Analytics wrote:Droopy wrote:Comments?
I for one don't know much about hip-hop culture or the black experience, "authentic" or otherwise. Having said that, if I were black I would hold the same position that I do as a white: I wouldn't want to raise my kids in a way where they felt they needed to personify hip-hop music in order to be "authentic." Presumably, successful blacks (Oprah Winfrey, [insert favorite black athlete here], Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, etc.) agree with me on this.
So what is your point? Presumably, you think liberals take issue with what you quoted? Perhaps you could quote a liberal who actually says what you think they say, and we can talk about that.
Where to start (there are so many...) Let's take just two, one from the present day, and one from the revolutionary past to which the modern progressive Left, both white and black, owes so much.
http://www.michaelericdyson.com/cosby/points.htmlThe above comments by a well known Marxist/black power university professor of some note contains a very nice overview, in a way, of common themes among the Left since at least the early seventies when confronting the phenomena of the black underclass, its culture, and the grossly disproportionate popularity of that culture among black youths.
It also, in its defense of Hip-Hop culture, betrays a deep intellectual debt to attitudes and ideas already mature among the Left some forty years ago, regarding the black supremacist/separatist movement that rose alongside MLK's civil rights movement.
Here's another distinguished black studies/critical race theory academic (the father of critical race theory, indeed):
http://www3.law.harvard.edu/journals/hj ... HBK106.pdfThis is an excellent example of the quite common attitudes (not always expressed so explicitly) regarding key aspects of specifically black underclass culture and the thoroughgoing intellectual and moral surrender to it by an effete, alienated counter-cultural intellectual class:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/indi ... indid=2234These next couple of paragraphs are from Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, professor of anthropology Columbia University's Teachers College (which one might expect, because the teacher's colleges are the notorious dumping grounds for many of those who cannot handle serious intellectual work in other humanities or social science fields):
Q: Has Hip Hop become a scapegoat for many of the social problems that have arisen within the Black community?
No doubt. Every time a social issue gets raised, particularly one that implicates White people, hip-hop gets thrown into the mix. Don Imus disrespects the Rutgers girls and everyone is talking about Snoop. Dog Chapman uses the N-word and media commentators are bringing up 50 Cent. This is not to say that we shouldn’t challenge hip-hop artists to do better. On the contrary, we must demand that the hip-hop community set a better example for ourselves. Nevertheless, it is both naïve and disingenuous to suggest that the evils of the world start and end with hip-hop. For example, it’s safe to say that Don Imus didn’t get the term “nappy headed hoes” from watching BET. That type of hatred comes from a deeply racist worldview that existed before hip-hop was conceived. At the same time, we need to demand that BET stop calling us “nappy headed hoes”
Q: The Hip Hop community often perpetuates the stereotypes that we are continuously fighting against. Where does this stem from? Is it a lack of education, rebellion or claiming ownership over what is negative in an attempt to make it positive? For example, the use of “N” word.
It is important to remember that Black people have always struggled to reclaim, reshape, and rearticulate the things that have been so viciously used to undermine our existence. For example, Black people have always used the N-word in ways that were deliberate, thoughtful, and redemptive. The problem, however, is that our culture has been bought and sold in the open market. As a result, much of the complexity and nuance that used to accompany our use of “nigger” or a conversation about “snitching” have been reduced to sound bites and slogans. Such a space dilutes the conversation into something that is politically impotent or, in the case of the n-word, counter-productive and dangerous. This circumstance isn’t the result of Black ignorance, but an inevitable part of contemporary capitalist culture, which reduces everything and everyone to dollars and cents.
http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2007/12/ ... mont-hill/One would not be hard pressed to find numerous other examples of this kind of race-fixated excuse-making, tribal glorification of the in-group, minimization or dismissal of any internal cultural problems, and the placing of all social pathologies and weaknesses on a scapgoated out-group thought to be in a position of permanent, collective, innate hostility with respect to the out-group (exactly that the Nazis did to Jews and socialists did to the socioeconomic middle class and to "capitalists")
We can save the white, leftist, upper-class elitist news media, political class, Hollywood, and academic romanticization and apologies for the underclass culture they were so complicit in creating for another thread.
Interestingly, several things tie each of the above commentators together, one being Neo-Marxism fused with racial separatism and a kind of ethnic jingoism, and the second being a deep hostility to both free markets, individualism, and American//Western values/ideals as a whole.
