NonF. LOSING MY COOL, Father's Love Beats Hip-Hop

Thomas Chatterton Williams' revealing memoir elucidates how the hip-hop culture permeates black youths & subjugates them with a misguided conception of acceptable behaviors.  Thomas is son to a white mother & black father.  "Losing My Cool" pays tribute to his loving parental guidance, in particular his father's mentoring that steered him to a better way of life and to being a better person.  Obama, also of mixed heritage, clarifies himself as a black man.  Thomas identifies himself as black & aspires to be accepted as cool by relating to the lifestyle of the hip-hop culture.  "Hip-hop is a way of being street-shit." The mind-washing rhetoric drummed into young blacks is "money, hoes, and clothes, that's all a brother knows: fuck bitches, get money."  Ironically, this jargon which Thomas, along with his peers growing-up bought into, is subversive to success, in all significant wakes of life.  While there is much to feel chagrin at in Williams' adolescence, he speaks with a voice of  innocence, sauciness, wit & revelation.   There is so much to recommend from the unpretentious lessons learned here that aspire us to be independent thinkers and universally tolerant.  I am only perplexed as to who would make a cooler father, Thomas' dad or Bill Cosby.