Another Hip-Hop Role Model

Hours before he was to perform and possibly receive awards for his talents, the rapper T.I. was arrested for trying to purchase two machine guns. The entertainer was set up by his personal bodyguard who he had sent to retrieve the guns. Here unfortunately is another example where life is trying to imitate art. You see T.I.’s specialty is rap music that glorifies the drug lifestyle and even has its own label, “trap musik”. For those unfamiliar in the black community a trap can be a drug house, house of prostitution, or some other place of nighttime activity. A drug dealer, pimp, or player is said to be checking traps in the same sense that a hunter or trapper checks their traps for game or prey.

The entertainer, whose real name is Clifford Harris, was arrested Saturday just hours before he was scheduled to perform at the BET Hip Hop Awards.

Harris, 27, was arrested in a federal sting after his bodyguard-turned-informant delivered three machine guns and two silencers to the hip-hop star, according to a Justice Department statement.

Authorities said they found three more firearms in the car in which Harris drove to pick up the machine guns and silencers, "including one loaded gun tucked between the driver's seat where Harris had been sitting and the center console."

At his home, authorities found six other guns, five of them loaded, in his bedroom closet.[1]

According to court records, Mr. Harris is a convicted felon and therefore cannot possess firearms. We in the black community are constantly being given signs of the destruction that this music and its purveyors have wrought on our communities and yet time and again we ignore its destructive effects. We continue to allow BET and the other media outlets to glorify these clowns for our children’s edification. We have had these clowns kill folks, we’ve had them denigrate our women, and they have continued to dare our communities to stop them. We continue to kowtow to these hoodlums and allow their poison to infiltrate our homes and the minds of our children. I just wonder what it is going to take for us as a community to stand up and say enough is enough.

This man was about to receive awards for promoting drugs and that lifestyle and then to top it off he is trying to purchase machine guns and silencers. I’m sure they were for going hunting with Dick Cheney. These are not common weapons that you just have lying around the house for personal protection; these weapons are designed to do maximum damage to humans. Our children are being fed a steady diet of this garbage by BET, I’m sure this man’s CD sales are about to go through the roof. What are the lessons that our sons and our daughters are being taught by this episode? Where is the uplifting in this?

I know that there will be those who claim it was a setup, another poor blackman being targeted for extinction by the white power structure, the same white power structure that created him and marketed his “trap musik”. How can we continue to be so foolish to believe that money will insulate us from the real America? This man had to know that he was on everybody’s radar and yet he still tried this foolish mess. But, it was the thug life that he had to be true to, had to keep it real. How much longer are we going to continue to glamorize this nonsense? Does anyone wonder why are communities are war zones when the role models are living like this? We have only ourselves to blame, we allowed this to come into our neighborhoods and into our homes. We created this monster and now it is turning on us and destroying us.

What happened to the outcry after Don Imus, it has quietly faded into the usual drone of forgetfulness. The stupor that so easily envelops our communities and our lives, which has us unwilling or incapable of mounting any sustained effort against anything. Have we become so complacent to the struggles of life that we no longer have the will or the strength to stand for what is right and what is good? The flood of negative images continues to flow unabated through our communities, being driven by greed and the self destructive mentality of some who would rather glorify violence to make money at the expense of our youth and our communities.

It is time for us to say no more to the people who reward those who are destroying our communities. We must no longer allow others to define for us who the role models for our children will be. We must demand an end to the negative and begin to elevate the positive images of our people. We can no longer wait on those who exploit us to have a change of heart; it must come from within us. We must cast off the shackles that no longer bind our feet and hands, but now bind our minds, our spirits, and our imaginations. Have our dreams and the dreams of our forefathers been reduced to petty crime, drug dealing, and senseless violence directed at each other? And are we going to sit idly by while the aspirations of a people are being high-jacked by the greedy executives and their willing black minstrels? I pray to God not.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Music/10/15/rapperti.court/index.html

