Bob Herbert wrote a suprisingly candid column last week titled "Blowing the Whistle on Gangsta Culture." (Full text of the article accessible via the Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Herbert uses the death of E.J. Duncan and three friends - all of whom were aspiring rappers (of various ethnic backgrounds) gunned down in the basement of Duncan's parents' house the week before last for no apparent reason - to highlight the "profoundly self-destructive cultural influences that have spread like a cancer through much of the black community and beyond." He continues:

I keep wondering when leaders of eminence will step forward and declare, unambiguously, that enough is enough, as they did in the heyday of the civil rights movement, when the enemy was white racism.

It is time to blow the whistle on the nitwits who have so successfully promoted a values system that embraces murder, drug-dealing, gang membership, misogyny, child abandonment and a sense of self so diseased that it teaches children to view the men in their orbit as niggaz and the women as hoes.

However this madness developed, it's time to bring it to an end.

I noticed that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Snoop Dogg and other "leaders" and celebrities turned out in South Central Los Angeles on Tuesday for the funeral of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the convicted killer and co-founder of the Crips street gang who was executed in California last week.

I remember talking over the years to parents in Los Angeles and elsewhere who were petrified that their children would be killed in cold blood - summarily executed, without any possibility of a defense or an appeal - by the Crips or some other gang because they just happened to be wearing the wrong color cap or jacket or whatever.

The enthusiastic turnout at Tookie Williams's funeral tells you much of what you need to know about the current state of black leadership in the U.S.

That is some stiff, righteous stuff - all the more impressive coming from the source. If Herbert is disgusted with the current state of black leadership in America then we may indeed have reached a tipping point.

RELATED: Two and a half years ago Herbert wrote a similarly tough column about anti-intellectualism in the African-American community. You can read my comments on it here.