Hip Hop Justice: The Art of Revolution
February 7, 2010 — Rev. Lisa R. Schwartz
Some Americans say that the election of Barack Obama has ushered in a “post-racial” era. The nation’s first African American president generally says he thinks race is a non-variable in criticism of him. Would Joe Wilson say differently? How about Henry Louis Gates? Or any of the nearly 800,000 African American men in prison? Rev. Lisa Romantum Schwartz uses images of Hip Hop to explore the topic of race in the sermon below.
Read the sermon:
Before the sermon, the congregation watched a video of Daniel Beaty performing his poem, Knock Knock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nktBsI0PYPs and listened to a recording of “Sound of Da Police,” by KRS-ONE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRZq3J0uz4.
I know this is NOT the first time hip hop music has played here in Scanland Hall, because I know some of the youth group gatherings meet in here. But I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve played hip hop during a Sunday service, and I acknowledge that the experience wasn’t entirely comfortable for everyone.
I wanted to stir things up a bit today, to get us outside our collective comfort zone, because I’m going to talk about an unsettling and uncomfortable topic: Racism. It’s become harder to raise people’s blood pressure about racism, or even to find people willing to discuss it. Since the proud moment when our nation elected an African American president it’s popular to say that we are living in a “post racial” America.
These days, to talk about racism is often to be accused of “playing the race card.” Once upon a time, people were proud to use terms like “affirmative action.” Mention that epithet these days, and you’ll likely be accused of “reverse racism.” And of the many strange and disturbing things said about President Obama (he’s Muslim, he’s not really American, he’s a socialist) one of the strangest and most dangerous things I’ve heard is this: we don’t have to talk about race anymore now that we have an African American president. And this is said without a shred of irony, even as the tea party protesters carry signs depicting president Obama smeared with a minstrel’s white face, even as a U.S. congressman interrupts a major policy speech by shouting our President down and calling him a liar.
Bakari Kitwana is a Harvard scholar and author. In an editorial in last fall’s issue of the NAACP magazine Crisis he notes that former President Jimmy Carter correctly named the tea-party protestors’ rhetoric racist to the core. But both conservatives and liberals responded with denials. How outrageous, to suggest that any of the ugly backlash against President Obama was race-based. And most frustrating of all, President Obama himself denied the racist overtones in the attacks.
Kitwana says:
…one of the most crucial questions for civil rights advocates in the Obama era…is…how to ensure that reasonable arguments about racism are not neutralized…Ironically, the post-election environment, rather than signaling an end to America’s old racial politics, has instead invigorated its proponents…So professor Henry Louis Gates’ arrest in his home does not lead us into a substantive national discussion about race, criminal justice and law enforcement, but rather [is seen as] a private feud best resolved by a beer at the White House.
So, lest we are tempted to slide into a comfortable lethargy about race, I’ve tried to bring some stirring images from hip hop culture as an antidote to the claims of a “post racial America.”
Hip hop has undeniably influenced the larger culture. You hear the music blasting at window-shaking volume from cars at stoplights. You see the prison-inspired fashion statements like baggy clothes, shoes without laces, and pants without belts, sliding down young men’s hips. You can see hip hop’s influence in popular dance styles, and hear it in the cadences of speech. And you can see and hear all of this right here in Topeka Kansas. Not just in the hood, mind you, but among white kids from Washburn Rural and Topeka West. (Did you know that 70% of mainstream hip hop is sold to white males? And a fraction of a percent to middle aged white women, clearly.)
As with any revolutionary art form, hip hop’s influence is profound and powerful, both in positive ways and negative. Hip hop lifts up issues we’d otherwise not see, and it attempts to reclaim empowerment for a disempowered demographic. I’ll flesh out those claims more later. But to begin with, I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t admit that some hip hop is also rife with misogyny and homophobia, and a celebration of violence and materialistic excess.
Maybe you saw the film, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes, when it aired on PBS recently as part of the Independent Lens feature. Producer and unapologetic hip hop fan Byron Hurt says hip hop often presents a very constricted view of masculinity. Men have got to be hard, be tough, be in control. They’ve got to be rich. They’ve got to dominate other men, and especially women, with verbal and physical violence. But wait: Isn’t that simply the dominant American view of masculinity?
