Featured Image by rharrison on Flickr, used under license (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic/CC BY 2.0).

With recent events and tumults, black America has again come to the forefront of societal discourse in America. Certainly, no other demographic faces worse prospects — liberal hipster fostered gentrification, endemic crime and poverty, mass incarceration, abortions outpacing live births, etc.— despite six years with the first black president.

But it should come as no surprise to those who have made the moral decision to take the red pill that black America’s plight is to a significant degree internally undergirded by the ubiquitous female imperative of “hypergamy.” This refers to the tendency to seek mates of higher social status, attendant resources, and its trappings. It is the often unstated and ineluctable principle governing sexual politics. With women as sexual selectors in any courtship ritual, male behavior is significantly determined by visceral female dating preferences. Indeed, the alpha male persona given apotheosis within the PUA community is a reflection of subconscious female choices. In the dysfunctional social structure they find themselves in — where, as anywhere else, reproduction is paramount — black men act as they do under a framework determined by their women (including via decidedly matriarchal households).

Contemporary rap music is a microcosm of this dynamic. At its core, the hyper-pseudo-masculine bad boy persona it has engendered is a meretricious response to innate female demand for alpha characteristics.

In a typically solipsistic feminist article, Straight Outta Rape Culture, appearing in the Huffington Post, Sikivi Hutchinson censures NWA’s fostering of a supposed “rape culture .” But here’s the elephant in the room: Mention of the daily fratricidal meat-grinder black males are subjected to — and NWA’s relation to it — is conspicuously omitted from the narrative. This is true with both Hutchinson and the larger ongoing debate. This is why the discourse and rancor vis-a-vis police brutality and murder is disingenuous.

Hutchinson’s myopic approach is from the prism of female plight while ignoring the palpable and fratricidal killing fields black males are impelled into. More so than “yoking rape culture and rap misogyny,” as she argues, there is a litany of dysfunctional and socially destructive views NWA and its successors have fostered. More to the point, if “girls have grown up with the pervasive message that violence against black women and girls is normal, natural, and justifiable,” then black men have grown up with the message that violence against their black brothers is not just “normal” and “justifiable,” but it is indeed glorious. The results of this inculcated sanguine treatment of murdering black men by other black men are manifest.

A warzone.

The leading cause of death for black males 15-34 is murder. Numbers fluctuate, but approximately 8,000-9,000 blacks are murdered each year; usually by a member of their own race. This is astronomical. To quantify, in one year more blacks can be expected to be killed than total US deaths in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars combined. Thus, for an epicenter of violence such as Chicago the nickname “Chiraq” is apt. Looking at the data for combat deaths in America’s main 20th-21st century wars is also telling. It is conjecture because no complete study exists, but extrapolating the data sample we can surmise in a period of eight years more blacks were killed in the streets than American deaths in the entire Vietnam War. Over 100,000 blacks were killed during a comparable time period among the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars. It’s safer for a black male to enlist in the armed forces than participate in their default milieu.

This is not an internecine social dispute between a group of people: Blacks are at war with themselves. Indeed, “No one is safer in [American] communities of color than white folks,” one commentator informs us. While it is true even between whites that most murder is by members of the same race, the scale of carnage between blacks outpaces all others. The prerequisite self-hatred for such carnage has been fostered by the NWA just as much, if not more, than for any “rape culture.” To be sure, some of this doubtless precedes NWA, but so does any violence against women.

Which cultural meme fostered by NWA is more socially destructive? This is the reductio ad absurdum. Murder — especially fratricide — is an ultimate crime. It takes a characteristically feminist solipsism to only lament that “brutalized bodies of black women will be lost in the predictable stampede of media accolades [for the new NWA film],” while the bodies — all male — pile up ad nauseam in places such as Chicago and Washington D.C filling up morgues. (Growing up in one of the most dangerous cities in the northeast, I have seen it firsthand.)

This is not to offer apologia for one crime by severity of another; rather, an exhortation to recognize a spectrum whereby punishment and our attendant indignation for each crime is proportional to its severity: an iPhone thief should not be censured in the same degree a murderer is and vice versa.

In the unstated sexual politics, hypergamy governs all. Because women are typically sexual selectors in a courtship ritual, male behavior is to a significant degree dictated by visceral female dating preferences. The common unexamined proclivity (undergirded by an archaic chivalrous impulse) is to deny women any agency. In his out of print work, Anatomy of Female Power, Nigerian critic Chinwezu makes a cogent argument that man may rule the world, but women rule the men who rule the world. (Perhaps, there is an elementary wisdom in Beyoncé.) “The male may be the head, but the female the neck. ” The dominant feminist narrative of patriarchy relies on the disingenuous assumption that political power is the only form of social influence. (To carry this erroneous assumption into the sphere of black America is even more untenable because black households are decidedly matriarchal.) The political may be a male dominion, but the power of the womb is hers. To secure any progeny, legacy, family of his own, and therefore meaningful social fulfillment, the male is left little recourse than to be supplicant and filtered through female selectivity.

