The South Is NOT Killin' Hip-Hop.

Sly & the Family Stone - Babies Makin' Babies
Della Humphrey - Don't Make the Good Girls Go Bad
Smokey Robinson - The Family Song

Enough with the arguments. Biochemical Slang will concede: the South is NOT killing hip-hop. Their babies? Not so much.

Things are looking UP in America. It just depends on WHERE you look. Along with gas prices and the American death toll in Iraq, we can add the Southern infant mortality rate to the numbers that are on the RISE in America.

A black child born in MISSISSIPPI has a 17/1000 chance of dying before reaching the age of one year. What makes that statistic even more heartbreaking? That number is on the RISE. Let's put Mississippi's black infant mortality rate in perspective. The following are a selection of countries with a lower infant mortality rate than the black population of Mississippi:

• Malaysia
• Bahrain
• Jordan
• Brunei
• Uruguay
• Bosnia and Herzegovina

In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. How can we explain these terrifying numbers? Obesity? Cuts in Medicaid? Lack of prenatal care? Lack of motivation to attend prenatal care classes? Lack of an adequate public education system? Disenfranchisement? Lack of jobs? Lack of responsibility? A culture of failure? A culture of supremacy?

Enough! We need to be asking ourselves more important questions: Is Lil Wayne the greatest rapper alive?