Someone on the forums at televisionwithoutpity.com (great site!) suggested that I check out this article that appeared in Altar Magazine a while back. My reaction is just have all of you check it out for yourselves. Please let me know what you think. I expect this to be the opening volley in a very interesting and heated debate. I can't help but wonder, though....is there anyone (no, really, anyone) who is actually listening to, or cares about, the long-term damage that hip-hop is doing to us as sisters? I hope this isn't just another voice screaming in the woods.
http://www.altarmagazine.com
Celie's Revenge
by Jennifer McLune
from Altar Magazine
Indeed, like rock & roll, hip-hop sometimes makes you think we men don't like women much at all, except to objectify them as trophy pieces or, as contemporary vernacular mandates, as baby mommas, chickenheads, or bitches.
But just as it was unfair to demonize men of color in the 60s solely as wild-eyed radicals when what they wanted, amidst their fury, was a little freedom and a little power, today it is wrong to categorically dismiss hip-hop without taking into serious consideration the socioeconomic conditions (and the many record labels that eagerly exploit and benefit from the ignorance of many of these young artists) that have led to the current state of affairs. Or, to paraphrase the late Tupac Shakur, we were given this world, we did not make it. Which means hip-hop did not breed ghettos, poverty, single mothers, fatherlessness, rotten school systems, immorality, materialism, self-hatred, racism, sexism, and the prison-industrial complex that is capturing literally thousands of young Black and Latino males and females each year. --- Kevin Powell
You were given this world, and you glorify it. You were given this world, and you protect it. You were given this world, and you benefit from it. You were given this world, and even in your wildest dreams you refuse to imagine anything else but this world. And anyone who attacks your misogynistic fantasy world and offers an alternative vision is a hater or, worse, an enemy of that world who just doesn't get it. What is there to get? There is nothing deep or new about misogyny, materialism, violence and homophobia. The hardest part isn't recognizing it, but ending it. Calling it unacceptable and an enemy of us all. Refusing to be mesmerized, seduced or confused by what these conditions in hip-hop really are: a betrayal of our imagination as a people. Dismissing the sexism in hip-hop as being predicated on socioeconomic factors is a way to silence a feminist critique of the culture: make an understanding of the misogynistic objectification and eraser of black women in hip-hop so elusive that we can't grasp it long enough to wring the neck of its power over us. This argument completely ignores the fact that women too are raised in this environment of poverty and violence but have yet to produce the same negative and hateful representation of black men that male rappers are capable of making against women. His understanding also lends itself to the elitist assumption that somehow poverty breeds sexism or at least should excuse it. White boys can create the same hateful and violent music as black boys and as long as they can agree that their common enemy is female and their power is in their penis. We must not hesitate to name the war they have declared on women.
Hip-hop is sexist and homophobic and any deviation from this norm within the culture and music has to be fought for and still remains marginal to its most dominant and lucrative expressions. Hip-hop owes its success to the ideology of woman-hating and it creates, perpetuates and reaps the rewards of it. The most well-known artists who represent an underground and conscious force in hip-hop like Common, The Roots, Goodie Mob and others still remain inconsistent, apologetic and even eager to join the mainstream Players Club. Even though consumers like me support them because of their consciousness, they still remain on the fence by either playing down their consciousness or giving props to misogynistic rappers. As Talib Kweli said in an interview on the hip-hop shock jock radio show Star & Buckwild, he wants to be cool with artists who degrade women and perpetuate materialism. On another Star & Buckwild Show, Talib's boy Common reiterated this sentiment when he said he also has no problem with sexist and degrading music and just wants his piece this rotten pie. Hopefully, selling out to coca-cola will give him a big enough slice.
I also believe that much of what passes itself off as tackling sexism in hip-hop culture is nothing more than a sly form of public relations to ensure that nobody's money, power or respect is ever really challenged within the circles that benefit from hip-hop's commercial appeal. I have yet to see any of these ‘enlightened’ interpreters of black culture call for boycotts of cultural productions that degrade black people especially if anyone black benefits from these productions. Instead we are asked to dialogue about, forgive and ultimately celebrate our progress, which is always predicated on a few rappers and moguls getting rich. Angry young black women like myself are expected to be satisfied with a mere mention that some hip-hop music is sexist and that this sexism of a few rappers is actually as Powell calls it, “the ghetto blues, urban folk art, a cry out for help.” My question then is whose blues? Whose art? Why won’t anybody help the women who are raped on endless rotation by the gaze of the hip-hop camera?
