N. Hip Hop Vs. America Part 1

Hip Hop Vs. America Part 1 – Hip Hop as a scapegoat for black oppression
By Dr. Boyce Watkins
www.BoyceWatkins.com

I get a kick out of hearing conservatives describe hip hop as the bane of their existence. Rap music is nothing but a scum-of-the-earth product that lies in the center of everything that’s wrong with Black America. It’s the reason crime happens in black communities, why girls get pregnant, why brothers get shot, and why black men are in prison.

Using $50 words learned in some graduate school class, Rap music becomes Exhibit A in an open-and-shut case proving that all young black people are doo-doo heads headed to hell in a hand basket, and have little value to society While I am no fan of what Bob Johnson did to these kids over the past 20 years, I tire of the drawn out, yet unproductive discussion that takes place among people who really don’t even understand rap music in the first place.

How creative of us.

One of the oldest traditions in the world is for old people to look at young people and believe that they’ve lost their damn minds. When Jazz was the hot new form of expression, there were parents everywhere screaming that their kids were possessed by the devil (remember all the former gospel singers who went to Motown and were disowned by their fathers?). When Elvis swiveled his hips, parents had aneurysms everywhere. Rather than respecting the energy and creativity that young people bring to the world, we would rather knock them upside the head and tell them they are worthless. This goes double for the hip hop generation, who has the misfortune of being part of a community that has a 400 year old list of problems that they conveniently blame on a 30-year old social movement.

Rappers are not the reason so many black men are in prison. Our prisons are full because there are corporations that now have a direct financial incentive to incarcerate people and use their cheap labor as a modernized form of slavery. There is study after study proving that black men are given longer sentences for the same crimes, more likely to be incarcerated for those crimes, and consistently disenfranchised from society after paying the price for those crimes. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Inequality made many of these assertions last month and didn’t say a word about hip hop in their study. Even during the Nazi Holocaust, explanations were always given as to why Jews were solely responsible for their own demise.

Yes, personal responsibility plays a role, but we must first have the personal responsibility to stop pushing all of our problems onto the rappers. Hip Hop didn’t create our broken justice system, and when NWA said “F*ck the Police” in 1988, the LA riots proved they had a good point. Before Rodney King, there were thousands of black men being beaten by the police, and even Bill Cosby can’t argue that it was always their choice to be beaten.

Rappers are not the reason that our school systems are underfunded: the lack of funds results from the fact that schools are supported from the tax base of the communities around them, and black people don’t have any money. Perhaps better school systems would not give rappers so many bad educational experiences to rap about. I could have written many lyrics on my terrible experience in the school system. In fact, I could write a song or two about what I see when I speak in schools to this day. You would be amazed at how the sun seems to shine brighter when I leave the inner city school to go speak at the school in the suburbs….there are more books, olympic size swimming pools suddenly appear, the teacher-to-student ratio drops like a brick, and guidance counselors suddenly prefer the words “WHEN you go to college” over the words “IFyou go to college”.

Rappers are not the reason black people are poor. We are relatively poor because there is a 400 year tradition of excluding African-Americans from the ability to pass wealth down to our children. American poverty has inspired thousands of hip hop lyrics through time, as art truly imitates life. Addressing socioeconomic inequality might provide hip hop artists with positive inspiration, rather than the despair that so readily fuels their creative talents.

Rappers are not the reason there is so much crime. To blame hip hop, a form of entertainment on urban crime is like blaming Hollywood for the crime that takes place in America. If music has a hypnotic effect on the mind, leading to violence, then one must certainly argue that the image of violence in film has a much stronger impact. Remember how violent “da Terminator” was before he became governor? If he were a rapper, we would surely blame him for the Iraq War, Terrorism and the Virginia Tech shootings. There were violent films long before there was ever a violent rap song. Additionally, the annual budget our country spends making violent movies far outweighs the money spent recording violent rap lyrics.

Racism and oppression are evil diseases that lie within the very fabric of America’s social infrastructure. The notion that these 400 year old demons are the result of 30 years of hip hop is nothing more than the standard scapegoating used against oppressed people in many societies. To blame hip hop for the state of black America is like bulldozing down a man’s house and then blaming the destruction on the fact that he spills milk at breakfast. When I motivate young black people to focus on education and wealth building, I firmly believe that honestly explaining the true cause of wealth and educational disparities is the best way to help them honestly solve the problem. Explanations riddled with references to cultural inferiority only serve to further reduce their commitment to doing the right thing.

There are many rappers who write about good things in the world. But even if all artists were “gangsta rappers”, there is no way anyone could conclude that these individuals are solely or predominantly responsible for destroying the fabric of black society and culture. If that’s true, then I now have the right to blame Martin Scorsese and “The God Father” for creating the gangsta culture that created NWA, which created gangsta rap in the first place. As ridiculous as this sounds, that is how silly we sound blaming hip hop for all of our problems.

Hip hop says we should keep it real. Common sense tells us we should keep it REALISTIC. Racial disparities took 400 years to create, and it may take another 150 years to fix them. Perhaps it is the creativity of the hip hop community that will lead us to the creativity necessary to solve complicated problems. The same old mess won’t work.