Two weeks ago, this column stood at the intersection of a catfish festival and a funeral and asked when we stop calling this an epidemic and admit it has become a way of life. Naming the wound is only the first surgery. This week, we pick up the scalpel again.
The Perfect Storm
The violence did not simply appear. It was cultivated.
Over roughly three decades, three forces converged on Black communities across the South: Music. Television. And a street code so thoroughly inverted that a generation grew up believing silence was honor and truth was sin. No single force could have done alone what all three did together. They did not just influence a generation. They rewired it. They installed a new moral operating system and called it culture. And because we called it culture, we called it normal.
What the Music Said
In the early 1990s, a man named Robert Earl Davis Jr. — known as DJ Screw — developed a technique in Houston that slowed rap music to a crawl. It was designed to replicate the feeling of being under the influence of “lean” — a mixture of prescription-strength codeine cough syrup, soda and candy.
The music was literally built to soundtrack drug use. DJ Screw died in 2000 at age 29 from an overdose, never seeing his chopped and screwed sound spread across the South and sink into the Delta. But it did. And while it started as a regional subculture, it was later hyper-commercialized by global labels, selling the lean lifestyle to every kid with a smartphone.
Music does not just entertain. It instructs. When every song a child absorbs celebrates death, degradation and contempt for consequence, they do not just hear those values — they adopt them as a baseline.
The Screen and
the Script
Then there is the screen. Shows like “Power,” “Raising Kanan” and “The Wire” are brilliantly made — and that is precisely the problem. They make the criminal life look powerful and give the villain the most compelling arc in the room.
The danger is not just in the violence. It is in the omission of the aftermath. A teenager watches the first three episodes and sees the money, the respect and the glamour. They rarely stay for the final season’s tragedy. They study the code, the mannerisms and the worldview until the imagination narrows and the street looks less like a dead end and more like a destiny.
The Inversion
The screen is not the sharpest edge of this problem.
The sharpest edge is this: Somewhere along the way, the culture took the most basic act of moral responsibility — telling the truth about a crime — and rebranded it as the worst thing a person can do. They called it snitching.
Cooperating with a murder investigation used to be called courage. Now it is called betrayal. Silence used to be called complicity. Now it is called loyalty. The killer walks free because witnesses will not speak. Cases go cold.
The snitch code does not protect the community. It protects the people who are destroying it. It is a contract written by the predator and signed by the prey.
The Way Back
The solution is not censorship. The government is not coming to save this. Another program with a poster and a ribbon-cutting will not be enough.
The way back begins with a decision to look at what has been normalized and refuse to call it normal any longer.
The Black church must reclaim its prophetic voice — not the carefully managed voice that avoids controversy to protect attendance, but the voice that speaks with love, with specificity and without apology. If a pastor cannot say from the pulpit what is in this column, something has gone wrong in that pulpit.
Fathers must be present — physically when possible, intentionally when not. This is not a condemnation. It is a call. And where the biological father is absent, the village must mobilize. Coaches, deacons and neighbors must act as the surrogate pillars of accountability that our children are starving for.
Telling the truth is not betrayal. It is the most courageous act a person can perform. We must stop allowing criminals to dictate the moral terms of our neighborhoods.
Young people must be given something real to belong to — mentorship, arts, athletics and vocational training. Pathways that make the street look like what it actually is: a trap.
The World Catfish Festival will come back to Belzoni. The crowds will return. The question is not whether the festival will return, but what kind of community will be standing there when it does.
This is not a policy question. It is a question about what a people decide they will no longer accept. These forces did not arrive overnight and they will not leave overnight. But they can leave.
We called it entertainment.
It called it normal.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.enterprise-tocsin.com ’
