Singer Chaka Khan is about to take over role of Sophie in the Broadway production of "A Color Purple." The former lead singer of Rufus is known not only for her singing chops, but also for her attitude. Fans however tend to excuse diva-esque qualities in people who can actually deliver the goods. Chaka Khan does---her first studio album in 10 years, "Funk This Up" has been nominated for two Grammy Awards.
In an interview in the New York Times, Chaka Khan, who also worked for the Black Panthers talks about racism, saying, "Racism is still very much alive, but it has become intellectual. It's practiced in a very high-minded way. It's all smoke and mirrors. It's not blatant outright whupping and lynching like in the past. It's more psychological, and spiritual."
Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Wonder," was fundamental to my development. I hesitate to say that it helped me to become a, "Strong, Black, Woman," that's such a played out and problematic label---let's say, the song helped me to look within for power, to choose my own path, to be supportive in relationship, but most important---be myself.
Here's a Flashback: Rufus and Chaka Khan, "Do You Love What You Feel (1979)
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Friday, December 28, 2007
Reading More in 2008
Every year I do my New Year's resolutions. I sort of look at it as my outline for the coming year. I am proud to say that most years I did the majority of things on my list---that was until motherhood struck more than 3 years ago. It suffices to say that plans often go awry and things that were meant to be done, remain undone. It took a lot of adjustment---but I have no complaints. The little man in my life is healthy, happy and loved...that's priceless. Until there are more hours in the day, I will have to prioritize my time. That means everything ain't going to get done, or it can only get done after my family and my work are straight.
I am a committing to at least one thing this year...I need to read more. People who know me well are howling at this statement. Yes, I read alot, but not always the things that I want to read. I do research, I read countless newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and web site...and while they are all interesting, it's not the same as that vacation reading. I am not talking about Harold Robbins or Judith Kranz---that's not my style, but I am the reading that you do simply for pleasure.
So I am going to Jamaica for MLK, Jr. weekend and will definitely get in some pleasure reading. For the New Year I am also committed to reading more books from the African diaspora. I get to travel and listening to different music has helped to amplify and explain what I think that I have come to know about other countries. I just think that it's time to step that up a notch. There so much more out there than just Colin Channer or Zadie Smith---although they will stay in the rotation.
One domestic book that is on my reading list is One Drop by Bliss Broyard. Broyard's father was a successful cultural critic at the New York Times. After living a comfortably WASP existence in Connecticut, as an adult she learns that her father was not "White," at least under the "one drop" of Black blood rule. As the story goes, the elder Broyard decided to "pass" as White---perhaps like other members of his family. The author finds out that there are "Black" Broyards and "White" Broyards. Part of my interest has to do with how the author's identity has changed, if at all, after this revelation.
I am interested in the story because it makes us have to examine our thoughts about race. Is race biological, cultural, a malleable social construct or what? It seems like a really dumb question until you go to other countries...or you look at someone in the US whom you presume to be "White" who says she is Black. Or meet a darker skinned person who recites his familial lineage---including slavemasters and undercover lovers, so that you are clear that he are not "Black." Americans have a very fixed notion of race, but that is not the case else where in the world. I am not the lightest light, but abroad there have been times when I was not considered "Black." In these instances the presumption was that one of my parents was White. People will say, "Black people are much darker." It's an odd space, since I never think of myself as anything but Black. My own experiences have made me wonder how a person's world view changes if he has the capacity to inhabit another identity. I wonder whether the burden of "passing" was the secrecy, rather than joining another race. It seem that the paradox about race may that one can be more flexible to define oneselves, the lighter one's skin is.
I am a committing to at least one thing this year...I need to read more. People who know me well are howling at this statement. Yes, I read alot, but not always the things that I want to read. I do research, I read countless newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and web site...and while they are all interesting, it's not the same as that vacation reading. I am not talking about Harold Robbins or Judith Kranz---that's not my style, but I am the reading that you do simply for pleasure.
So I am going to Jamaica for MLK, Jr. weekend and will definitely get in some pleasure reading. For the New Year I am also committed to reading more books from the African diaspora. I get to travel and listening to different music has helped to amplify and explain what I think that I have come to know about other countries. I just think that it's time to step that up a notch. There so much more out there than just Colin Channer or Zadie Smith---although they will stay in the rotation.
