As I watch the news unfold around the senseless murder of Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor a series of grim thoughts are entering my head.  If Taylor’s murder was an isolated incident than it would be easier to process.  There would be less of a urge on my part to think critically at what happened, because one can only do so much to avoid the unexpected.  

Like most sports fans and the general public it’s his murder that has brought Taylor’s life into focus.  We are learning that many of the images that brought him to fame were a blend of his actual superlative talents as a football player, and a mishmash of conclusions drawn about young men elicited from a mishmash of preordained stereotypes.  That the truth about this young man’s life comes about after he’s passed on is not surprising.  This unfortunately is a very common occurrence.  

What we do know for sure is that Taylor was accidentally murdered during a burglary attempt at his Miami home.  Four suspects have been arrested and detained, and over the coming weeks and months the lives of these four men, all of whom younger than Taylor, will receive due scrutiny.  One ESPN report alleges that one of these young men worked as a gardener at Taylor’s home, and another, is the cousin of a man who Taylor’s sister is currently dating.  This matted helix of allegation and truth, distance and proximity will unravel soon enough to give the officers in the case the necessary information.  

Sure, someone is out there has already penned the piece blaming hip-hop, and I’m sure that black youth culture is being explicitly and implicitly critically derided on airwaves throughout the country.  

There is a pop-cultural elephant in this room, but in my mind it ain’t hip-hop.  The more that I think about Taylor’s death and the recent spate of break-ins that have also befallen basketball players Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry, it’s hard to get the MTV show Cribs out of my head.  When it was first introduced Cribs was a pop-culture phenomenon.  It took the blueprint of Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and made it hipper and more accessible to young people.  One of the first things that my friends and I noticed during Cribs’ early days in the aught was the huge discrepancy between the accommodations of professional athletes and their hip-hop peers.  On end of the spectrum were the lavish abodes of NBA players Penny Hardaway and Jayson Williams, and on the other end was Redman’s legendary modest abode.  As the series wore on the homes started looking alike and the celebrities appearing on Cribs became increasingly self-referential, making their own allusions to other homes that had been profiled.  More recently it seemed as if MTV had exhausted its roster of celebrities to profile, and after a while indoor basketball courts and plasma TVs were no longer new—in other words the thrill was gone.  

Having become overly familiar with the appointments of celebrity home, it was only a matter of time before criminals got the idea to start robbing them.  Cribs had provided thieves with a blueprint of what a celebrity’s home would look like, what kinds of furnishings it’d contain, and how to maneuver through the space.  The show inoculated a generation of young adults with a level of materialism, greed and envy, that as the tragic death of Sean Taylor has shown us, is finally beginning to rear its underbelly.