In an attempt to gleen from the entire essay there what Cam is trying to get at (but won't argue himself, preferring to spend most of his time here posting insulting graphics and symbolically making faces), I came up with this:
Williams fails to truly engage hip hop culture in the context of this book.
such an inability to dialogue with hip hop was more than a disappointment.
Williams is black, identifies as black, and grew up listening to and living the inner city Hip-Hop lifestyle, and yet he does not understand Hip-Hop and cannot "dialogue" with it, as can the "Uppity Negro."
and for the duration of the second half of the book I became with the most insipid barrage of racial and cultural stereotypes that I had ever read in a long time.
Williams is black, came from the inner city, and lived the lifestyle, and yet "Uppity Negro" claims to somehow understand it better than Williams. Perhaps "Uppity Negro" might wish to take a look the description of his past life at his own book website:
Like many young men in America, Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in awe of Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and the parade of bling-bedecked rap stars he saw on Black Entertainment Television. Williams emulated their lifestyle - sporting chains and expensive designer clothes purchased for him by his girlfriends, who were themselves little more than accessories to Williams. He and his friends roamed the streets, maintaining their status by intimidating passersby.
Somewhere, in a place I’m sure Williams does not want to touch anytime soon, he’ll have to come to grips with his own warped point of view.
Or "Uppity Negro" (what on odd appellation to place on one's own persona, as a black man, in this day and age. Bizarre, is far closer to the reality here, and bespeaks yet the same, squalid destruction of an otherwise fine mind by ideology) will eventually have come to grips with the reality around him in which he is embedded.
I find it highly problematic that throughout the book Williams has no qualms about problematizing the entire hip hop culture with one broad brush as if to be totally ignorant of it nuances.
Uppity Negro either hasn't really read the book, or is greasing his own ideological skids here. In the Amazon interview, just for one example, Williams is clear:
Q: Do Kanye, Jay-Z, and other current rap superstars have anything to offer society?
The thing I want to stress here is that it has never been my aim or desire to criticize hip-hop from a musical or formal standpoint. For one thing, I’m not qualified to do that, and for another, I’m already convinced that it is formally very interesting and worthy of respect from a variety of perspectives.
That, doubtless, won't do for "Uppity Negro" because, for him, Hip-Hop validates and legitimizes the entire Pan-Africanist, black nationalist ideological prism from which he looks at American and racial dynamics:
Williams disdain for hip hop culture came off as a disdain for black American life.
Williams is black, has always been black, and is now black, and he grew up immersed in the very culture he is now critiquing, but notice how "Uppity Negro" attempts to pass himself off as somehow more "authentically" black then Williams, as somehow having a greater degree or intensity of "blackness" within himself than Williams? Notice how UN exaggerates and misrepresents Williams by claiming and/or implying that he is attacking [i]black culture and black American life in an overarching sense?
But now, let's get to the meat and potatoes who who "Uppity Negro" really is and the intellectual template from which he is approaching William's book:
Once he made the decision to be a philosophy major and got introduced to the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, he began to rationalize away that which hip hop had deposited into him. Now, as me and The Critical Cleric had discussed, and as I said in my blog a few days prior, there are some definitely anti-intellectual strands of hip hop, however, to forsake the cultural wealth that is hip hop culture by a) looking through the lens of white, homogenous, western philosophy to critique and b) equating ALL of young black culture with all of the negative aspects of hip hop culture is the epitome of myopia that is systemic of unbridled elitism that does more damage to the race you claim is in need of a reclaiming of the “discipline and the spirit we have lost.”
For Williams, as he stated in the epilogue that “more than thirty years the black world has revolved around the inventors of hip hop values, and this has been a decisive step backwards.” But, this reeks of the conservative mindset that rests in the notions of personal agency and personal responsibility but do not at all address systemic issues at play. For the entire book, Williams appears to leave underdeveloped characters as memorials to failures in the black community as a direct result of hip hop. Let me be clear, while well-written, his book flops as a serious cultural critique of young black American life because of his insistence on operating from stereotypes on hip hop culture as a dominant paradigm.
1. UP appears to believe, as do all racialist collectivists, that for any individual to abandon, or move away from that which collectively authenticates and defines the in-group is tantamount to a kind of in-group treason. UP believes there is "cultural wealth" within Hip-Hop and that this cultural wealth was "deposited" within Wlliams during his youth, and that he is now, in some sense, as a black man, betraying that cultural inheritance.
Once he made the decision to be a philosophy major and got introduced to the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, he began to rationalize away that which hip hop had deposited into him
HORRORS! Thomas Chatterton Williams may have - gulp - stepped outside the boundaries of the leftist/Afrocentrist/cultural nationalist plantation. He appears to be harboring "conservative" philosophical deviations from critical race theory orthodoxy, among the most alarming features of which, for Uppity, are "notions of personal agency and personal responsibility."
This of course, is not compatible with the neo-Marxist/racialist lens through which Uppity sees the world, which he clarifies when he says that this upsetting concentration of personal agency and personal responsibility do not "address" the "systemic issues at play (i.e., the leftist concept of pervasively embedded institutional racism at every level of American culture and society).
He also misrepresents William's work as attacking all Hip-Hop and, through this, the entirety of American black culture.
Sound familiar?
There was once, long ago, a generation of liberals who, although taking issue with conservatives and libertarians on a number of issues, still held to the same fundamental core of American values that conservatives held to, and most issues between them were more about how best to achieve similar goals, and the degree to which the state should be involved in such measures.
That generation of liberals is now, for the most part gone, and "liberalism" has now become simply the Left. There is no more moderation, no more underlying shared values, and no more space for civil or reasoned debate between them.
That older liberalism, as well as contemporary conservative intellectuals, would look at Williams statement, when asked what he wanted people to take away from his book, when he says:
I hope that Losing My Cool will provoke readers black, white, old and young to question, critique, and ultimately reject more of the nonsense and conformity that surrounds us all.
With approbation. With the modern radical Left having essentially absorbed, corrupted, or excommunicated most of the last remaining moderate and reasoned elements that were once found among liberalism, all that is left is this: the standard black studies professor/lecturer/author/ideologue/race hustler, valiantly manning the parapets of the racialist castle and trying to keep any incipient individualism that might bubble up and seek to express itself outside the racial collective and upset the united front of racial solidarity that is so key to the continuance of the race-hustling industry and of the influence and power of people like Uppity in the academic and media world from capsizing the sepratist/victimology cruise ship.
Good choice of a reviewer, Cam. One of your own.