The evolutionary theory of parental investment, as it relates to sexual selection, predicts the sex investing the most and facing the bigger cost (female) will be more selective resulting in the opposite sex (male) being more competitive and aggressive pursuing it. Reproduction is more costly for a female than a male, impelling her to be the more selective partner. The corollary of female selectivity, and relative male sexual weakness, undergirds all sexual politics — even in the black ghetto, as we shall see.

Men and women have an opposite role. Males must always initiate while females filter. In the familiar ubiquitous trope, the male must slay the dragon or villain and thereby prove himself worthy of the distressed damsel. In contrast, for the female to have sexual partners, they must simply exist; for the male, it’s entirely conditional. This is why geneticists can show us 80% of our female ancestors reproduced, while only 40% of our male ones did.

The principle applied to the black ghetto is no different. Female selectivity continues to manifest in the visceral imperative of “hypergamy.” Women seek men with high social status, resources, and its trappings; what in tribal configuration was exhibited by the “alpha male.” Although in a modern civilization selecting an alpha male does not guarantee her access to resources, innately women still overwhelmingly filter for breadwinners. With some of the characteristics of a failed state, (lawlessness) it is unsurprising black ghetto female selection filtering is not all that different from demonstrating the confidence, courage, physical strength, and social prowess of primacy in a hierarchy of competitive males we would have experienced in a retrograde primal society.

Thus, to avoid sexual invisibility black men are relegated to fulfilling one of two roles for sexual access: That of an alpha ‘bad boy’ asshole or beta high-earning provider. Consequently, they must cultivate a personality of alpha virility or overwhelmingly subordinate professional decisions to pecuniary concerns. In the context of the ghetto, the former is paramount while the latter often shunned (more on that later). The easy choice (conventional) of dealing drugs, joining a criminal gang, or other nefarious behavior — which as a corollary engenders a certain social capital within their own milieu — compared to the highest unemployment rate and endemic job discrimination is not inexplicable.

Indeed, from their perch as sexual selectors, black women in the ghetto have given an apotheosis to ‘bad boy’ culture. It’s hypergamy run amok. Black women place tremendous cultural emphasis on men for the possession of traits matching that of urban alpha male masculine culture of the variety originally propelled by NWA. This is called “swag.” It is demonstrating aggression, social dominance, and an edgy appearance. Men do not necessarily want to adopt this disposition, but their women demand it of them.

Consequently, academically inclined males and attendant intellectualism are marginalized and often held in opprobrium. Going this route is well-nigh a guarantee of sexual invisibility. The charge of “acting white” and the ostracism it entails is very real (never mind the intellectual parlance of a Frederick Douglas or MLK or even a superficial amore propre in President Obama). Indeed, as Athlone McGinnis offered in these pages, “You think the sexual market value of the average white or Asian nerd is low? Try being their black equivalent and having your entire culture essentially disown you.”

Moreover, if you have the aplomb to make it to the other side of the academic route, you will often face onerous employment circumstances. You may be counted among the 56% of blacks underemployed with degrees making $8.50 at Barnes and Noble. This is coupled with endemic discrimination, typified by the likes of “liberal” Facebook where you can almost count on your fingers the number of blacks hired, contrasting with a 36% Asian staff. This is besides the onus of an astronomical debt burden (arguably the most encumbering in American history). These factors all vitiate your potential as breadwinner.

Hobson’s choice writ large.

This by no means, answers all the underlying, social, sexual, economic, or political factors on this issue or the plight of black America as a whole. We obviously cannot ascribe everything solely to hypergamy. Nevertheless, in the circumscribed ideological paradigm of mainstream discourse — dominated by the mendacious and outright idiotic feminist narrative — it goes a long way in explaining such observed phenomena.

We cannot play the blame game. We need to take responsibility. We need to recognize women have just as much, if not more agency as men within black society.

If N.W.A is “straight outta rape culture,” they are straight outta hypergamy culture. As sexual selectors, female sexual predilections will continue to determine how males behave. Rejecting determinism means first attaining knowledge, and its corollary of belief, to change a given arrangement. Calling attention to women’s own sexual choices can but lead us to amelioration.