This, according to McWhorter makes rap more appealing (i.e.: oppositional), but does not “formulate and exact actual solutions to what ails us.” He singles out The Root (from Philadelphia, his hometown) for this chapter. In their music, they rap and wax poetic about the lack of employment for black men with high school diplomas or less education.
McWhorter (and William Julius Wilson, whom I met back in 1990) point out the flaws in this ancient argument, on pages 50-52, that department of labor stats, surveys, and anecdotes do not bear out that there are no good jobs for black men sans college degree. In fact, there are plenty of jobs that can be had with high school diplomas or less. The employers often go begging; and as we’ve seen, they go to other countries for hires.
McWhorter has always maintained a belief that there will be no civil rights or civil wrongs revolution. I was unclear as to what he meant and was not on board with his logic until now. He said that window was open (1960s-1970s), but post-1970s, that window is hermetically sealed. Why? For one, the U.S. legal and illegal immigration explosion without expulsion: one can observe “the human entrepôt” that many Texas, Eastern seaboard, and large northern cities (AKA sanctuary cities) have become. Blacks are no longer the only brown face in town.
We Come to Liberate - not Educate
McWhorter addresses the dicey issue of education in low-income neighborhoods with the words of one “conscious” rapper, Pete Rock, who raps, “All my teachers can suck my dick / Tellin’ me white man lies, straight bullshit!” McWhorter cites something I read online about the Kansas City “money experiment,” where monies were spent to bring inner-city schools up to and beyond suburban ones with amenities like Olympic swimming pools, computer labs, new libraries, and new classrooms, to no avail. There was barely a blip in the uptick of reading scores and nearly no progress in math. Money is clearly not the answer. Worse, it’s not the problem.
If not money, then who peoples the schools matters more. That is painfully obvious to most educators, but you can bet your undies they are not about to rap that. McWhorter asks what’s there to rap about if black anti-intellectualism or administrative incompetence (black administration) is to blame. His chorus, my paraphrase: there is no drama in blaming mama!
Oddly, this is also what educators are being sold in public education today. The author asks pointedly why rappers don’t rap about the real and the enemy within instead of the “prison-industrial complex” itself? Rather than how whitey is getting over (blacks are also employed there, too), why aren’t they rapping about how and why they end up in jail and prison in the first place. Good question.
Article comments
1 - Curry Kid
Peace and Blessings.
In the segment of Hip Hop that moves me, that is how some greet one another. I have yet to read Mr. McWorter's tome. Frankly he was completely off my radar until today. So i can only speak to what i have read in the above piece and one or two other critiques of the book. Also, if i could clarify, little aggravates Hip Hop purists more than when one substitutes the word 'Rap' for the phrase 'Hip Hop' like they are interchangeable. Hip Hop is a culture (some of us prefer 'kulture'), rap is a component of said culture. In terms of music, Rap is a subgenre of Hip Hop. As well, all a Rapper requires is a microphone and an audience. MCs are wordsmiths who can motivate whole groups of people to move their butts or, dare i say it... think.
Does Hip Hop employ a certain amount of bravado and posturing..? Sure. Are some short-sighted seeking only financial growth..? To my dismay, guilty again. However to paint this as the very fiber of Hip Hop is to pants Hip Hop in order to decry the folly of allowing ones' boxers to show.
It seems the prevailing logic here in is, with regard to Hip Hop, it is not worthy of note unless it is promoted via corporate America... Since when is Pete Rock a Rapper, let alone a conscious one? Saying something: political, reactionary or revolutionary on one rap song does not make one a Conscious MC. If it did: Flava Flav, Goapelle and Justin Timberlake would be among the genre's greats. 'Why?' and 'Jesus Walks' were good songs, but i somehow suspect the former didn't get Paris salivating to sign Jadakiss to Guerilla Funk nor the latter garner Kanye a shelf full of Stellar Awards. If you gage all of Hip Hop based on the image portrayed by the likes of Vivendi, Clear Channels and Viacom: not only do i understand your concern, but i wouldn't be surprised if you thought scratching was invented when someone spilled a beer on a turntable.
The truth is, just as throwing a LOT of money at one school district will not level a playing field still off kilter from the events of several millennia ago... Hip Hop too, is much deeper than what meets the eye. Next time you choose to demonize Hip Hop for how it is portrayed in pop culture, i beg of you... Take a fraction of the time you employed digging for Mr. Worter's books and apply it to investigating lesser-known Hip Hop projects. There are whole catalogs of albums with little or no expletives. There are whole sub-genres of music that refer to women as 'Sista' and 'Queen' not 'b****' or 'h*.'
I confess we as a Hip Hop Kulture did (in numbers larger than i wish to admit) buy into the notion that money trumps expression. However that does not mean to perform spoken word poetry to a Hip Hop beat is to perform music that is inherently synthetic, misogynistic or or self-destructive.
As for the social issues we as a kulture are not getting the credit for speaking to or working through...
To overlook the contributions of Hip Hop in the success of Barrack Obama is to all but admit that you still think rap is nothing more than a fad that children listen to to piss off their parents.
Just as the success of black students will not change exclusively by the rapid influx of greater sums of money, neither will the numbers of people of color in prison. Frankly both of those arguments sound to me like little more than conservative talking points. Hip Hop is so quick to speak ill of the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex because next to rap and professional sports they seem to be held over the heads of youth as the ONLY options for success. There are several deeper socio-economic causes for this disparity and belittling Hip Hop for being a mouth-piece for the voices of people conscious enough to be concerned is not the most effective approach i can think of for resolving those issues.
Incidentally, people of color working in the prison system strikes me as less something to be heralded and more a modern day case of the house negro. Not saying that they get into the field for that reason, quite the contrary. I would imagine that many people of color who sign on to be members of law enforcement, military, educators or doctors do it for much the same reason anyone else does.... At root, they seek to help others. However, to declining degrees (when read respectively) it is a struggle not to give into the frustration of seeing people like yourself in that condition. Or worse to respond the way others may have millennia ago. Resolve some of those issues before shooting the messenger.
In conclusion, Hip Hop was never exclusively about shaking one's hind quarters. Yes, dancing has always been a part of Hip Hop. But so too has bragging rites (as won through battling) and politics. Because the reason that those youth in the South Bronx were scrambling to challenge each other to competitions of skill involving: dance, oratory, paint/markers and vinyl in the early 70s was that they just lost funding for after school programs. It took about three and a half decades for the system to persuade their offspring that Hip Hop is not a better route. Would you like to take the blame for that one?
One Love,
Curry Kid
OFFtheTOPradio.com
Ps. Its 'The Roots,' not 'The Root.'