Great Society Begets Bad Society By JOHN MCWHORTER

On “60 Minutes” last Sunday, rapper Cam’ron told Anderson Cooper that he would not inform the police if a serial killer were living next door to him, as it would alienate his fan base.

The “stop snitching” Zeitgeist has become a shibboleth of being “down with” your people in poor black neighborhoods and refusing to give the police information about a black-on-black homicide, even if you witnessed it. This version of black identity has become so entrenched over the past few years that it is making it ever harder for investigators to crack murder cases.

Using this technique as a means to stop racism is as misguided as it is easy. Police brutality was much worse in the past, and the war on drugs is old news. The current “stop snitching” notion is, quite simply, a subcultural fashion of the moment.

It is also a facet of a larger phenomenon: a sense among black teens and 20-somethings that being aggressive toward the opposition is the soul of being authentic. There has been this element in the black community since the 1960s, but these days, it is so deeply felt that it is tacitly approved to place anti-authoritarian sentiment over saving black lives.

I got an earful of this generation’s sense of self not long ago from an overheard conversation between three teens, a boy and two girls, on a subway. Our aggrieved musings over black people’s use of the N-word had no application: all three were using it twice a minute. The exchange kept wending back to the leitmotif of joys of breaking rules: one girl exclaimed how good it felt to jaywalk, the other celebrated the police’s inability to curb open drinking in Harlem.

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