No Apologies Necessary! Rethinking Rick Ross on Mother’s Day

‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’

 

While everybody’s buying flowers for dey mamas, everything ain’t coming up roses for girls and women in the American landscape of hip-hop. Since I’ve been using rants in my political sociology class to inspire social participation in the public sphere among my students, it’s high time for my own civic engagement rant.

Last week an open letter to Michelle Obama composed by UK-mom Rakhi Kumar dating back to April 20th found it’s way to me through social media. When I read it I thought this is a sign It’s my turn! Time to return to my blog (cuz’ it’s been a minute).

When I read Kumar’s letter asking FLOTUS to distance herself from Beyoncé rather than promoting her as a role model for girls, I was like YES!! It resonated with my current project on the seduction of young girls and hip-hop social media.  [Read a teen's response to Kumar on the benefits of the Beyoncé generation.]

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that all the recent apologies by rap artists Rick Ross, Lil’ Wayne and Tyler the Creator that showed up in my social media feed on Twitter and Facebook around the same time. All things have their season.  But their “apologies” brought Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem to mind. Those of you who know it, know what I’m talking about.

 

When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, my mama took me to see the Broadway show For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Was Enuf by Ntozake Shange. It was a group trip. She and I and a bunch of other real and fictive “sisters” and their daughters took a 4 hour bus-ride from Maryland to New York City, where I now reside. I searched for my own copy of the book which I probably bought in grad school or maybe I took my mother’s copy like I took many of her albums when I headed off to grad school.

For Colored Girls was pivotal in reorienting certain ways of thinking about my self as a woman of color. If I ever raise my own kids, it will be a must read. It helped me align my experiences with other non-white bodies–which I think is a New York thing but wasn’t a DC area thing back then in my adolescent thinking. My thinking was limited by a distorted mental image of myself shaped and conditioned by 60 second Cover Girl TV ads, weekly fashion magazine covers viewed from the A&P  supermarket aisle, and school bullying by white boys since 4th grade teasing me about the size of my butt. One of them I still remember by name. He’s probabaly long forgotten me.  James’ 4th grade aspersion was “buttweefer”  (translates: you got a bigger butt than my sisters) and I was convinced by some social force or being outside myself to believe it was because he liked me.  I was thin then. Normal sized for my age. But I couldn’t see my own beauty back then. The media left me with little vision.

 

There was time and space for reflection during my doctoral studies around the age of 30. Time and space to develop my own view of Self. I became socially conscious, aware of the sociological imagination that produced the structural  burdens of my internalized racism and sexism. Finally, it wasn’t just me. Being black and female in a patriarchal society was fostered as being outside the norm by a corporate culture that sold “the majority” as an ideal to its minorities for profit.

The antidote to the internalization was poetry. My own and Shange’s. Only poetry could rewire the internalized racism and sexism. It is primarily through language that change begins. We are linguistic social beings. Poetry demands a linguistic reorientation of the brain, of one’s self towards loving one’s own voice, towards the power of the erotic, as Audre Lorde said, rather the pornographic.

From my poems came my dissertation. In the dissertation there were  social stories about music and gender in hip-hop. Narratives that area  feature of my book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-hop. I am proud it won the most outstanding book award in my field. Check out the Kindle version.  Perhaps a new poem is emerging out of my most recent project.

 

On March 8th, I am searching for new words to say when I inadvertently get hooked into watching the release of the “Freaks” video by French Montana f/ Nicky Minaj on YouTube. It was released on March 7th. I was doing some YouTube research on women emcees in hip-hop. I think I was watching a Missy Elliot video in a VEVO frame. VEVO advertises other videos in a frame within a frame.  Talk about distraction factor.  Curious, I took a look since I was studying female emcees. The promotion showed Nicky Minaj who is now recognized as the largest-selling female rapper to date, like it or not, and young girls’ attraction to her as an icon would become clear.  I watched it more times than I anticipated.  What I saw stunned me.

At 1:30 seconds in, Minaj makes her “bad bitch” entrance bouncing her booty “on a throne.” As she turns and faces the YouTube audience–an audience that had swarmed to over 900,000 within 24 hours of its YouTube release–she displays her full luscious breasts in fashionable jacket, the gold, flesh-toned pasties applied to hide her nipples don’t really count as a method of covering up her nudity.

