They should have just taken their clothes off. Should have just gotten butt-naked.

Nudity, after all, was the only ingredient missing from a recent fully-clothed orgy that has been making the rounds on You-Tube. A video clip titled, “Mitchell High School Memphis…Rape Dat Ho,” shows a knot of black high school students simulating sex acts on the gym floor after a talent show -- all to the chants of “Rape Dat Ho.”

There’s a girl on all fours that a boy pulls up to him like a wheelbarrow, wildly thrusting behind her. There’s a girl lying on her back, her legs open and a boy between them, simulating intercourse. And if that wasn’t enough, another girl gets behind him and grinds on him.

I guess we’re hell and gone from back in the day, when the slow drag was enough to cause chaperones’ eyebrows to crinkle.

Then again, it seems that there were no chaperones -- at least not on the YouTube clip that is being widely circulated. But a Memphis, Tennessee television news station that found a second video clip says that on that one, several adults walk past the camera as the dirty dancing rages.

And do nothing.

All of that tells me that, as black people, we’re hell and gone from a lot of things from back in the day.

We’re hell and gone from things like pride and self-respect. From young women who wouldn’t dare want to be part of anything with the word rape in it. From teachers and administrators who would have cared enough to not let black kids like the ones at Mitchell High school embarrass themselves into becoming fodder for conservative talk show hosts like Bill O’Reilly to once again show white Americans how sick black people’s lives are.

Then again, we’re up against some obstacles that didn’t exist back in the day.

YouTube is one of them. On the one hand, it is a blessing in that it gives everyone a glimpse into bad things that would otherwise be swept under the rug.

On the other hand, it has become a curse -- because this is the look-at-me generation, and kids don’t care about being embarrassed on YouTube.

All they care about is being looked at. Period.

And that’s not just true for black kids doing the rape dance in Memphis, but for white kids like the girls in Lakeland, Florida.

In March, some girls lured another to a home where they brutally beat her and recorded it all on video to post to YouTube. One of the girls is even heard saying that they had only 17 seconds of tape left, and to “make it good.”

Like the rape dance, that too made for some shocking teen video.

But here’s the difference: When white kids do something that’s appalling, it’s seen through the lens of anomaly. They get invited to explain themselves on "Dr. Phil." They get painted as kids gone bad. But when black kids act up, they tend to be portrayed as kids who were born bad.

Things like the rape dance are seen not as anomalies, but as more proof of the incorrigibility of black kids -- and why white folks should stay away from them.

We know this.

Studies have shown us that few employers will toss out an application with names like April, Britney or Cara -- the names of some of the girls involved in the Lakeland beatdown -- on them. They won’t associate those names with YouTube brutality.

But they will associate names like DeAngelo and Lakesha with all the worse images that black kids are saddled with -- images like the one being portrayed in the rape dance video -- and probably crumple up their application.

As I said, a lot has changed from back in the day. Most of us from the integration generation (and from the old school before that) understood that our actions oftentimes didn’t just reflect on us as individuals, but on our entire race. And if we didn’t understand that, most of us had parents, teachers and ministers who would remind us.

That’s not to say that we were perfect all the time. But we at least knew what was at stake.

These days, black kids -- many of whom are probably taking their decency cues from Lil Kim instead of Oprah Winfrey -- are clueless about that.

And that must change.

I’d like to say the place for that to start is in the home. But unfortunately, the rape dance video shows that a lot of these kids are being failed on the home-training front.

And if adults at the school indeed walked by as the rape-dancing was commencing, that tells me that they have already given up on black kids; that rather than correct the kids’ behavior, they shrug at it.

So now, I’m thinking that the churches or maybe some community movement should step in. Maybe they should conduct reality-check camps to not only teach black pride to black kids, but that fame and notoriety are two different things.

And that notoriety is the last thing that black kids need.