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Crisis Of Conscience

We in the Black community are at a crossroads. We are coming to the place where we are becoming irrelevant in America in any meaningful way. What has created this crisis and how did we get here? There are many factors that have led us to this place. Slavery, racism, complacency, institutionalized inferiority, self-hate, moral degradation, personal irresponsibility, are all contributing factors and I’m sure you can name more. For too long we have been looking backwards and not forwards. We have been too preoccupied with the past thanks to our so-called leaders and not the future. We have had a failure of leadership at the highest levels. Those who have been placed in positions of leadership should look at the state of affairs in Black America and feel ashamed, I know I would. Instead of positioning us to move forward through education, self-sacrifice, and hard work they have promised us a panacea of worthless dreams. However, for themselves and their families they have created a future full of promise. There are those who have achieved their modicum of success on the backs of their brothers and sisters.

Though we have more Black people with money than ever before, we are worst off as a people than we have ever been in our history. Why has achievement as a people eluded us even though we have more material wealth? There is a disconnection between those that have achieved material success and the average Black person on the street. There is a growing gap between those that have and the have-nots. The rising tide has not raised all boats.

While we spend tremendous amounts of time and energy annihilating the outsiders who dare to use the same words we use to describe ourselves and yet we do nothing against those in our community that dispense the vile vermin that poisons our minds and the minds of our children. Where are the protest marches outside of Sean Combs studio or any number of other hip-hop artists that poison the air waves with violence, sexism, and the worst attributes of our communities? We have no trouble picketing CBS over Don Imus, yet where is the outrage for those who we really should fear? Who should we be more afraid of a few washed up white media personalities that most of our children have never heard of or those who invade our homes and our air waves everyday with all manner of mental pollution?

There will be those who speak about artistic expression and the “language of the street”, but those arguments hold no weight. There is more going on in our communities than the “thug life” that these so called Black artists are portraying. When has our community been about nothing, but drug dealing, dope smoking, and killing other Black men? These so called Black men are more responsible for other young Black men being killed than any racist white men. The Klan no longer have anything to do, we are finishing the job ourselves. These men who profit from the misery of their brothers and sisters are worse than any racist. At least with an outsider you can see it coming, but these people they are doing from the inside what no outsider could do. It is a known fact that what you listen to is what you become. This isn’t about some musical expression; this is about the intentional internal genocide for the sake of fortune and fame. Is everyone in the Black community selling drugs, smoking dope, and killing? When did this become our only story? This is not my story. Is it yours?

Why have we allowed this “gang and prison mentality” to become our story? Why have we abdicated the responsibility of raising our children to these clowns? If these were whites saying these things there would be full scale riots, but because they are Black there is silence. It is this silence that is killing us. It is not just killing us physically, but spiritually and emotionally as well. We have allowed this to continue for too long. There should have been an outcry at the very beginning, yet we allowed this genre to define who we were and what we believed. We should all be ashamed. We may have lost a whole generation of children because of our inaction and complacency.

Instead of extolling the values of education and hard work we have allowed them to believe that if they live this thug life they can be successful. I work in the community and all the time I talk to young men and I ask them why they won’t take a starting job. They tell me that they should be earning 15.00 an hour, I ask what skills they possess worthy of earning this money and they say none or I can rap. They spend hours and hours listening to these lyrics, teaching them that education is for sell-outs and that women are just to be used and disposed of like yesterdays garbage. I remember when I was young there was a movie called, “Superfly” and it depicted the life of a drug dealer/pimp. To this day it still amazes me the number of people that tried to make this movie reality. You had men changing their hair to match the actor’s hair and the whole nine. This was just a two hour movie; imagine what listening to this garbage hour after hour is doing to the psyche of our children. You would think that the only things happening in our communities are these things depicted in these songs and videos. There is a concept known as “self-fulfilling prophesy” and it is a prediction that, in being made, actually causes itself to become true.