We are expected to solve the condition of woman hating in hip-hop simply by alluding to it even as we celebrate and excuse its environment of unacceptable misogynistic arrogance, hatred and ignorance. What this angry black woman wants to hear is that Black women are black people too. That any attack on the women in our community is an attack on us all and that we will no longer be duped by genocidal tendencies in black-face. That the black men who make music that perpetuates the hatred of women will be named, shunned and destroyed financially and socially like the traitors of our community they are. That until hip-hop does right by black women everything hip-hop ever does will fail.
If we go by Powell's explanation for why hip-hop is the way it is and why we should continue to consume and celebrate it then, ultimately, we are to accept ourselves as victims who know only how to imitate our victimization and let off the hook the handful of us who benefit from this tragic conclusion. I choose to challenge hip-hop by not feeding its gluttonous appetite for commercial appeal with my money or my attention.
I do this for my own self preservation as a black woman who feels ill and angry every time I'm subjected to the cultural productions of hip-hop. I'm a reluctant member of the so-called Hip-Hop Generation which like the Pepsi Generation or Generation X is a convenient yet completely unexplored marketing tool to get young black folks to channel our hard earned money, energy and creativity into a culture that asks us to obediently consume its mindless, disposable products, media, fashion and messages.
I'm tired of the ridiculous excuses and justifications for the unjustifiable pillaring of black women and girls in hip-hop. If black women experience double the oppression as both blacks and women in a racist patriarchal culture, where is our anger and venom at men and white folks? The black men who make excuses for the ideology of woman-hating in hip-hop are probably the same black men who would have supported the attacks on black female writers whose work went public about the reality of patriarchy in our community. The fact that these black female writers did not create incest, domestic violence, rape and other patriarchal conditions in the black community did not shield them from being skewered by black men who had their feelings hurt by the exposure of their male privilege and domination of black women. Our literature and activism around these issues is taken apart and attacked in spite of its truth by black men and many women for whom ego, privilege and domination supercede reality and who creates it. We were called traitors for refusing to be silent about the misogynistic order of things in our minds and homes and yet women-hating rappers are made heroes by the so-called masses. This is not merely about exposing reality and keeping it real. This is about a particular narrative of reality that sells and gets men hard. A reality in which, as a Wu Tang Clan video shows, black women are dancing cave chicks in bikinis that get clubbed over the head. Or in which gang rapes are put to a phat beat. Or in which working class black women are compared to shit eating birds. As a black woman who views sexism as just as much the enemy of my people as racism I can't buy these apologies and excuses for hip-hop. I will not accept the notion that my sisters disserve to be degraded and humiliated because of the frustrations of black men even as we suppress our own frustrations, angers and fears in an effort to be sexy and accommodating.
Although Kevin Powell blames the negatives in hip-hop on everything but hip-hop culture itself, he ultimately concludes, "What hip-hop has spawned is a way of winning on our own terms, of us making something out of nothing." If the terms of winning are the objectification of black women and girls, I wonder if any females were at the table when the deal went down. Did we agree to these terms of success as being either the invisible or the objectified? Rather than pretending to explain away the sexism of hip-hop culture, why doesn't Powell just come clean: It really doesn't matter how women are treated. Sexism is the winning ticket to mainstream acceptability and Powell knows this, just like Russell Simmons and others. And it's obvious that if these are the winning terms of our creativity, in the end black women are the losers. And that's exactly how these self-proclaimed players, thugs and hip-hop intellectuals want us: on our backs and pledging allegiance to the Hip-Hop Nation. If we were all to condemn woman-hating as an enemy of our community, hip-hop would be forced to look at itself and change radically and consistently. And then it would no longer be marketable in the way that these hip-hop intellectuals celebrate. It's all about the Benjamins on every level of the culture. And black women should expect to be thugged and rubbed all the way to the bank.
