Does Black Thought genuinely feel that poor black men are largely shut out of the employment market when he spends his life seeing, for example, black security guards, cable TV guys, and so on, none of whom talk as if they wangled their jobs against great odds? Often, when he is in the studio recording, the security guard downstairs was a black man without a college degree. There are plenty of jobs like this available. The problem is that so many are unaware of the jobs' availability – or opt to take a chance on rising up in the drug sale hierarchy because that's what so many of their friends are doing.

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Roots frontman, Black Thought.

And tell me that it is better for young black men to seek the off-chance of becoming a drug kingpin – and likely going to jail for a long time because of it – rather than taking legal employment and living a less dramatic but real life.

What this means is that decrying the economy for leaving out young black men without education is barking up the wrong tree. It isn't a position that can help black people. Robin Kelley thinks "Bird in the Hand" is really, really cool: Here is "reality rapper" Ice Cube telling it like it is. But frankly, despite the passing pleasures of what Kelley terms the track's "thumpin'" bass line, the tale is not the way it was then, nor the way it is now. No matter how  fun cuts are like Da Lench Mob's "All on My Nutsac," in which the dealer overtly refuses to work at McDonald's, they are not depicting reality. These cuts would baffle black people in the old days, when, quite simply, a drug trade did not exist to tempt young black men away from coping with an unglamorous but workable legal employment world.

What we need to do is guide poor black people toward available work, and toward the training needed to do it if necessary. Remember – by available work, I don't mean mowing lawns or picking up trash, but respectable work like being a cable repairman. If you aren't into going to college, you can be a cable repairman. Nobody at the cable company is hoping that their applicants went and got B.A.s first. Rather, they assume that anyone applying for their jobs did not. Building inspectors are not assumed to have spent time in college learning about Shakespeare. If a sound technician spent four years living in a dorm, he's the odd man out. There are jobs for people without college degrees.

The rapper, even a conscious one, is quite understandably inclined to shake his fist at the powers that be and assume that the economy is the problem. It may well be that you can't write much of a rap about training someone to fix heaters and air conditioners.

In which case, it may be that in thinking about how to get ahead, even the conscious kind of rap is something we might want to look beyond.

Of course, to analyze every political statement The Roots have ever made would require a whole book. However, the general pattern is that they trace black America's problems to a morally putrescent government, such that we need to think about a sharp rupture with the current modus operandi. I do not hear an orientation toward what could actually happen in the real world.

Take another cut, "Don't Feel Right." "The struggle ain't right up in your face, it's more subtle." I suppose. Black Thought gets more specific: "The system makin' its paper from the prison." So, The Roots is political because they cite the prison-industrial complex. Well – let's acknowledge that there are selfish, small-hearted people out there who are not exactly unhappy that the prisons are full, since they provide jobs and inflate the voter count in their district. The issue here is the focus. Why not focus on the things that get black men pulled into the criminal justice system in the first place? Among people obsessed with the prison-industrial complex, there is a truly dismaying tacit assumption: That it is inevitable, and even acceptable, that black men will end up on the wrong side of the law. I gather that part of that assumption is based on the notion that poor black men can't get jobs, upon which see above. In any case, hating the prisons is easy. Thinking about what got the men into the prisons and how we could change it is harder. Guess which one ends up getting rapped about most charismatically, even by the conscious ones?

The idea that we must accept that poor black men will drift the wrong way until society becomes perfect is, at the end of the day, passive. How valuable is it, to people who need help, to mothers who have lost sons getting shot in the head over nothing, to say "This is how it's going to be because the playing field isn't completely level?" Is that really a game plan? Is that the kind of politics that would best serve black America? With complete admiration for The Roots' music as art, I cannot see that this message is more valuable simply because The Roots don't talk about killing people and don't say bitch.

"I ain't seekin' responses," Black Thought says later. But I'm sorry: If this kind of rap is supposed to be political, then we are going to respond, despite the confrontational tone that the rap emcee, conscious or not, is virtually required to take. And in that vein, when Black Thought gets off that "If you ain't sayin' nothin' then you's a system's accomplice," then I can't help thinking: If all you have to say is "They're racist," then because this has changed nothing since the one time it did in the 60s, you, too, are just letting the system keep going.

However, I am fully aware that The Roots and the other conscious rappers are under the sincere impression that the Fight-the-Power, leftist perspective on what ails black America is the only one that could possibly be correct. I grew up with a very intense mother, and I remember one summer (probably 1978) when she required me to read an entire sociology textbook, so that I would understand that the conditions that black people lived in in North Philadelphia were not "their fault." That summer I learned all about things like societal racism, factory relocation and even the military-industrial complex. It all made sense to me. It seemed like an ingenious analysis of what on the surface looked quite different, and I immediately had a sense that it would be good if everybody in America had access to the truths I had learned. In the wake of the Rodney King riots, my first response in trying to understand what had happened was to read a special issue of The Nation on the event, and then I read my first book by William Julius Wilson. I do get where The Roots and everyone else are coming from.

