Black British newspaper the Voice has made headlines itself in recent years, for labelling the Metropolitan police commissioner an "ass", and for being accused by him of sparking an anti-police riot in Brixton. Many of its readers, therefore, would have been shocked this week to hear the paper's editor, Mike Best, calling for police to be given greater stop and search powers in order to eradicate inner-city crime - the same stop-and-search powers which are already five times more likely to be used against black people than white.

Are there howls of protest, condemning him as an appeaser to the establishment? No, there is barely a condemnatory word to be heard - just a refinement by the mayor of London's race adviser, Lee Jasper, that, of course, searches have to be targeted and intelligence-led rather than indiscriminate.

Jasper caused a stir himself last week when he slated "ghetto" rappers So Solid Crew for glamorising a culture of drugs and violence. And last month, urging black people to work with the police, he said: "The overwhelming majority in the Afro-Caribbean community is innocent, and many are victims of gun crime. But there is a significant minority, a separate and unseen grouping, which is committed to crime." Also last week, long-time race campaigner Diane Abbott MP told the Commons that people convicted of gun crime must be given tougher prison sentences.

So what's happening? Only 18 months ago, when black academic Tony Sewell suggested most Afro-Caribbean teenagers feel held back at school by peer pressure to fit black stereotypes, he was roundly condemned. Then Jasper said: "It is a 'blame the victim' culture yet again - if it's not the government saying it's lone mothers that are the problem, it's the aggressive nature of black kids."

Now it seems that, at last, "community leaders" are waking up to the real issues which affect the people they claim to represent. If, 10 years ago, you asked black people in inner-city areas what they most feared when walking the streets, they would probably have said it was police officers; today they'd reply that it's loud, aggressive gangs of young black boys - who may or may not be criminals, but are deliberately trying to strike terror into those around them, living up to the gangsta-rap culture which has been imported from the US since the late 1980s. "We're from the street," they grunt, "we want respect" (expletives deleted).

For a decade now, backed by the profane, misogynistic imagery of rap videos, these people have been given free rein to hijack black culture. Being black is all about music, sex, guns, drugs and living on "the street", they say, and their message has been taken on board by too many impressionable youngsters.

As Sewell said, education has been portrayed as "white" - what use is it when strutting the streets? Now, he says, the issue in black children's education "is not racism, but whether they do their homework, whether they come to school with bags full of books or just CDs and a football."

Ordinary citizens have had enough. They can't tolerate living in streets where they face fear and intimidation on a daily basis. Callers to the UK's leading black radio phone-in, hosted by Geoff Schumann on Choice FM, have given up on their long-term favourite moans (about black-black or black-white relationships). The issue of the day is "what's happening to our children?"

Last year in London alone there were 21 gangster-style gun murders and 67 attempted murders. People have been shot over minor traffic accidents. The saying that youngsters receive more respect for coming out of prison than graduating from college is becoming ever more true.

But since the Macpherson inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence - as race campaigners now seem to have discovered - it is increasingly less credible to claim that all doors are closed to black progress, and hence that education and hard work are a waste of time. Racism is still rife and well-qualified black people still have poorer job prospects than their white counterparts. But many organisations are making genuine efforts to attract black recruits - and the black population needs to be in a far stronger position to take advantage of this.

For years, race campaigners turned the spotlight on white institutions but ignored the growing crisis within the community itself. Now at last there is the chance that they will focus on other social issues which are also fuelling the misery. At the top of the list must surely be the breakdown of the black family: 50% of Caribbean mothers under 35 have never been married - five times the white figure - and the number is increasing.

Once work is done to re-educate children as to what blackness means - and doesn't mean - we may start to see progress on the employment issues. In the US, the black population has diverged into two distinct communities: the middle classes and those condemned to remain in the ghetto. In the UK, we cannot afford to allow so many of our people to sink into the sewer.