If you want to understand your teenager, you better get to know Tupac, dmx and Li'l Kim. Even if you don't like them, not knowing about them could hurt you.

Hip hop artists, like it or not, are a cultural icon for many teenagers -- their anti-heroes, said Carl Taylor, a spokesman from the Institute for Children, Youth and Family at Michigan State University."If you do not know what hip hop is, you are in big trouble," Taylor told uvenile justice professionals. "Regardless of how many degrees you have, you are lost."

Taylor spoke Friday during a workshop of the National Juvenile Justice Conference in Salt Lake City, emphasizing to those who work with troubled kids that to understand them, you have to understand their culture.

Baggy pants, MTV, language that shocks, pierced noses and lyrics that rage are part of a phenomena sweeping the world of teenagers out there, and it is not going away.

"This is their world and they will look at you many times and say you are not wanted. They fight over Tupac and Biggie just like we fought over JFK and George Romney."

Taylor said adults don't have to like it or approve, but they should understand. Even for him, a lifelong advocate of youth and father of a teenage son, the hip hop movement is baffling.

"I am a child of Detroit," he said. "A child of Motown. Life was simpler then." The Temptations never sang about shooting people and they never sang about sex organs. But if juvenile justice professionals are going to be effective, they have to be hip. It is especially important for disillusioned youth who are locked up.

"When we are not sensitive to the culture, the message we send to young people is you don't count," he said. "Our juvenile detention facilities have become the breeding ground for malcontents."

Taylor was just one speaker who addressed cultural diversity. His comments were echoed by a University of Utah sociologist who predicts greater violence in society if racism and stereotyping goes unchecked.

"I see it getting worse before it gets better. There will be more conflict over resources and I see some violence ahead," said Theresa Martinez.

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Both Martinez and Taylor said the disproportionate representation of minority youth in the criminal justice system is a problem that is continuing to get worse.

"We have to keep counting, keep track of this and we have to speak up," she said. "We have to take the moral high ground."

But tracking racial bias in the criminal justice system -- even at the local level -- is getting harder, not easier. Despite a 1995 recommendation by the Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice to more accurately record the race of young offenders, the latest study said agencies are worse at it than they were four years ago.

Justice officials say blacks are 41 more times likely and Asian and Pacific Islanders are 10 times more likely than Caucasians to be arrested for their crimes.

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