One domestic book that is on my reading list is One Drop by Bliss Broyard. Broyard's father was a successful cultural critic at the New York Times. After living a comfortably WASP existence in Connecticut, as an adult she learns that her father was not "White," at least under the "one drop" of Black blood rule. As the story goes, the elder Broyard decided to "pass" as White---perhaps like other members of his family. The author finds out that there are "Black" Broyards and "White" Broyards. Part of my interest has to do with how the author's identity has changed, if at all, after this revelation.
I am interested in the story because it makes us have to examine our thoughts about race. Is race biological, cultural, a malleable social construct or what? It seems like a really dumb question until you go to other countries...or you look at someone in the US whom you presume to be "White" who says she is Black. Or meet a darker skinned person who recites his familial lineage---including slavemasters and undercover lovers, so that you are clear that he are not "Black." Americans have a very fixed notion of race, but that is not the case else where in the world. I am not the lightest light, but abroad there have been times when I was not considered "Black." In these instances the presumption was that one of my parents was White. People will say, "Black people are much darker." It's an odd space, since I never think of myself as anything but Black. My own experiences have made me wonder how a person's world view changes if he has the capacity to inhabit another identity. I wonder whether the burden of "passing" was the secrecy, rather than joining another race. It seem that the paradox about race may that one can be more flexible to define oneselves, the lighter one's skin is.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
What Would James Baldwin Think?
I came across a short essay by Kai Wright in Colorlines that discussed how little has changed since James Baldwin published his first collection, Notes of Native Son in 1955. While Wright is correct that there is little substantive interest in changing conditions in the ghettos of America, I believe that today Black Americans have far more opportunities than James Baldwin could have imagined when he died in 1987.
Whether or not one agrees with the politics of Barack Obama, Colin Powell or Condi Rice----everyone knows that in 1955 they could have never achieved their respective levels of power and influence. Moreover, I know that in 1955 I would not have been able to make the same choices about my life that I have. At that time race rather than ability or finances dictated everything from where someone lived and went to school to who one associated with. I am not suggesting that my life has not been touched by racism, it just has not been the type that curtailed my ambitions or interests. Perhaps that is the rub. Whether or not things for Black Americans has changed depends largely on how much education you have and your economic status.
I would daresay that for families who have not been able to break the cycle of poverty through education or employment, life may look just like 1955. For folks in poor communities dead-end jobs, inadequate housing, failing schools and negative encounters with societal institutions still shapes their daily existence. However for Black Americans who have always been middle class or were able to rise to the ranks of the middle class through school and/or advancement-track jobs, they are now reaping the benefits of expanded opportunities. Race matters---but how much may be determined on how much social capital you have---meaning your ability to navigate the waters of the "mainstream," vis a vis advanced education, money or professional skills/talents.
Wright is correct in saying that it is not enough to tell folks in the 'hood to pull up their pants and get their lives right, particularly if we as a society are not going to instill these communities with hope--- in the form of education, job training, sustainable employment and safe affordable housing. By the same token suggesting that nothing has changed is a slap in the face to the millions of Black Americans who have worked hard, often in hostile environments, to get and keep their deserved piece of the American pie.
Here's Wright's essay:
Twenty Years Later: James Baldwin's America Has Not Changed
[Author and Essayist died twenty years ago on Dec. 1]
Baldwin’s biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays “prophetic,” as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America’s peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin’s day, was politely called the “race problem.”
Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin’s work remains contemporary because America’s racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.
Baldwin considered race America’s poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.
Today, we still have not reached Baldwin’s understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.
In his first essay collection, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes an urban ghetto that since has changed only in aesthetic. “All over Harlem now,” he wrote, “there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”
Then and now, reform efforts have failed to alter that bleak reality because they’ve made no fundamental changes. As Baldwin wrote, “Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”
So today Baldwin’s Harlem still lingers atop the list of New York neighborhoods with problems ranging from dilapidated housing stock to communicable disease to food establishments that simply fail to pass health inspection. The same is true for other racially defined ghettos around the country.
What is different today is that few discuss race in Baldwin’s structural terms. Instead, we busy ourselves with word games.
We play gotcha with celebrities who use slurs, rather than noticing the morbid conditions African Americans are disproportionately asked to live within. We eagerly embrace commentators like Bill Cosby when they decry the way individuals have adapted to generations of ghetto life. But we nickel and dime any policy effort to change those conditions. We ban the N-word, and we leave the ghetto intact.