“The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come 'true' This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.^”[1]

What we are witnessing is the fulfillment of this in our communities, these thugs would have you to believe that our neighborhoods are as they describe and our children in an effort to imitate these thugs bring about the very environment these thugs rap about and then they say, “See this is what is happening in my neighborhood.” Anyone who disagrees with their scenario is labeled a sell-out or out of touch with reality. I submit that these thugs are out of touch with reality. They will never define me with their stereotypical clown roles for the Black man. Their perception is not my reality and it never will be.

We have a rich heritage in the Black community of overcoming all types of obstacles, both internal and external. It is time we rid ourselves of this cancer, before it is too late and we lose another generation of Black kids.

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[1] Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1968, p. 477, ISBN 0-02-921130-1.

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Where Are Our leaders?

The Don Imus incident once again illustrates our lack of “real” leadership. The real issue we should be discussing is not the comments of a white radio personality who has made a career of being offensive. The majority of black’s in America have never heard of Don Imus. Don Imus was not offensive to Blacks as much as he was offensive to the white myth of racial tolerance.

There are two issues that stick out in my mind that should be under consideration. The first is how we have allowed a few individuals to speak on our behalf for their personal enrichment and secondly, how we continue to depict ourselves in a degrading light for the same goal of personal enrichment.

To begin, let us start with our “so-called” leaders. It never fails that when there is opportunity for self-aggrandizement and personal gain our two favorite civil rights leaders show up to offer the offending party an opportunity for public penitence. Of course this opportunity comes at a cost to not only the offending party or “victim”, but also to our legitimate feelings of outrage. Any chance of the situation being taken seriously immediately disappears when Messer’s Jackson and Sharpton show up. Due to the past history of both men they bring baggage to any situation they intervene in. My initial question is who has appointed these two; spokesmen for anybody?

I recall in the 80’s and 90’s, two “so-called boycotts. One involved the Coca-Cola bottling company which was spearheaded by Mr. Jackson and his organization. For those who do not know, one of Mr. Jackson’s sons was rewarded with a Coca-Cola distributorship, a very lucrative business. Then of course there was the “boycott” of Anheuser-Busch again spearheaded by Mr. Jackson and his organization. And again, another of Mr. Jackson’s sons was rewarded with a Budweiser distributorship. Mr. Jackson has a history of using his organization and the threat of civil rights action for his own or his families personal gain. He has also demonstrated a lack of moral judgment in his own personal life and yet he continues to want to be the moral compass of others?

It now appears that Mr. Sharpton has recognized the profits in using threats and bullying tactics to gain personal rewards. Mr. Sharpton has a history of supporting fabrication and self-promotion.

The Imus affair will never be taken serious because it smacks of hypocrisy. We have an industry known as hip-hop that has made millions using worse language and depicting the lowest values of the black community. The excuse for allowing this to continue is that it is artistic freedom and that they are just speaking about street life in America. While these are partly true, I don’t think they completely explain what is going on in our communities.

It is time we stop allowing others to define who are or appoint themselves as, our leaders. It is time we hold our leaders accountable and put an end to those who enrich themselves at the expense of those less fortunate. Even during slavery, the darkest period of our history in this country you had blacks willing to sell out their brothers to live in the masters house.

We need leaders who are willing to tell the truth, not only about what others are doing to us but also about what we are doing to contribute to our own suffering. The biggest enemy to the Black man today is lies and ignorance, not Don Imus. We must be willing to stop being entertained and discuss those issues that continue to enslave us. Issues such as the drugs poisoning and turning our neighborhoods into war zones, our refusal to live morally, and our continual usage of language that demeans all of us. Over 50% of all unwed women bearing children are black, yet we only constitute about 12% of the population. This represents a breakdown in our moral fiber. The biggest threat against young Black men is not the Klan, but other young Black men. We buy our children the latest “Jordan’s” and fashions, but won’t but them a book. It is time for us to stop looking for enemies on the outside and begin to turn the mirror on ourselves. To continue this discussion please check out my other blog, Fornication: Our Dark Little Secret

http://fornication-our-dark-little-secret.blogspot.com/

So again I ask, where are our leaders?

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