My point is simply that from what I have learned since, that perspective today does not allow us to change the lives of the poor or anyone else because the problems have changed since the old days, such as when that textbook my mother gave me had been written (it was already not exactly a new book then, I recall). Because I cannot see how that perspective can help people, I question it – not because I have some problem with dreadlocks, anger or Black English.

I must also stress: I am not saying The Roots don't make great work. I am, rather, offering a disagreement with their version of politics. "Game Theory," if there's any justice, should go down as a classic album recital just like Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. I can feel that way without agreeing with everything on an album. The end of "Return to Innocence Lost" on Things Fall Apart, an aural vignette of black men's ugly experiences with the police, in fact recalls a similar vignette Wonder had in the middle of "Just Enough for the City." And the duet with Erykah Badu, "You Got Me," almost makes me well up.

It's not that I don't like or approve of The Roots. It's that I don't think their philosophy is, in the true sense of the word, progressive. Their views do not move us forward. Apprised of what they tell us, we are not in a position to help people. We are simply informed that, well, "Sheeee-ittt!" The Roots are fine artists. But as to what kind of politics their art suggests, I'm afraid no poor black person would benefit from it.

Pete Rock on Education

"Anger in the Nation" by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth on Mecca and the Soul Brother is a rich few minutes.

For one thing, it informs us that "library broken down is lies buried" and that television equals "tell-a-lie vision." Cynicism, as always, is the staff of life for rappers. And cynicism makes for good listening in an idle sense. It's "hot."

But in this case, the message is to be wary of books and television. There's a fine line between that and becoming the kind of black person who gets too much of their information from crackpot authors distributing their books on street corners and at book tables in the lobby at chitlin' circuit theatre shows. For example, "library broken down is lies buried" is the kind of thing that ends up leaving black people falling for the idea that AIDS was created in a laboratory in the United States and foisted deliberately on blacks, or that the Greeks stole their intellectual heritage from "black" Egyptians.

And Pete Rock is hardly alone among rappers – conscious rappers -- in taking this kind of stance about school being "white." Dead Prez in "They Schools" on Let's Get Free say "All my high school teachers can suck my dick / Tellin' me white man lies, straight bullshit!" The idea seems to be that school is antithetical to a black revolution, in that the schools aren't teaching survival skills for ghetto folk. High school is, therefore, a mere "four-year sentence," and the track ends with a parting shot, "Bee-yotch!!!" Now, remember, we can't just group this with the gangsta theatrics of Ludacris and that sort: Dead Prez are cherished as "underground." Their hearts are even in the right place sometimes: One of their recent albums, with Outlawz, was called Can't Sell Dope Forever. I agree! But, I'm sorry -- the last time I checked, having a decent fund of general knowledge was a big plus in forging sociopolitical change. What would a track like "They Schools" have to tell lawyers for the NAACP who were central in the founding of modern civil rights law? One of them, Charles Houston, was known to counsel "Lose your temper, lose your case." Upon which we must note that hip-hop is all about losing your temper.

So when Ice Cube dismisses school as being about someone who "didn't give a fuck about me" in "The Product," some people celebrate it as higher awareness – but they shouldn't. College Dropout? Late Registration? I didn't think those Kanye titles were funny even though I loved the albums. Graduation was much better (at least, as a title).

Brad Barket / Getty Images

Rapper/Producer Kanye West promotes his latest album, "Graduation".

I know there are some black people who consider grapevine theorizing, conspiracy theories and unfocused cynicism a kind of higher awareness. I'm not one of them, nor are countless millions of blacks. This means that, at best, Pete Rock's position in this case is not progressive, revolutionary or transformational in some pure sense that all would agree with. It is one man's opinion out of many – and not one likely to attract enough consensus to revolutionize much of anything. Lord, forbid anyone tell my future children that they should read books with a sense of wariness and distance in case the book harbors some kind of coded anti-black message written by the white man.

And as for Pete Rock letting us know that "I'm aware of segregation," that's not as slam-dunk a point in the "political" sense as it sounds.

If white flight left a neighborhood all-black, then treating the white flight as why the neighborhoods are so often hell holes is risky: Do we really want to say blacks need whites around to lead constructive lives? Did black men start leaving their children to be raised by their mothers alone because the Lutzkys no longer lived down the block? Are black boys shooting each other practically for sport because the Houlihans moved away?