This neglect has the same impact today that it had when Baldwin dissected it in 1955. “All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand,” he wrote, “and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”
Kai Wright, a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. His new book, Drifting Towards Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming Out on the Streets of New York, will be published in January by Beacon Press. He is also publications editor for the Black AIDS Institute and author of two previous books on African American history.
Whether or not one agrees with the politics of Barack Obama, Colin Powell or Condi Rice----everyone knows that in 1955 they could have never achieved their respective levels of power and influence. Moreover, I know that in 1955 I would not have been able to make the same choices about my life that I have. At that time race rather than ability or finances dictated everything from where someone lived and went to school to who one associated with. I am not suggesting that my life has not been touched by racism, it just has not been the type that curtailed my ambitions or interests. Perhaps that is the rub. Whether or not things for Black Americans has changed depends largely on how much education you have and your economic status.
I would daresay that for families who have not been able to break the cycle of poverty through education or employment, life may look just like 1955. For folks in poor communities dead-end jobs, inadequate housing, failing schools and negative encounters with societal institutions still shapes their daily existence. However for Black Americans who have always been middle class or were able to rise to the ranks of the middle class through school and/or advancement-track jobs, they are now reaping the benefits of expanded opportunities. Race matters---but how much may be determined on how much social capital you have---meaning your ability to navigate the waters of the "mainstream," vis a vis advanced education, money or professional skills/talents.
Wright is correct in saying that it is not enough to tell folks in the 'hood to pull up their pants and get their lives right, particularly if we as a society are not going to instill these communities with hope--- in the form of education, job training, sustainable employment and safe affordable housing. By the same token suggesting that nothing has changed is a slap in the face to the millions of Black Americans who have worked hard, often in hostile environments, to get and keep their deserved piece of the American pie.
Here's Wright's essay:
Twenty Years Later: James Baldwin's America Has Not Changed
[Author and Essayist died twenty years ago on Dec. 1]
Baldwin’s biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays “prophetic,” as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America’s peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin’s day, was politely called the “race problem.”
Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin’s work remains contemporary because America’s racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.
Baldwin considered race America’s poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.
Today, we still have not reached Baldwin’s understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.
In his first essay collection, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes an urban ghetto that since has changed only in aesthetic. “All over Harlem now,” he wrote, “there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”
Then and now, reform efforts have failed to alter that bleak reality because they’ve made no fundamental changes. As Baldwin wrote, “Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”
So today Baldwin’s Harlem still lingers atop the list of New York neighborhoods with problems ranging from dilapidated housing stock to communicable disease to food establishments that simply fail to pass health inspection. The same is true for other racially defined ghettos around the country.
What is different today is that few discuss race in Baldwin’s structural terms. Instead, we busy ourselves with word games.
We play gotcha with celebrities who use slurs, rather than noticing the morbid conditions African Americans are disproportionately asked to live within. We eagerly embrace commentators like Bill Cosby when they decry the way individuals have adapted to generations of ghetto life. But we nickel and dime any policy effort to change those conditions. We ban the N-word, and we leave the ghetto intact.
This neglect has the same impact today that it had when Baldwin dissected it in 1955. “All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand,” he wrote, “and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”
Kai Wright, a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. His new book, Drifting Towards Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming Out on the Streets of New York, will be published in January by Beacon Press. He is also publications editor for the Black AIDS Institute and author of two previous books on African American history.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Teenage Pregnancy on the Rise
What a difference a day makes. Yesterday one news report says that teen pregnancies were declining, now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases a report that states that teenage birth rates have risen for the first time since 1991.
Unfortunately it is no surprise that the largest increase was among Black teenagers. There however were also increases among Whites, Latinos and American Indians. The only group whose teenage birth rate continues to decline is Asians. According to the report "unmarried childbearing" reached a record high in 2006, accounting for 38.5% of all births.
What study after study shows is that the births among teenage mothers and umarried women tends to have poor outcomes: the families remain mired in poverty and the children are more apt to end up in jail. Yeh, yeh, some women are holding it down, but few will hail it as an ideal situation.
The issue is not marriage---marriage does not cure all ills. If you do the math, two unmarried adults, who are each gainfully employed and who are engaged parents, trumps an immature married couple that is financially unstable and only marginally interested in parenting.
