singers.

Lately, a rap singer has come to be defined as a singer with a rap sheet, the sheet often being quite long. A man going by the name "Snoop Doggy Dogg," said to be the most popular rapper around, has been charged as an accomplice to murder. The victim, Philip Woldermariam, was shot in the back while riding in Mr. Dogg's jeep. A person called "Dr. Dre," who is not a physician at all but a celebrated producer of rap albums and a rapper himself, has settled a suit stemming from an episode in which he is said to have beaten up a TV-show host while the two partied at a Los Angeles nightclub. Most recently, Tupac Shakur, another famous rapper, was accused of leading the gang rape of a female fan in his hotel room.

These are serious crimes, but it is impossible to discuss any crime seriously when the person accused of committing it is referred to in the newspapers by an adorable comic-strip nickname like Snoop Doggy Dogg. Mr. Dogg's real name is Calvin Broadus. Dr. Dre's is Andre Young.) The New York Times, a newspaper that insists on the use of honorifics, has even allowed one writer--himself identified only as Toure," no first name please--to refer to Mr. Dogg throughout an entire article as "Snoop."

Published in the Arts & Leisure section, Mr. Toure's full-page appreciation of Snoop Doggy Dogg is a classic in the genre of weirdly chummy rap criticism as it appears in upper-middle-class publications like the Times. The writer alludes in his first and last paragraphs to the murder of Mr. Woldermariam, but gives every indication that this crime should not deter our admiration for, as a headline put it, "the Poet Laureate of the Homies" (short for "homeboys").

The murder and impending trial do not make Mr. Toure see it as less than relevant to praise Calvin Broadus at length for his "fresh . . . vocal approach," for his "laid-back cool [which] places Snoop in the African-American tradition of making light of personal horror," and for his "subtlety" in composing the rap refrain " 'cuz it's 1-8-7 on a undercover cop": the number 187 being police code for homicide. By introducing us to Mr. Broadus, a gentleman who sings about murdering policemen, as Snoop," Mr. Toure asks us to think of him as a buddy, to whom we should feel comfortable referring familiarly: a "homie," in the words of that headline composer (who no doubt uses that term around the office all the time).

For an equivalent, try to imagine a story in the Times about statutory rapist Joey Buttafuoco, referring genially to Mr. Buttafuoco as "Joey" and blathering on about his talents as an auto mechanic.

Elsewhere in the media, in a feature about Calvin Broadus, Time magazine devoted the lead paragraph to the murder of Mr. Woldermariam, but then dropped the unpleasant subject. Abruptly the tone turns bubbly and cordial. "Snoop's" music, we're told, "bounces along at a casual speed that's ideal for both dancing and just hanging out. Snoop unabashedly expresses his adolescent urges, talking freely of having casual sex, smoking pot, and even gunning down enemies . . . [But] he's at his best . . . when he tries to go beyond the gangsta posturings." According to Time, it is a mere matter of an "adolescent urge" to want to "gun down enemies." The "big musical question" is paramount: "Does Snoop's album live up to expectations? The big answer: Yes."

Newsweek, too, has reported on violent crime among rap performers, but for a cover headline the editors could screw up only enough courage to produce the timid query, "Is Rap 2 Violent?" Note the characteristically cutesy rapspeak substitution of 2" for too," blunting the force of the question--which should not be a question at all. Obviously rap is too violent: it serves as musical accompaniment to the entire underclass culture of violence. For an equivalent here, try to imagine a Newsweek cover story about civil war in Eastern Europe: "Is Serbia 2 Violent?"

In an essay accompanying the story, Jonathan Alter comes closer to denouncing rap than perhaps any other white liberal to date. But he stops short. Mr. Alter insists we should blame not the rap performers themselves, but the white businessmen who market the records.

Now, were he talking about certain white criminals, and another group of whites seeking to profit by publicizing their crime--let's say, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, and the TV networks that made Movies of the Week about them--Mr. Alter would not be so shy in condemning the criminals. But a different analysis is brought to bear when we are thinking about blacks, and in particular blacks who are identified as "artists."

It is a symptom of some deep neurotic guilt that whites feel compelled to treat rap culture not as the pathology it is, but as a sexy, charming, even cute pop phenomenon which cannot be criticized except in the most oblique, backward fashion. When black singers are implicated in grave crimes, we praise the way they sing--just as we will sit passively as our eardrums melt, for fear of offending a black movie director who isn't even in the room. Our language undergoes metamorphosis, our thinking turns upside down, when we talk about blacks.

Sorry, that should be "African-Americans."