In the film, as Byron Hurt discusses hip hop’s messages about manhood, the viewer is assailed with images of movie heroes like John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone blasting away with guns, fist-fighting, and engaging in various kinds of violent braggadocio. In that respect, he says, “hip hop…is pure Americana.” It’s just that, for middle class white America, it’s scary to see young black men presented that way.
Byron Hurt says hip hop’s hyper-masculine posturing is an attempt at building a kind of psychic armor, a denial by young black males of their vulnerability in our society. After all, black men are the most likely to be the victims of crime. 49% of all gunshot victims are black males ages 15-24. The leading cause of death for black men between 15 and 34 years old is homicide. Black males are 14 times more likely to be homicide victims than any other racial group.
Of course, black men are far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, too, but not because they commit that much more crime. Of the people in the U.S. who use illegal drugs about 13% are black, but of the people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses, nearly 60% are black. This is so astonishing I want to make sure you get this point: African Americans commit about 13% of non-violent drug crimes, and they do 60% of the time.
Part of this is due to racial profiling by police officers. Even black officers admit that, though they know white people’s drug use accounts for the vast majority of drug crimes, they still disproportionately stop, and search, African American males.
And then there are judicial policies like mandatory minimum sentences, and the disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The nonprofit organization Common Sense for Drug Policy says,
In 1986, before mandatory minimums instituted the crack/powder sentencing disparity, the average sentence for blacks was [only] 6% longer than the average sentence for whites. Four years later following the implementation of this law, the average sentence was 93% higher for blacks.
It’s all part of our country’s ongoing “War on Drugs,” a war we’ve been fighting for nearly forty years, at least in a selective sense. It’s selective in that we aren’t at war with the drug that’s the biggest killer. That dubious honor is held by, a drug that kills nearly 400,000 people worldwide each year. Aspirin kills 2,000 people each year. In case you’re wondering, there has never been a documented overdose of marijuana.
The hip hop star KRS-ONE explains,
In society you have illegal and legal
We need both to make things equal.
So legal is tobacco, illegal is speed
Legal is aspirin, illegal is weed.
All illegal drugs combined, including hard ones like heroin and cocaine, kill about 4,500 people a year. Nicotine and alcohol together kill more people each year than all illegal drugs combined, for the past century. Yet the U.S. government subsidizes the production of tobacco and licenses the distribution of alcohol, even as it “wages war” on drugs whose use brings in no tax revenue.
It’s time to ask some questions about this War on Drugs: Who is the enemy? How will we know if we’ve won? And do we even have an exit strategy? We have a right to ask these questions, since after all we are paying the bill for this war. We are literally bankrolling it with our tax dollars, and we’re paying in many other ways, as well.
You can imagine the impact it would have on our own community if 25% of the men here today could count on spending time in prison. Would it create a social and economic burden on our families, and our community? You bet it would. The fact is, 25% of African American males will spend time in prison, which means black families are regularly torn apart, and set up for various economic and social disadvantages.
Another part of the “collateral damage” of the war on drugs is the massive voter disenfranchisement, particularly among African American males, as a result of felony convictions. According to a recent study by the Sentencing Project,
An estimated 5.3 million Americans … have currently or permanently lost their voting rights as a result of a felony conviction.
[And] given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40% of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.
If the current drug laws affected our community in the same way that they disproportionately burden the African American community, I think we’d be making some noise.
Paul Butler is a professor at George Washington University and a former federal prosecutor who says, frankly, that the American criminal justice system is broken. And the worst part is not just the alarming statistics I just cited – It’s how seldom you hear about it in mainstream culture. Butler points out that you can listen to country music, or rock, or NPR, or read the latest vampire books, or magazines, and not hear a peep about the staggering fact that there are 2 and a half million people incarcerated in this country, nor the fact that most of them are black and Latino men. But tune into hip hop music, and you’ll hear about it all the time.
What’s going on? In his book, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment, Butler says that getting arrested and doing time have become rites of passage for many young African American men in the inner city. Urban slang for getting arrested is “catchin’ a case,” and it’s become about as common, and as minor an inconvenience, as catching a cold. Hip Hop emerges out of an environment where so many people have been imprisoned, or have loved ones who have done time, that while criminals aren’t necessarily glorified, no one is ashamed of their prevalence, either.