In several Scandanavian countries unwed motherhood is practically the norm. The difference however is that generally these women are well educated and can at least provide financially for their children. Moreover, the children's fathers are usually gainfully employed and active in the children's lives.
In comparison, in our country many of these teenagers and unmarried women are neither emotionally or financially equipped to deal with the daily challenges of parenting. More problematic is that in many cases the mothers have a tenuous relationship with the child's father, who may or may not regularly contribute financially and emotionally to the child's upbringing. Moreover, unlike decades past, the support network(grandmothers, aunts, neighbors) who could help with babysitting or money, if a mother ran low one week, is rapidly dwindling as more women enter the workforce and stay in it longer.
The old people used to say that children are a blessing. I believe that to be true. That being said, innocent children are done a disservice if their parents are not prepared to give them a steady dose of love and attention as well as food, clothing and shelter.
Unfortunately it is no surprise that the largest increase was among Black teenagers. There however were also increases among Whites, Latinos and American Indians. The only group whose teenage birth rate continues to decline is Asians. According to the report "unmarried childbearing" reached a record high in 2006, accounting for 38.5% of all births.
What study after study shows is that the births among teenage mothers and umarried women tends to have poor outcomes: the families remain mired in poverty and the children are more apt to end up in jail. Yeh, yeh, some women are holding it down, but few will hail it as an ideal situation.
The issue is not marriage---marriage does not cure all ills. If you do the math, two unmarried adults, who are each gainfully employed and who are engaged parents, trumps an immature married couple that is financially unstable and only marginally interested in parenting.
In several Scandanavian countries unwed motherhood is practically the norm. The difference however is that generally these women are well educated and can at least provide financially for their children. Moreover, the children's fathers are usually gainfully employed and active in the children's lives.
In comparison, in our country many of these teenagers and unmarried women are neither emotionally or financially equipped to deal with the daily challenges of parenting. More problematic is that in many cases the mothers have a tenuous relationship with the child's father, who may or may not regularly contribute financially and emotionally to the child's upbringing. Moreover, unlike decades past, the support network(grandmothers, aunts, neighbors) who could help with babysitting or money, if a mother ran low one week, is rapidly dwindling as more women enter the workforce and stay in it longer.
The old people used to say that children are a blessing. I believe that to be true. That being said, innocent children are done a disservice if their parents are not prepared to give them a steady dose of love and attention as well as food, clothing and shelter.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
29 Year Old Grandmother
Today I ran across an article from the Quad City Times, which covers Iowa and Illinois about a 29 Year Old Grandmother or rather her 15 year old daughter who had just given birth. The upside of the article was information that teenage pregnancy rates in the area (and across the nation) had fallen in the last ten years. The bad news was that the teens who were getting pregnant may be getting younger. In this instance the new mother was more interested in shopping, rapping and getting back to playing basketball that taking care of her son. It is not that the girl is mean or uncaring, she ia simply a self-centered teenager. By the way, I should add that her mother has three younger children.
This type of story is fodder for ghetto humor, but on the serious side...what will be the fate of both of these single mothers and their children? Is it really blaming the victim to point out that the likelihood that these women, both young and undereducated will be able to develop financially and emotionally stable homes is very slim? Moreover, is it too defeatist to predict that without some major intervention, these children will replicate the lifestyles and choices of their mother and grandmother?
Barack Obama is getting a lukewarm reception from many Black folks. Personally I think that his bi-racial background is irrelevant and is not the cause of the resistance to him. I think that the problem for Obama (and the new vanguard of Black leadership) is that in order to appreciate their success, many Black folks will have to look at their own failures. It is easier to call another Black a sell-out or to say that he/she is not "black enough," or cry about racism rather than admit your own bad choices and short-sided thinking are largely responsible for your situation.
Obama and his peers are not talking about "Black issues" as if Blacks are a separate species from the rest of America. This is disconcerting to folks to believe that without concessions from Whites Blacks can't make it. Whether Obama's universal political message is right for this point in remains to be seen. However even if he does not become our next president, he spells the future of Black politics. With so many Blacks achieving and doing well, it becomes more and more difficult to contend that the majority of our interests and concerns distinct from those of Whites, Asians and Latinos.
