In the Chapter about Malcolm X and the Resurgence of Black Nationalism in his seminal work “Making Malcolm” there lies a true gem about modern-day black criticism that goes unnoticed by the most prudent Michael Eric Dyson enthusiasts that I dare not highlight. Before I rightfully journey to find Sherman Jackson, an ardent student of blackamerican religion must always listen to Dyson first. Read Below.
The wide distribution of recorded music has allowed technological eavesdropping on what formerly were tightly contained communities of vocal discourse circulated within secular black gatherings. These oral traditions rife with signifying practices, symbolic distortions, and lewd language, must be kept in mind in comprehending and justly criticizing the troubled quest for an enabled black masculinity expressed in much of gangster rap.
The recent attacks on gangster rap as fatally misogynistic and deeply sexist by prominent black women like political activist C. Dolores Tucker and entertainer Dionne Warwick must be qualified considerably. Gangster rap is neither the primary source nor the most nefarious expression of sexism or misogyny, in either society at large or black communities in particular. That honour belongs to chairs and branches of our national culture, including the nuclear family, religious communities, and the educational institutions of our society. Black bourgeois civic life, religious communities, and educational institutions have certainly not been immune.
These cultural centres that reflect and spread sexist and misogynistic mythology — especially the black church, black civil rights organizations, and the black family — much more effectively influence black cultural understandings of gender then does gangster rap.
Also, most attacks on gangster rap not only continue the widespread demonization a black male youth culture — it’s alleged out of control sexuality, pathological criminality, and sadistic preoccupation with violence — but conceal an attack on black women. Accompanying them the wails and whispers of complaint aimed at black males throughout the United States are the detrimental accusations that black males are shaped as they are by black women and single parent female-headed households; by welfare queens or in the vicious logic that Tucker and Warwick are right to point to, by black mothers who are the bitches and hoes named in many rap lyrics.
Tucker and Warwick however, often miss the larger point about how their conservative Allies in their struggle against gangster rap have similarly, but more subtly, demonized black women. (And besides, like most critics, Tucker and Warwick don’t mention the homophobia of gangster rap; is it because like many mainstream critics, they are not disturbed by sentiments they hold in common with gangster rappers?)
The most just manner of criticizing gangster rap is by juxtaposing salient features of black culture — such as moral criticism, sage advice, and common sense admonitions against out-of-bounds behaviour — with a ready appreciation of black oral practices like signifying and distorting. By doing this, we can powerfully criticize gangster rap for its faults while skillfully avoiding the move of collapsing and corresponding rhetoric and art to reality. Also, we can criticize the conceptions of black masculinity that are prevalent in hip-hop culture without making rappers a scapegoat for all that is seriously wrong with gender in our culture. In the process, we might more clearly see and name the real culprits.
Introduction by Mudasser Ali
Words by Michael Eric Dyson
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