The comments section revealed an expected reaction from the male viewers. One read: “I want to stalk her!” This was only a week after the media spectacles surrounding the Steubenville trial and reporting. I was stunned that this wasn’t viewed as contributing to rape culture or that no one had reported it to the FCC.

What made it most alarming was the statistics. Females 13-17 years old were and continue to be the top audience demographic viewing the “Freaks” video which in just over two weeks amassed over 9 million “hits” and after a month over 11 million.  The other top demographics were males 18-24  and females 18-24.  Not sure how much I can say from these statistics but it is noticeable that boys 13-17 were not among the top demographics. The comments of the males 18-24 clearly indicated that their relationship to the video was not about respect.

 

I tried to file a complaint with the FCC. Had this grand idea from Elizabeth Mendez Berry that I’d file a complaint a week and then write a piece about it. I got a rude awakening when I learned that filing with the FCC is not accessible to the average public. It’s expensive. You actually need to hire a lawyer to engage with the FCC and worse yet, the FCC monitors TV and radio but not telecommunications like YouTube. YouTube has a set of community standards for obscenity, profanity and indecency. What you do is flag a video for review. I flagged the video on April 6th and have yet to receive any response. Not even a sorry.

Apologies came from three of raps industry heavyweights–Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, and Tyler, the Creator–over the past weeks. Dan Charnas explained  in Billboard last week:

…in 2013 the people pursuing Ross, Wayne and Tyler are in many cases older fans of hip-hop (and, by extension, fans of older hip-hop), most often people of color, motivated by progressive politics and empowered by social media…. [That pressure led to the loss of] lucrative endorsement deals –”ending Ross’ with Reebok and Wayne’s with Mountain Dew, and inducing Mountain Dew to remove a Tyler-helmed ad deemed offensive from the company’s site and his YouTube channel.

Once again men prove that in reality when it comes to misogyny its the bottom line that counts–assets always trump objectifying asses. When the profit gets moved from the background to front and center, then and only then will apologies be in order.

In the early 20th century, Upton Sinclair, once wrote:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Understanding is the booby prize.

 

So this is my open letter.  An open letter to all the “better-late-than-never” apologies for extra-linguistic acts from the faux papas of club rap and the music industrial complex. Faux papas who exploit and subject girls–and boys–to a kind of emotional verbal abuse, an unacknowledged environmental injustice issue of our times. Social media now peddles their sorries via hand-held devices that produce profit for themselves and corporate entities in the name of moving the crowd.

But as Shange inspired me to say, “one thing I dont need” is an apology from a grown ass security guard turned rapper, from Wayne (who they say was a straight A student in school before all this) or Tyler (the creator of whose reality and on whose dollar?). Just so y’all know, I didn’t accept Chris Brown’s late apology to Rihanna either. But in that case I guess it doesn’t matter cuz’ she did.

Since keepin’ it real will not necessarily elicit more than your illicit cooperation to promote more bad bitches and hoes in videos, I must share dis poem,  and my own poems, and dat poem, this choreopoem which my mother planted in my soul in New York City. There was no social revolution called YouTube. My revolution at 15 could not be televised and sometimes I still think it isn’t. But my mama made sure it was live back in ’75. How do we get more choreopoems to outdo the Freaks video on YouTube?

 

I don’t know. But I know one thing. “i dont need” another reason to write another choreopoem like For Colored Girls. Plus we keep writing ‘em and y’all don’t seem to listen. People been saying the more things change, the more things stay the same.  So I’ll bring Shange back again. Know this: That the power of words are not equal and they are not free. Even on mother’s day!

one thing i dont need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i dont know what to do wit em
they dont open doors
or bring the sun back
they dont make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didnt nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
i loved you on purpose
i was open on purpose
i still crave vulnerability & close talk
& im not even sorry bout you bein sorry
you can carry all the guilt & grime ya wanna
just dont give it to me
i cant use another sorry
next time
you should admit
youre mean/ low-down/ triflin/ & no count straight out
steada bein sorry alla the time

enjoy bein yrself

Blessings to the Creator Mother and all mothers on this fine Mother’s Day!

No apologies necessary.

