In The Male Prison, his review of Andre Gide's notebooks that appears in his brilliant collection of essays titled Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin said that "To deny another person's humanity is to deny one's own."
Specifically, he was talking about the French Nobel laureate suppressed love for a woman named Madeline, of which Gide hid beneath a veil of extreme contempt. Baldwin's broader point, however, was about sexism: that when men do not give love to women, and I'm talking about a a broader, more plural, more encompassing love than the pleasures of the flesh, they do a brutal amount of damage to the women they are with, as well as themselves. I am reminded of this quote every time I turn on the radio and hear crunk, bounce, or any other kind of thug music over the past couple of years. For the imagery in their lyrics has been brutally inhumane, even for rap. Where do you want to start? Lil Jon's obsession with sexual dehumanization ( all you b*tches crawl, skeet, skeet, skeet) 50 cent's vicious lyrics combined with an antebellum image of a black woman in chains? Triville and the Ying Yang Twins' fetish for reducing women to their body parts and abusing those body parts afterwords? And to top it off, Lil Weezy's sick obsession with crack and rape?
For the sake of not attempting to score easy points by only saying how those messages are wrong, let me clarify myself. The misogynist rapper and rap fan has enclosed himself in a prison that is similar to the prison of the nihilist, in so much that both of their foundations are built by a dark paean to and concern for the self. But the walls of the thug rapper/fan's prison are made by an obsession with "real manhood." This brand of "manhood" is always "under attack" by women, black men who aren't "real" like them, white people, and pretty much anybody who doesn't think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. This ever present sense of "danger" always makes their lives tenuous: since they believe they are always under assault by the slightest offense, their only forms of expression are a phony rage at the women who slighted them, and a glorification of material things in order to cauterize their wounded egos.
Article comments
1 - Sal
This is a thought provoking post from Robert Lashley. The anger is palatable. It could have had more impact andor credibility, however, if the author had taken the time to run a spell check since I believe perish, rather than parish, is the word intended.
2 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Whew!! I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of your pen.
Fantastic job, Robert. I do hope you are collecting these articles of yours into a book.
Oh yeah. Do fix parish to perish.
Blessings from Jerusalem
3 - robert lashley
I want to fervently apologize for my mistake. It will be fixed as soon as possible. I felt like rushing the article when I shouldnt have. It wont happen again.
4 - Elvira Black
Kudos to you on another powerful article.
5 - P. Lewis
This article generally made some sense to me until I began noticing Lashley backsliding into tiresome cliches about "black irresponsibility" (repeated ad nauseum since the days of Booker T. Washington) and "immorality" (again, repeated ad nauseum). Somehow Lashley fails to see that these black thugs are an effect and not a cause of many of the problems of our society. They (all appearences notwithstanding) are not cartoon characters who appeared out of nowhere to drag us all down by our ears.
Yes, they are ugly, stunted, screwed-up excuses for human beings, but they are America's home-grown product. Their very presence speaks volumes about us--about our system of education, about our so-called "values", about how we view money and material things in relation to the lives of people besides ourselves, about how we view sexuality--which, after all, is not very different from that of these thugs. They simply do publicly what too many of us so-called "respectable middle-class" people do behind closed doors.
Furthermore, the last part of this article was so incredibly thick-witted that I have to quote it, just to pick out where Lashly got it wrong. Chester Himes' "novels" about "abusing white women" were never "wildly critically accalimed," at least not in his lifetime; furthermore, no such novel by Himes really exists. "The End of a Primitive," presumably the novel Lashley had in mind, was ignored by critics when it appeared in 1955, and more or less ignored (again) when reissued in its complete form in the late 90s by Old School Books. Amiri Baraka never wrote poems about shoving black women into gas chambers--Jews, perhaps (eg., "For Ted Postell, Dead Black Poet", which was pretty vicious), but Lashley is mum about the impetus behind the rage that would drive a black man, of all people, to want to beat up a white woman or man. Or, for that matter, a black woman or man. (One can only wonder, living in a society that continues to denigrate all things black and African.) This rage consumes not only so many black men, but millions of black women as well. Maybe he never read early Nikki Giovanni ("Can you kill a honkie/can you stab a Jew").
"I believe that young black men need to deal in a metaphysical philosophy of love, empathy and respect for humanity. Because if we don't, we will perish, and do a disservice to our ancestors in doing so."
Yes, but given the nature of the United States of America, this is more than wishful thinking. The entire social-political-economic structure of this USA is thoroughly corrupt and rotten from the inside out. "Young black men," after all, are Americans, and being Americans, they are endowed with all of America's worst flaws, including racism, sexism, conservatism, anti-Semitism, etc. This twisted thug-rap-nihilism would make a lot more sense to everyone when seen in the same context as Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo, or John Ashcroft. Jay-Z is morally indistinguishable from an old fart like Rush Limbaugh--they are two stunted, deformed branches on the same ugly American cherry tree.
It is not the "thug attitude" that disgusts you looking at these assholes in their stupid baggy pants and mushmouth minstrel dialect--it is really just the same regurgitated, updated slave bullshit, repackaged for our time.
And while you are at it, you may care to ask why do so many of these poor young black women positively insist on choosing stupid thug boys over young black men who are actually doing something with their lives (like getting a fucking education). You may also care to ask just why do so many young black women insist upon having children by these stupid thug boys, who have no intention whatsoever in sticking around to raise the children they dump on these silly, misguided women.
Why stop at black men? Why not white men, or brown or tan or yellow men, while you are at it, since this misguided Superhero machismo seems to be so much a part of America's dumbfuck cowboy culture? Why insinuate that the rest of America is any more enlightened than these cracked-out negro thugs, when all evidence (which one can gleam very casually from daily newspapers) suggests that it isn't?
And as for writers, let's leave that man's man Hemingway, or touchy-feely Norman Mailer, or super-sensitive Bukowski (who was once filmed kicking his fiancee and calling her a "fucking whore") or sugary-sweet, PC Henry Miller (especially of Sexus and Tropic of Cancer) and above all, that woman-loving William S. Burroughs (who once claimed in "The Job" that women were a "mistake") out of this arguement, because then we would be just setting up straw arguements, wouldn't we?