STICKS AND STONES

do you ever think about
when you outta here?
I had been meaning to work out some thoughts around Don Imus, rap slang and social responsibility but as it turns out, Bakari Kitwana pretty much nailed most of what I probably would have said anyway:

Hip-hop slang spreads wrong word

BY BAKARI KITWANA for Newsday

April 13, 2007

When Don Imus put his foot in his mouth on the air last week with a dirty
and derogatory reference to young black women, he was articulating a message
that had been clearly voiced by Michael Richards, Rush Limbaugh and
countless others long before him. Ditto the white law students at the
University of Connecticut who donned big booties and blackface this year on
Martin Luther King Day, as well as the rash of undergraduates across the
country, from Michigan to South Carolina, who somehow imagine that hosting
"pimp and ho parties" is a good idea.

That message is this: The aesthetics of hip-hop culture - from the language
and clothing to the style and sensibility - can be absorbed into American
popular culture like any other disposable product without any effort or
responsibility on the part of the consumer.

It is an idea in part ushered in by the marginal voices of black youth
themselves, youth so eager to be visible that they gave up far too much of
their identity in the interest of partnering with the corporate music
industry. Together, and all the while green-lighted by the Federal
Communications Commission, a handful of rap artists packaged and commodified
rap music (not to be confused with hip-hop culture lived daily by countless
youth around the globe at a local level, from graffiti and break dancing to
deejaying, spoken word poetry and political activism.).

Encouraged by the quick bucks, this partnership was quickly reinforced by
additional peddlers of one-dimensional images of young black men as violent,
and women as oversexed bitches and hos - from filmmakers and television
producers to music video directors, comedians and beyond.

These snake oil salesmen marvel at the gravitational pull that hip-hop
exerts over American youth and see dollar signs. Drawing necessary
distinctions between the various lifestyles (street culture, prison culture
and the traditional culture of black America) that converge on the national
stage isn't even an afterthought.

The result is what cultural critic Greg Tate addressed in his 2005 book,
"Everything but the Burden." That is, far too many American consumers of
black popular culture don't take the time to decode the complexity of black
life that produces a 50 Cent, a Jay-Z or a Russell Simmons,
multi-millionaires all, who peddle rap music riddled with the language of
the street.

When I interviewed Jay-Z as I was completing my book "Why White Kids Love
Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in
America," he put it this way: "Hip-hop is not clothing or a place you go,
this is people's lives, people's culture."

But who picks up the slack when this gets lost on the consumer?

Imus - and his defenders who claim they learned this language from hip-hop -
are only partly correct, even as they are wholly dishonest. They would do
themselves and the country a service by owning up to at least three facts.
1) Imus took liberty with a culture that he didn't fully understand, and
when he got called on it, rather than coming clean, he pointed the finger at
hip-hop to take the weight. 2) Clearly those far more powerful than rappers
are complicit in bringing pimp and ho talk to the American mainstream. 3) If
indeed Imus is a hip-hop fan, innocently consuming its language and
aesthetics, that doesn't remove him from the responsibility to understand
hip-hop cultural and political roots in all their complexity.

Rather than an ignorant fan chopping it up in the living room with one of
his buddies, he's a public figure whose voice is heard by millions. His
responsibility then is even greater.

That is why he had to be removed from his radio and cable TV networks. Lest
folks inside the hip-hop activist community who were calling for such be
deemed hypocrites, let the record show that media justice advocates such as
Davey D Cook (of the organization daveyd.com), Rosa Clementes (of R.E.A.C.H.
Hip-Hop) and Lisa Fagers (of industryears.com) have for years been very
loudly challenging the music industry and rappers to raise the bar.

Hip-hop's internal criticism is something that a 2007 study by the Black
Youth Project recently documented. In a survey of 1,600 young people it
found that the "overwhelming majority" of young people agree that rap music
videos contain too many references to sex, and "the majority" agree rap
music videos portray black women and black men in bad or offensive ways.

Maybe the flak over Don Imus' mean-spirited, sexist and racist comments can
help to raise the volume of those voices. Our failure to hear them, like our
failure to check Imus, can mean the difference between our ability to escape
America's old racial politics and our historical tendency to drown in them.

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.

--O.W.