A great majority of the new Black middle class have humble roots. Most obtained whatever they have through hard work, luck and a lot of prayer. However many of these same people have friends or relatives who made choices that landed them in jail, poverty, single motherhood or worse in the grave yard. As one kid decided to go to school and get a job after school, his classmate dropped out of school and decided that robbing or hustling was the fast-track to riches---now he's locked up. In another neighborhood, one girl was too invested in going to college to be swayed by her boyfriend's pleas for condom-less sex. Her best friend, not interested in anything but her boyfriend took that bait; gaining a child and lost the boyfriend. A single woman looking for love kept having children, with different men, although each successive child plunged her and the other ones deeper into poverty. While no one is saying the racial discrimination is dead, some have managed to keep moving forward. Unfortunately others make one bad decision after another.
There are no easy answer to stemming generational poverty, but we might start by having some serious talks in communities around the country. Not moralizing, but getting real about how quickly a few bad moves or careless nights can cripple your for life.
This type of story is fodder for ghetto humor, but on the serious side...what will be the fate of both of these single mothers and their children? Is it really blaming the victim to point out that the likelihood that these women, both young and undereducated will be able to develop financially and emotionally stable homes is very slim? Moreover, is it too defeatist to predict that without some major intervention, these children will replicate the lifestyles and choices of their mother and grandmother?
Barack Obama is getting a lukewarm reception from many Black folks. Personally I think that his bi-racial background is irrelevant and is not the cause of the resistance to him. I think that the problem for Obama (and the new vanguard of Black leadership) is that in order to appreciate their success, many Black folks will have to look at their own failures. It is easier to call another Black a sell-out or to say that he/she is not "black enough," or cry about racism rather than admit your own bad choices and short-sided thinking are largely responsible for your situation.
Obama and his peers are not talking about "Black issues" as if Blacks are a separate species from the rest of America. This is disconcerting to folks to believe that without concessions from Whites Blacks can't make it. Whether Obama's universal political message is right for this point in remains to be seen. However even if he does not become our next president, he spells the future of Black politics. With so many Blacks achieving and doing well, it becomes more and more difficult to contend that the majority of our interests and concerns distinct from those of Whites, Asians and Latinos.
A great majority of the new Black middle class have humble roots. Most obtained whatever they have through hard work, luck and a lot of prayer. However many of these same people have friends or relatives who made choices that landed them in jail, poverty, single motherhood or worse in the grave yard. As one kid decided to go to school and get a job after school, his classmate dropped out of school and decided that robbing or hustling was the fast-track to riches---now he's locked up. In another neighborhood, one girl was too invested in going to college to be swayed by her boyfriend's pleas for condom-less sex. Her best friend, not interested in anything but her boyfriend took that bait; gaining a child and lost the boyfriend. A single woman looking for love kept having children, with different men, although each successive child plunged her and the other ones deeper into poverty. While no one is saying the racial discrimination is dead, some have managed to keep moving forward. Unfortunately others make one bad decision after another.
There are no easy answer to stemming generational poverty, but we might start by having some serious talks in communities around the country. Not moralizing, but getting real about how quickly a few bad moves or careless nights can cripple your for life.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Sean Taylor, The Black KKK and Hip Hop
For the past week the Internet world as well as the physical world has been discussing the murder of Redskin's player, Sean Taylor. Where I am in the Washington, DC area, home of the Redskins, the story has been amplified and is a personal loss for many people.
One of the more controversial pieces is Taylor's Death a Grim Reminder For Us All written by sports columnist Jason Whitlock. Whitlock calls Taylor's killers members of the Black KKK and essentially blames rap music not only for Taylor's past misconduct, but also for his death.
Whitlock's comments are too simplistic for my taste. Blaming Hip Hop ignores a host of other factors that contribute to crime and violence, including stupidity, callous disregard for human life and free will. If rap music fell off the earth tomorrow, the crime and violence committed against Black Americans by other Black Americans would not autormatically cease. Moreover, when we point fingers at rap and Hip Hop are we just pointing at rap artists or will we also be pointing at the multi-national entertainment companies and the corporate radio station that disseminate their messages and make the lions' share of the money?