12 Lessons in Micro-Aggressions (for Black History + Women’s History Months). #31DBBBDay2

Calvin Candie: [to Django and Schultz] Gentlemen, you had my curiosity. But now you have my attention.

J Rosamund Johnson (standing) with Bob Cole. Johnson composed Lift Every Voice and Sing set to the poetry of his brother James Weldon Johnson who among other things was a diplomat, politician and anthropologist.

 

 

 

 

 

See the shorter, tighter version here on the TEDFellows Blog.

I am doing the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge and Day 2 asks that we write a list post. My post title is reminiscent of the narrative titles from the earliest printed books in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a time, I must remark, when enslaved Africans were not allowed to read and write or play drums for fear of the power to communicate.  Now that we’s free, we black folk got lots to say and too many don’t care to hear.

We professors often learn to trade and mediate between worlds which can be a blessing and curse.  But as I see it, communication and writing–having a voice–is essential no matter who you are. Blogging is a mechanism I downplay too often to get my thoughts across even though I have had 3,000, 6,000 and even 12,000 reads on something I’ve written before. I still resist owning my own voice. In 2013, I am putting more of my words out in the blogosphere.

Books tell stories as can list posts. I realized my list could tell my story of microaggressions.  You may ask, what is a micro-aggression?

Sue et al. (2007) describe microaggressions as, “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”[2]  These can be both racist and sexist.

My list of 12 Microaggressions adds a bit of irony, not unlike my descriptive narrative subtitle recalling the descriptive titles in the 18th and 19th centuries

12 Lessons in Micro-aggressions: A Guide to the Memories of a Learned Black Womanist Professor Upon Writing A List Post for Black History & Women’s History Months Which Can’t Begin to Scratch the Surface of the Deeper Politics of Racism and Sexism Women and People of Color Encounter Still Today.

12 DON’TS THAT DO MICROAGGRESSIONS

1. Don’t ever read June Jordan’s “Poem about Police Violence” in a racism course with any white male student who once loved you. His version will be: What if every time  you follow suit, I threaten to file a lawsuit? You think the litigation rate for reverse racism would drop subsequently?
2. Don’t play a female rapper first in a hip-hop course. Queen Latifah might have said “Ladies first” but women in hip-hop are supposed to only be one of the boys or a bitch at best.
3. Don’t be surprised when in 1997 you get hate mail addressed “Dear Ms. Afro” after your first semester teaching at the University of Virginia. And there won’t be a check in the mail across the Mason Dixon line.
4. Don’t sing the Negro National Anthem after the Star Spangled Banner at a joint concert of the choirs from the University of Virginia and Hampton University.  One of your conservative white women students who is majoring in music will complain and even if you can convince her to study the history in her final paper where she learns and even teaches you that James Rosamund Johnson and his brother wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” BEFORE the Francis Scott Key anthem, she will not let her white privilege be shaken. No older anthems, she will conclude, should be allowed.
5. Don’t dance in your white colleague’s African Drum and Dance ensemble unless you are ready to deal with the tensions that will rise between you of always being considered the teacher and her resenting that you’ve never been to Africa. Skin color privilege and mental slavery still trumps travel.
6. Don’t defend your group’s ability to name itself when even a white Jewish colleague with a Ph.D. in public administration lapses in judgment when she asks why you call yourself ”African” American. You’ll be asked by other acquaintances on the Air Train. Be prepared. Her rationale will be that her friends from Senegal are Senegalese American?
7. Don’t hesitate when your music department chair,  a composer of Western art music, asks how much time are you actually teaching music as an ethnomusicologist. Don’t forget to simply answer 100% to battle potential rage or cry in her office later telling her you won’t stay if her lack of support continues.
8. Don’t dream it won’t happen again that while supporting the 100-member gospel choir from U.Va. as they sing at the predominately white episcopal church across the street from campus that a white church member, seated just in front of you, turns, sees you, and then shares how much she loved your singing. They call us the “frozen chosen” she adds to soften the blow.
9. Don’t hate when your white date whom you thought might be a real boyfriend asks you to teach him how to dance right after spending the whole afternoon with a dozen of his white friends on Memorial day. Their earlier episide of trauma sharing after the BBQ, going round the table one-by-one to share how burnt they got while tanning that summer while they wait silently for you to go will be penance enough. Just join in the color blind fest and teach him tonight.
10. Don’t expect to get the $700 for writing a test item for the ACT about Bessie Coleman or the Negro National Anthem coming before the Star Spangled Banner. They will reject your question informing you that any questions that would disturb [white] testers are not allowed.
11. Don’t get riled up and lose your mentor cool when a liberal white student asks you rather than his black peers why black students don’t apply to live on the Lawn at Thomas Jefferson’s University with no running water, no toilet, and an “outhouse” in the back that comes with your own rocking chair and fireplace too. Roughing it on T.J’s former plantation should be an esteemed part of a public education in our century.
12. And finally, don’t go Django on ‘em (meaning “off the chain”) when you learn that you can’t visit the ruined slave quarters at Monticello in the winter time. The docent will remind you that the regular patrons would find it uncomfortable cuz’ it’s all about the main house.

