It is always a good time to talk about racism and poisonous images pumping through the mass-media pipeline. What is most interesting is the traditional but unpredictable source of the trouble. Whenever critics point at Tea Party posters of Barack Obama as a witch doctor or as a garishly dressed pimp attending a ball at the White House with Michelle, it is easy to realize that the Tea Party, Fox News and the rest of their ilk are not the worst offenders. Hip-hop minstrelsy, taken to an extreme, has repeatedly outdone all crude, vindictive and simply clumsy whites whenever it comes to dehumanizing black people. Hip-hop obviously, and no less insultingly, does it better.

Byron Hurt is a hip-hop fan from way back, but when he took a critical look at what it has become in its most thugged-out extremes, the filmmaker created a devastating documentary, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. It makes the strongest case for connecting hip-hop imagery with all that was demeaning and commonplace in 19th- century minstrel shows.

Though losing the ball as often as he recovered it, Spike Lee served us all well with his Bamboozled by looking high and low until he reached something uncomfortably close to the absolute truth, which always cuts both ways. The Brooklyn, N.Y., director and filmmaker finally recognized that simple-minded "street brothers" can come up with an angry black nationalism as shallow and unconsciously pernicious as anything done in the long Hollywood tradition of stereotyping black people for laughs.

That is what Thomas Chatterton Williams meant in The Wall Street Journal when he recently described Lil Wayne as "a modern-day minstrel who embodies the most virulent racist stereotypes that generations of blacks have fought to overcome. His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass."

And now, under the banner of humor or satire, yet another minstrel monster has raised his video head from the gutter once again in the brand-new "Head of State," which has been seen on YouTube more than a million times.