Where I tend to agree with Whitlock is that Black folks need to stop sugarcoating bad choices under some misguided sense of racial unity. Everyone who is poor or who comes from a single family home does not become a criminal. Furthermore, let us not forget that the middle class spawns criminals. More often than not becoming a criminal or hanging with criminals is a personal choice, not a survival tactic. Whether you live in a mansion or in the hood, you can't elevate yourself if you continue to surround yourself with the same ol' people and the same ol' influences. Sometimes in order to grow you have got to make a clean and complete break from the past.
Rap and Hip Hop are not the reasons why there is an academic achievement gap or that Blacks lag behind others in business and home ownership and its coarser elements may be exacerbating existing problems. The truth of the matter is that many rap artists have become millionaires preaching to the masses that in order to get paid you just rob somebody or get your hustle on----the days of talking about being a fool for dropping out of high school are long gone. Ironically, other folks consume rap music and Hip Hop as "entertainment" and keep on stepping into college, careers and nice lives. Unfortunately, too many Black youth have made rap music their life guides and as we used to say back in the day, they "got played." They covet the riches regularly displayed in music videos, yet by remaining "true to the streets" they are getting getting neither the education nor the job skills that could put them on a path to attaining at least some of these luxuries.
I have always thought that too much weight has been placed on Hip Hop to heal "Black America." Frankly I thought that that task should fall to policy makers, scholars, clergy and kinfolk. Hip Hop can aid the cause, but I think that it's nuts to think that performers who ultimately are looking to get a pay check will leading any revolution.
I stumbled on an interview with author and music journalist, Toure in Clutch magazine. I agreed with him on several points concerning Hip Hop, especially how it is being scapegoated. Here is a snippet:
Clutch magazine : Lately, hip-hop and black culture are use simultaneously. How do you feel about hip-hop becoming the current representative of our image and culture worldwide?
Toure: Hiphop has long been the lingua franca of my generation and it’s only right because it truly represents this generation, for better and worse. I think it’s a mistake to think hiphop and black culture are synonymous, they’re not, there’s many places where they don’t overlap at all. Black culture is perhaps more diverse now than it ever has been and hiphop is very racially diverse and it’s also international, repped in Japan, Europe, South America, Africa, all over the world. Hiphop comes from black culture and black culture often seems dominated by hiphop but by no means are they one and the same. There are many points of overlap but many points of disconnect.
Clutch magazine: Recently you and Jeff Johnson (Cousin Jeff) hosted BET’s heated debate “Hip Hop vs. America”. While most hip-hop artist don’t accurately portray the actual image and realities of Black America and does little in helping us kill stereotypes and generalization that are placed on us. Do you think hip-hop has become a scapegoat for the problems and issues in our community?
Toure: Yes, I think the elder generation has become increasingly afraid of the impact hiphop is having on the world which is funny because hiphop is as tame as ever. But they’ve been scared of hiphop consistently for the last 20 years or more. Every generation has to have music that scares their parents but this is insane. I was actually very disappointed in the older generation for turning the Imus controversy into a referendum on hiphop, which really allowed the racists to slip away. Why not a referendum on shock jocks or noose-placers? There’s been a preponderance of nooses this year all over the country, that’s much more dangerous than the preponderance of the words bitch and ho. What was lost in the Imus stampede was that nappy-headed ho was really the least of his comments. What he immediately went on to reference was Spike Lee’s School Daze and the scene where the wanna-bes faced off against the jigagboos. He was calling those girls jiggaboos. That’s not a word that you hear often in hiphop or anywhere in black culture, that’s one of those deep curses that you never hear thrown around because it’s too heavy. That’s where he took it and the massive pile-onto hiphop lost sight of the real enemy. But to the older generation hiphop is the real enemy as was disco before us and rock n roll before that and jazz before that. But none of those musical cultures ruined their generation and hiphop isn’t ruining ours. For God’s sake, heavy metal didn’t come under as great an attack after Columbine where many people died because older white people aren’t afraid of heavy metal.
Read the rest of the article at: Clutch Magazine Online
One of the more controversial pieces is Taylor's Death a Grim Reminder For Us All written by sports columnist Jason Whitlock. Whitlock calls Taylor's killers members of the Black KKK and essentially blames rap music not only for Taylor's past misconduct, but also for his death.
