-George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, January 2005
"George Bush doesn't care about black people!"
-Kanye West, December 2005, in response to Bush's handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster of August of that year.
"I think that an objective analysis of events that are taking place on this earth today points towards some type of ultimate showdown. You can call it political showdown, or even a showdown between the economic systems that exist on this earth which almost boil down along racial lines. I do believe that there will be a clash between East and West. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation."
-Malcolm X, January 19, 1965
I look to the culture - speeches, texts, performances, works of art, works of entertainment, etc. - as a gauge or an indicator of where we are as a society.
I was in college back in the early 1980s, listening to a variety of musical forms, such as 1960s political folk, Afro pop, and post-punk, in between my classes and term papers. This was the era of hip-hop's "old school," that is, of pioneering artists such as Grandmaster Flash, Eric B and Rakim, Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, and Boogie Down Productions and of songs like "Rapper's Delight," "The Message," and "Planet Rock." I thought then, and still think, that, following the decadence and mindlessness of the late 70s disco era, rap music breathed new life into Black popular music, just as punk at more or less the same time did so for rock and roll.
When I graduated from college, I then moved to the Bronx, hip-hop's cradle, so as to, like Barack Obama, practice my progressive beliefs as a community organizer. I organized tenants' associations and neighborhood groups in a neighborhood in the border zone between the North and South Bronx. I heard hip-hop playing in the beackground of the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis.
Since then, I have, selectively, made room in my music listening habits for various figures from the world of hip-hop. Most recently, I have discovered a young MC named Lupe Fiasco, an associate of Kanye's, and have been watching a pretty impressive video of his.
What to make of this? And what of the opening quotes by such opposed figures as Kanye, Malcolm X and George Bush?
First off, this song is actually not all that political in terms of its (somewhat surreal) lyrical content, but what is political here, theoretically, is the triadic relationship that the song establishes amongst Lupe, the thug chorus, and the cynical, clowning WASP character. Both the chorus and the WASP tell Lupe to "Dumb it down," and yet Lupe refuses. In fact, the initial chorus
You goin' over niggas' heads Lu (Dumb it down)
They tellin' me that they don't feel you (Dumb it down)
We ain't graduate from school nigga (Dumb it down)
Them big words ain't cool nigga (Dumb it down)
Yeah I heard Mean And Vicious nigga (Dumb it down)
Make a song for the bitches nigga (Dumb it down)
We don't care about the weather nigga (Dumb it down)
You'll sell more records if you (Dumb it down)
and the Wasp's lines
You've been shedding too much light Lu (Dumb it down)
You make'em wanna do right Lu (Dumb it down)
They're getting self-esteem Lu (Dumb it down)
These girls are trying to be queens Lu (Dumb it down)
They're trying to graduate from school Lu (Dumb it down)
They're starting to think that smart is cool Lu (Dumb it down)
They're trying to get up out the hood Lu (Dumb it down)
I'll tell you what you should do (Dumb it down)
are perhaps the key to the song, but, more deeply, a key to what's happening more generally in society, particularly for young persons, including young persons of color. As opposed to the rhetoric, the reality is that this society, with its dumbed down government, wants its young to be dumbed down. It is, in a sense, easier that way. That is, it is easier for those in power - be they local thugs or members of the Power Elite - to maintain control when certain conditions exist, conditions that rationalize holding tightly onto the levers of power.
During the Reagan 1980s, when, again, I was organizing the poor in a poor place, the Bronx, I was perpetually struck by the institutional racism of a conservative government that, for example, allowed poverty rates to rise and to disproportionately affect young people of color. As William Spriggs points out in an article in the American Prospect
During the Reagan administration, the United States suffered its highest national unemployment rates since the Great Depression. In the black community, the effects were devastating: The unemployment rate for adult (over age 20) black men peaked at more than 20 percent in December 1982; during the entire Reagan presidency, the unemployment rate for adult black men remained in double digits. The highest recorded unemployment rate for adult white men was 9 percent in November and December 1982. But for black men, the unemployment rate remained above that mark for 182 straight months (15 years), from October 1979 to November 1994. Because children do not work and need working adults to support them, it is hardly surprising that during that period, black child poverty rates remained intractable above 40 percent.
