Confronting the Subculture Within the African Community, 242 pages, 2013

As a poor paleface labeled a white man so that the crimes of my ancestors’ oppressors might be laid at the foot of my ancestors and fall upon my conscience, it irritates me to no end that most white folk fancy themselves the descendants of the tiny portion of our race who owned African slaves and wallow in that guilt like a sacred bath, even though African chattel slavery in the American Plantation System was primarily a means of maintaining a class gulf between the common American and the slave-owning superrich. I know other so-called whites [still waiting to meet that man who is the same shade as this desk] who are sick to death of being targeted for criminal black violence and upper-class white hatred for the sin of being born the same shade as the only people [it would appear] whose ancestors ever held slaves. As at least two of my ancestors and three of my youngest son’s ancestors were white slaves, this rankles especially.

However, what about decent black folks who don’t commit crimes and follow the example of Booker T. Washington by uplifting themselves? That is a group of people who have also been tarred with the brush dipped in the criminal ink well of the portion of their race who have been brainwashed into utter savagery as the attack dogs of the white elite. Imagine being that guy, an African American conservative who is expected to make excuses for the most heinous criminals and degenerates and advocate for special privileges for them, just because they are descendants from the same West African slaves.

Imagine being that guy.

Like Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Bill Cosby, and a handful of other American blacks with the courage to stand up against the image of their people as justifiably criminal and righteously violent, Taleeb Starkes, a man who I spoke with for about a half hour last week at the Compound Media studio in Manhattan, has the wide tired eyes of a man who has spit often into a strong wind.

His first book, The Un-Civil War, is written very much like Paul Kersey’s book on Baltimore and Colin Flaherty’s White Girl Bleed a Lot, but with a dark humor rather than their sharp condemnation of blacks in general. To lighten the subject and drive it home with humor, Taleeb begins his book with a glossary of humorous acronyms such as: NIGGER a Negro Individual Generating Grief Everywhere Routinely and OND Obsessive Niggеr Disorder and also terms such as Sugar Daddy: “The taxpayer funded entity that subsidizes NIGGER subculture, Also known as the government.”

Taleeb describes himself as a man who “evolve[d] from the projects to this project.”

His writing on Halloween on the housing voucher scam known as Section 8 from 112-114 is exceptionally well done as is his look at attire from 169-77 is unsurpassed elsewhere. The one thing that most whites—who have not attended black night spots in inner cities like I have—are ignorant of, is that the first thing a black bar owner has to do to keep men bringing wives and girlfriends to his place is to ban all hip hop attire and very often also bar males under 35 from entering. Bars which used to be plagued with biker violence in the 1970s and early 80s routinely posted signs forbidding “biker attire” including boots. I was denied entry to a bar because I was wearing work boots and a bandana. This was known to be a sensible solution and was not criticized, with bikers eventually learning to behave themselves and earn admittance to these places now that they are mostly middle aged. But the constant mantra from liberal thinkers, black and white, that gangster fashion styles and pants hanging about the knees are cultural aspects of a unique victim race strikes Starkes as a hijacking of his people’s image.

Taleeb includes headlines and summaries of many vile ghetto acts, which are live links in the e-book and shaded in the print version. His writing style is lively, clean and to the point, permitting me to read and annotate his book in just under 3 hours. From the ironic beating of Rosa Parks by a black hoodlum to a call for visionaries and realists to work towards a productive African American identity that is not imposed by the white guilt media, Taleeb Starkes has constructed an entertaining interior ethnography of a tragically weaponized population, and in so doing is fighting against a stronger type of bondage than what Booker T. Washington rose up from.