Kendrick Lamar and Wynton Marsalis may not have a lot in common on a personal level, but their accomplishments as representatives of America’s most heralded music genres — hip-hop and jazz, respectively — in many ways mirror each other.

In 1997, while hip-hop was reeling from the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, Marsalis, the New Orleans born son of a jazz legend, won the Pulitzer Prize for music. He was the first jazz musician to win the award in its history.

Two decades later, Kendrick Lamar has won the same award, becoming the first hip-hop artist to do so. Marsalis is a Grammy Award recipient, as is Lamar. And both are tremendously dedicated to and concerned about their respective hometowns of New Orleans and Los Angeles.

Despite these similarities, respect for the other’s art form certainly doesn’t flow both ways. As Marsalis expressed in his now viral appearance on the Cape Up Podcast with Jonathan Capehart, he simply doesn’t like hip-hop music:

“I look at it like a person who would have went along with the minstrel show in 1873 because everybody was looking at it,” says Marsalis. “I want to be on record. No. And I don’t think all rap is not creative.”

In Marsalis’ view, hip-hop music poses just as big a threat to the black community as racism.

Asked about the state of race relations in America, Marsalis gave the following response: “I think we have deep-rooted problems that have nothing to do with those little instances that are the least of the actual … sad part of racism has nothing to do with some guys in Starbucks or President Trump. The sad thing is how the education system has been hijacked, how we’ve lost our grip on our morality in the black community. Pornography and profanity and just addressing ourselves in the most disrespectful form.”

While I have always identified myself as a structuralist, as opposed to a culturalist when it comes to sociological examination of the black ghetto, I do my best not to disregard the unique and rather specific cultural issues that have incubated in the black community during the hip-hop and millennial generations. But we can never make the mistake of equating cultural responses to structural conditions.

When assessing hip-hop music, a representative extension of the ghetto, Marsalis takes the culturalist route: “The least of it is definitely not cultural. You can’t have a pipeline of filth be your default position (for) free. The nation is entertained by that, but it’s not free. Just like the toll the minstrel show took on black folks and on white folks. Now, all this “nigga this, bitch that, ho’ that. The position of most popular music is not a default position for a majority culture. It’s a mistake to have a profane majority position.“

Much like Kanye West a few weeks ago, Marsalis’ comments precede a new project he’ll be releasing shortly, entitled, The Ever Funky Lowdown. The ambitious project aims to explore America’s relationship with race through the eyes of a protagonist named Mr. Game. A major theme, according to Marsalis, is “that you will act against your own interests because you want more to get this person … because you’re fixated on who you think your enemy is."

While Marsalis assigns this narrative to the African American community, one can easily swap in the poor white conservatives who have been voting against their own interests for decades while being driven by candidates who incessantly paint people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants and other marginalized communities as their enemy.

Their votes matter. And that’s exactly how an unqualified, bigoted, narcissist who ran a campaign on division, with no shortage of racial undertones found himself in the Oval Office.

What Marsalis has exposed is the lingering generational chasm that still exists in the black community between those of the civil rights era and those of the hip-hop generations. Respectability politics play a huge role here. Despite his acknowledgement of systemic issues within public education for example, he reserves the lion’s share of criticism for blacks who have, in his view, lost their grip of morality.

The culture of the hip-hop and the millennial black ghetto is anything but perfect. There is no shortage of issues to be addressed here, including toxic and hyper-masculinity, rape culture, misogyny and a host of others.

While efforts are being made to address those issues, the last thing we need is one of the elders ranting about the language we’re using. I challenge Mr. Marsalis to pick a vinyl copy of Kendrick Lamar’s last two albums (To Pimp A Butterfly or DAMN) and listen to them. Not to pick out which words he doesn’t like, but to  better understand and appreciate the best of an art form that, much like jazz, faced many detractors inside and outside of the black community.

Our ghetto generation is a tough one to comprehend from the outside looking in. While prior iterations of the ghetto were plagued by poverty and joblessness, the hopelessness and despair that go along with the level of violence unique to the hip-hop and millennial ghetto can never be overlooked.