The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture By Bakari Kitwana. Basic Books, 230 pages, $24.00 A t a meeting I attended several years ago, a man who did not look all that much younger than me turned in my direction and announced that my generation had made a mess out of race relations and social justice. It was time, he said, for people like me to get out of the way and let his generation take over. As I was not yet 40 years old, I found myself so intent on defending my youth that I never did discover exactly what he meant. A little more than a year ago, at a town meeting on race held in Birmingham, Alabama, a mostly middle-aged crowd jammed into the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church had been the scene of a firebombing in 1963 that killed four young girls. Many of the evening's speakers discussed the horrors of racist violence. Ananda Lewis, a television talk-show host in her late twenties, surveyed the crowd and said how she had...