I suspect her prescription could be all the more deadly in comments on Mr. Feldman's videos.

Miss Manners recommends: Feign utter incomprehension. As in: “I'm so sorry, I guess I just didn't get that. Would you mind explaining it it to me?”

Imagine 100 or so of those showing up in a matter of an hour or two . . .

As for NAS, he's just being controversial and I don't have a say on his album because I haven't heard it. The Fried Chicken song is the truth about how he feels about fried chicken. It's how I feel about chicken sometimes to. There's truth in what he says. He's not just perpetuating stereotypes. It's part of

Have you listened to the Be A *N* too song? You're not understanding the message if you're trying to use that song as an example.

Here's a song for you thoug: Mr. Nigga by Mos Def! Listen to that and come back to me with your thoughts.

Calling him a racist is the easy way out.

Racism, by insisting on essential differences between people, is “fundamentalist” in this way. It writes meaning and permanence into a universe that is in reality fluid, evolving, and endlessly ambiguous (not ambiguous in terms of “did this happen or not” – slavery happened/happens, lynching happened/happens – but ambiguous in the sense of what do these physical realities mean to us now, what will they mean in the future, what do they say about proper behavior, proper action, proper community, etc.)

The critiques of Feldman that are most apt are not those that accuse him of racism – I don't believe that he thinks, as the racists do, that there are fundamental differences between the races and that one race (the “white” one) is superior to all others. If anything he is, like most humans, ethno-centric. He does not identify with being black, that's clear. “They” are different from him and his group. I'm not sure, however, who that group is and it may only be “ethnic” coincidentally, and not race-based at all. That is, I'm not sure that he identifies with being “white” in any simple sense (he's Jewish, right?). His group may be more like “tech-savvy, smarties, with a an extremely relativist sense of humor, and desire for celebrity.” I don't know.

Rather than creating friend/foe distinctions and using pro/anti-Feldmanism as an ethical or political litmus test, I would suggest judging his work “in its own terms.” In other words: Is it funny? Is it satire? Or, more importantly, does it use parody to express a truth that is otherwise suppressed or ignored? If the end result is base self-promotion, then call “bullshit.” If the result, or at least another result, is a meaningful discussion of the truth, then that's good, right?

Frankly, since Feldman doesn't see himself as racist, coming at him from that angle confirms his view that people “don't get it.” I'm not sure the argument that his stuff isn't funny would get to him either, but it certainly gives him less wiggle-room.