And then
Under Reagan, who ridiculed antipoverty efforts, the number of black children living below the poverty line increased by 200,000, from 3.9 million in 1980 to 4.1 million in 1988. During the Clinton years, the black child poverty rate fell steadily, from 46.3 percent to a record-low 30 percent, lifting about 1.6 million black children out of poverty. For all children, the poverty rate fell annually during the Clinton's presidency, reaching a 30-year low of 15.6 percent when he left office. But those reduced poverty rates may be the best we can achieve simply by getting jobs for parents. While lower than during the Reagan years, they do not equal the lows America has achieved for its senior citizens, or the general population. And those gains reversed course when George W. Bush became president.
Of course, such reality makes a mockery of Bush's grand quote about "healing" our divisions and underscores, instead, the quote by Kanye West.
Rolling Stone magazine has also recently published a wonderfully comprehnsive report on the failures of our "war on drugs" a war that has taken a heavy toll on America's inner cities, and that "now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade." The article points to a lack of poitical will to carry out necessary reforms.
But despite their evident success, the most forward-looking programs remain buried at the fringes of drug policy, featured not in the president's budgets but in academic journals and water-cooler talk in cities like High Point. Experimentation at the community level is more imaginative than programs that are federally sanctioned. "We haven't had the kind of national leadership that blesses this and encourages it," says Caulkins, the RAND researcher from Carnegie Mellon. "So this kind of innovation stays below the radar." Thirty-five years after Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, the most promising programs continue to be shunted aside by Washington's unswerving emphasis on law and order.
And as a parallel, the New York Times recently reported on a Big Increase in Black Men as Inmates Since 1980
The number of black men in jail or prison has grown fivefold in the past 20 years, to the point where more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges or universities, according to a study released yesterday.
The increase in the black male prison population coincides with the prison construction boom that began 1980. At that time, three times more black men were enrolled in institutions of higher learning than behind bars, the study said.
The study found that in 2000 there were 791,600 black men in jail or prison and 603,032 enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast, the study said that in 1980 there were 143,000 black men in jail or prison but 463,700 enrolled in colleges or universities.
Something's not right here.
I certainly do believe that while there is racism and bigotry to be found in many different realms and institutions, I also am hopeful that racism, as a disease of the mind, is curable. However, racism is many things, and in addition to being a subjective attitude, it is also a structural series of positions, one of, as Malcolm X alluded to, exploiter and exploited. Just as exploitive Bush, Cheney and their neocon associates have set forth the conditions for the exploitation of Iraq and its recources for decaded to come, the right wing and all it represents stands for the exploitation of the minority poor, its rhetoric notwithstanding. By disinvesting in progressive government, in meaningful effective education, and by leaving poor and weak individuals to their own devices, the right wing - with George W. Bush as its figurehead - places the profits of a few over the well being of the many. And this is shown in a whole variety of social indicators - crime and poverty rates being up, growing numbers of poor young minorities, suddenly gowing teen pregnancy rates giving lie to "abstenance education," parts of New Orleans remaining unlivable and ungovernable.
Yet, as with the Lupe song, speaking truth to power must be accompanied by some sort of vision. Malcolm X, paradoxically, began to see himself as emancipated from mental slavery, as Bob Marley once put it, while serving a prison sentence. He experienced a paradigm shift, just as we all must if we want to move our society beyond the ugliness of the Bush era.
In the meantime, going back to hip-hop, here is a nauseating reminder of the trivializing of this form of an essentially Black popular culture by those who hold power. It reduces hip-hop to little more than a minstrel show.
Totally whack!!!!
