I'm genuinely curious here
What part of Western Black Culture are we supposed to admire?
They talk like black culture is some monolithic entity that whitey is desperate trying to beat down and will soon break free.
So what are the good points to "black urban culture"?
I can think of several.
Jazz, the blues and early rock 'n' roll -- whether or not you appreciate hip-hop, surely you enjoy one or more of these genres.
Barbecue and soul food.
The incredibly visceral, impactful literary work created by black authors -- today people focus more on Morrison and Angelou, but I'm talking more about Hughes, Brooks, Baldwin.
The great black centers of the early 1900s. Bronzeville and Harlem -- and all the other neighborhoods of upwardly-mobile, professional black people who struggled against a hugely prejudiced society and made their segregated communities into something far beyond a ghetto. These centers were crowded with public housing by Great Society programs that had no intent of integrating neighborhoods but instead brought in people who were less likely to try to strive for upward mobility, and made those neighborhoods go into decline. Anywhere middle-class black people lived, the government made sure to fill up with as many generationally-impoverished black people as it could, hence the decline of those neighborhoods in the 70s. With less public housing available, and less welfare assistance overall, both Bronzeville and Harlem turned back into middle/upper-middle class neighborhoods while poorer black people were relegated to places further from city centers.
There is an element of black American culture that doesn't get talked about much any more, but used to be a major, huge part of what it meant to be black. For a long time, because of redlining and a lack of industrial-scale capital to make capital improvements, black communities have had to be self-reliant with less. If you look into the history of one of those neighborhoods I mentioned above, or if you go today to rural towns in Georgia that were founded as freed slave colonies, you'll see people sticking together and creating community to do what you could with very little. There are still rural Southern towns that are almost all black and lack all grocery stores in large part due to racial issues (you'd have no doubt this was the motivation if you saw what the white towns a couple of towns over put on their billboards about America and the Confederacy). But you know what those towns have instead? Some person with a little bit of money will try to open up a "store" in a house that has a few shelves and a less-than-convenience-store level selection, and they'll make a little on the markup but never enough to get rich. The idea of having to work harder to get ahead, but wanting to do that anyway to make a better community, was a big deal to many black communities in the 20th century.
A lot of these ideas have sort of been erased by the most recent couple of generations of media production. Black people are held up in our culture (usually by white media moguls who decide what to promote and what not to promote, so let's not think of this as coming from the black community itself) only when they live for pleasure and spend tons of money. Love him or hate him, Kanye's got a point:
You see it's broke nigga racism
That's that "Don't touch anything in the store"
And this rich nigga racism
That's that "Come in, please buy more"
The fact that people today even have to ask "what's good about black culture" is kind of crazy, honestly, and reflects what a good job these media properties have done in destroying the image of black culture as creating a vibrant, artistic landscape in urban areas and a soulful, social one in rural areas. Even white people in the 1950s who were racist as shit would have said things like "well, they sure know their music, don't they?"
But today, if you're less than 35, you probably don't have much exposure to that kind of black culture beyond reading "A Dream Deferred" in 10th grade or hearing Chuck Berry play at some nostalgia restaurant. It didn't take long to erase what was an incredible thread of American culture and transform it into something that would be unrecognizable in terms of values, social norms, and stereotypes to anyone from the Harlem Renaissance.