Perhaps this seems shocking, unhealthy, self-destructive. Surely people who’ve spent time in a federal penitentiary must be forever regarded as suspect, probably morally deficient. Think so? Butler answers with two words: Martha Stewart. When Martha left the penitentiary she was welcomed back into upper class society even as she still wore the electronic monitoring device that was a condition of her parole. When she returned to her TV show and proudly showed off the knitted shawl her cellmate had made for her as a going away present, Martha was besieged with requests for the pattern from middle-class women who saw it as a must-have fashion accessory.
As for the street creeps, those criminals whose greed and shady deals caused the collapse of the global economy, those predominantly white men and women? They cost the world billions of dollars, their actions sent many middle class people into poverty and poor people into abject despair, and most of them face few if any consequences. A sickening number of them were just awarded bonuses tallied in millions of dollars…each.
Meanwhile, the system we call the War on Drugs has eviscerated the African American community. Arrests for non-violent drug offenses have more than tripled in the last 25 years. Is it any wonder that KRS-ONE equates “the sound of the police” with “the sound of the beast,” or “officer” with “overseer?”
It’s true that some hip hop is weighed down with the baggage of misogyny, homophobia, and materialism. And the same could be said of some rock and country music. But there is also hip hop that reflects a trenchant critique of a broken social order, a calling out of a justice system that is inherently unjust for men and women of color.
In the song, Respiration, for example, rapper Mos Def says the “Gangstaz of Gotham, hardcore hustlin” are “ mercenaries … paid to trade hot stock tips for profits…” The rapper Immortal Technique says “families bleed because of corporate greed,” and Talib Kweli raps,
Hard to be a spiritual being when [stuff] is shakin what you believe in
For trees to grow in Brooklyn, seeds need to be planted.
Socially conscious hip hop calls the African American community to task, as well. In his song, Self Destruction, KRS-ONE says:
Back in the sixties our brothers and sisters were hanged
How could you gang-bang?
I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan
and I shouldn’t have to run from a black man.
Well, I admitted at the start of this sermon that I purposely introduced what may have been an uncomfortable genre of music in order to invite you out of your comfort zone. I’m not suggesting that we start using hip hop in all of our services, though an occasional song might not be a bad thing. If we’re open, the philosopher poets of hip hop might just shake us out of our apathy and call us to accountability for this troubled system of ours. Because like it or not, it is our system. As David Beaty reminds us, “Knock knock: Who’s there? We are.”
Martin Luther King said,
Those who passively accept evil are as much involved in it as those who help to perpetuate it. Those who accept evil without protesting against it are really cooperating with it.
If the next time you’re at a stoplight and a carload of young men pulls alongside you with hip hop blasting and you don’t give them a dirty look, it would be a great testament to this sermon. And if you can even smile, and get your groove on a bit, that’s even better. But I urge you to go beyond an attitude adjustment to real action.
First, don’t be seduced by our church’s largely white numbers into thinking this is someone else’s problem. Just as our gay, lesbian, and transgender brothers and sisters need straight allies to lift up their cause, the African American community needs white allies to speak for the disempowered and disenfranchised.
Write to your senators and representatives and tell them that you, along with the ACLU and the Human Rights Watch, oppose mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. Tell them you support the bill under consideration that will eliminate the disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Tell them we must end the longest-running and most expensive war in American history, the war on drugs. Tell them it’s time for peace talks, and an exit strategy.
Speak up, speak out, stand your ground, don’t back down. There is so much at stake, especially in this era when right-wingers and liberals both seek to beguile us with the illusion of a “post-racial America.”
Rosemary Bray-McNatt, an African American UU minister, says that
…diversity, inclusivity, is terribly hard, terribly uncomfortable, definitely unsettling, and often quite frustrating. What I know about being inclusive––crossing from culture to culture, learning the language of diversity––is that it’s the work of a lifetime. It’s hard to accept people who are not like you, who don’t talk the way you do, or believe the things you believe, or dress or vote as you do. It’s even harder to appreciate them for the things about them that are not like you…to enjoy the learning that’s part of the experience…[But] nothing that Unitarian Universalists need to do is more important…Hard as diversity is, it is our most important task.
Brothers and sisters, let us take up this task together. For ourselves and for our children’s children, let us take up this task in love.