Whitlock's comments are too simplistic for my taste. Blaming Hip Hop ignores a host of other factors that contribute to crime and violence, including stupidity, callous disregard for human life and free will. If rap music fell off the earth tomorrow, the crime and violence committed against Black Americans by other Black Americans would not autormatically cease. Moreover, when we point fingers at rap and Hip Hop are we just pointing at rap artists or will we also be pointing at the multi-national entertainment companies and the corporate radio station that disseminate their messages and make the lions' share of the money?
Where I tend to agree with Whitlock is that Black folks need to stop sugarcoating bad choices under some misguided sense of racial unity. Everyone who is poor or who comes from a single family home does not become a criminal. Furthermore, let us not forget that the middle class spawns criminals. More often than not becoming a criminal or hanging with criminals is a personal choice, not a survival tactic. Whether you live in a mansion or in the hood, you can't elevate yourself if you continue to surround yourself with the same ol' people and the same ol' influences. Sometimes in order to grow you have got to make a clean and complete break from the past.
Rap and Hip Hop are not the reasons why there is an academic achievement gap or that Blacks lag behind others in business and home ownership and its coarser elements may be exacerbating existing problems. The truth of the matter is that many rap artists have become millionaires preaching to the masses that in order to get paid you just rob somebody or get your hustle on----the days of talking about being a fool for dropping out of high school are long gone. Ironically, other folks consume rap music and Hip Hop as "entertainment" and keep on stepping into college, careers and nice lives. Unfortunately, too many Black youth have made rap music their life guides and as we used to say back in the day, they "got played." They covet the riches regularly displayed in music videos, yet by remaining "true to the streets" they are getting getting neither the education nor the job skills that could put them on a path to attaining at least some of these luxuries.
I have always thought that too much weight has been placed on Hip Hop to heal "Black America." Frankly I thought that that task should fall to policy makers, scholars, clergy and kinfolk. Hip Hop can aid the cause, but I think that it's nuts to think that performers who ultimately are looking to get a pay check will leading any revolution.
I stumbled on an interview with author and music journalist, Toure in Clutch magazine. I agreed with him on several points concerning Hip Hop, especially how it is being scapegoated. Here is a snippet:
Clutch magazine : Lately, hip-hop and black culture are use simultaneously. How do you feel about hip-hop becoming the current representative of our image and culture worldwide?
Toure: Hiphop has long been the lingua franca of my generation and it’s only right because it truly represents this generation, for better and worse. I think it’s a mistake to think hiphop and black culture are synonymous, they’re not, there’s many places where they don’t overlap at all. Black culture is perhaps more diverse now than it ever has been and hiphop is very racially diverse and it’s also international, repped in Japan, Europe, South America, Africa, all over the world. Hiphop comes from black culture and black culture often seems dominated by hiphop but by no means are they one and the same. There are many points of overlap but many points of disconnect.
Clutch magazine: Recently you and Jeff Johnson (Cousin Jeff) hosted BET’s heated debate “Hip Hop vs. America”. While most hip-hop artist don’t accurately portray the actual image and realities of Black America and does little in helping us kill stereotypes and generalization that are placed on us. Do you think hip-hop has become a scapegoat for the problems and issues in our community?
Toure: Yes, I think the elder generation has become increasingly afraid of the impact hiphop is having on the world which is funny because hiphop is as tame as ever. But they’ve been scared of hiphop consistently for the last 20 years or more. Every generation has to have music that scares their parents but this is insane. I was actually very disappointed in the older generation for turning the Imus controversy into a referendum on hiphop, which really allowed the racists to slip away. Why not a referendum on shock jocks or noose-placers? There’s been a preponderance of nooses this year all over the country, that’s much more dangerous than the preponderance of the words bitch and ho. What was lost in the Imus stampede was that nappy-headed ho was really the least of his comments. What he immediately went on to reference was Spike Lee’s School Daze and the scene where the wanna-bes faced off against the jigagboos. He was calling those girls jiggaboos. That’s not a word that you hear often in hiphop or anywhere in black culture, that’s one of those deep curses that you never hear thrown around because it’s too heavy. That’s where he took it and the massive pile-onto hiphop lost sight of the real enemy. But to the older generation hiphop is the real enemy as was disco before us and rock n roll before that and jazz before that. But none of those musical cultures ruined their generation and hiphop isn’t ruining ours. For God’s sake, heavy metal didn’t come under as great an attack after Columbine where many people died because older white people aren’t afraid of heavy metal.
Read the rest of the article at: Clutch Magazine Online
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
