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