AFTER THOUGHTS

Each of these incidents actually happened in my 15 years as a professor or in my personal life experiences during that period. Some happened at Baruch College-CUNY, most are from University of Virginia which was rich and contradictory space in which I taught both black music studies and hip-hop culture with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia as a backdrop.

But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.–Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately[Wheatley]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.

The Founders’ Constitution
Volume 1, Chapter 15, Document 28

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html

The University of Chicago Press

One of the hardest moments of recent years came after a white male student at CUNY threatened to sue me. I had been his advisor and he had deeply admired me before taking a course titled “The Evolution and Expressions of Racism” where I read a poem on police violence by Brooklyn poet June Jordan. I realized I coddled him too much as his advisor — wanting to be liked in a department that tried to sack me after the first semester.

In a ten-page single-spaced paper (that’s term paper length and he was eager to share it with others), he accused me of saying all white people and all white cops should be killed. (June Jordan’s poem never distinguishes between white and black cops on the NYPD.) He went to both my department chairs. I was jointly appointed. He went to the Dean and the president of the college. (Not the first time a student went that high in a complaint about my teaching.) After 6 weeks of it unrequited complaints, we had a mediation. I was mentally shaken afterwards but I pretended to be strong as I ran to catch a taxi to Soho from Midtown and was refused by several empty yellow cabs.

I recall commiserating with a friend about the incident (or complex of incidents) at a conference for global transformation who was also a black woman professor. She shared that my experience was not uncommon in hers — that of having a white male student wheel about and turnabout and jump Jim Crow once racism as an education became part of the picture.

I want to read, play, be surprised and sing; I want to dance, defend, hesitate and dream; I want the freedom to hate, expect, get riled up, and go to those places where conventional black history months don’t go.

Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March should be more of a space for all kinds of dialogue not just some predictable presentation of firsts or facts about women and African Americans.

Fear of Change

It’s sad to me that black cultural confrontations of structural racism often require humor or irony to be digested but I also realize this is true of all taboos of cultural norms. Status quo discourses often seek to replicate themselves through our fear of change. We might be sittin’ in garbage but it’s familiar garbage all the same. And we often cannot see what change might be needed. Something simple, easy to master would do but it feels so monstrous when we encounter problems of race and racism, sexual power and sexism.

Darren Rowse, the author of 31DBBB, created a list of 21 ways to write posts that are guaranteed to grow your blog. It it included:

1. Write something useful
2. Write something unique
3. Write something newsworthy
4. Write something first
5. Write something that makes those who read it smarter
6. Write something controversial
7. Write something insightful
8. Write something that taps into a fear people have

I hope my list taps into a few of these ways. Every professor hopes we she/he does makes you a little smarter.  You be the judge and don’t hesitate to let me know whatever your reaction.

 2013: THRIVING AGAIN

I mentioned in a previous post how academia had beat my love of reading out of me and yet late last year I started learning to love reading and writing again. Maybe some of these microaggressions have had me more than I imagined. I am thankful that my desire for both reading and writing has begun to thrive again.

Presently, I am reading Kevin Young’s book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness–which is a brilliant remix of literature, thought and music. In it Young writes:

“[T]he lost shadow book is the book that blackness writes everyday. The book that memory, time, accident and the more active forms of oppression prevent from being read. […] As African Americans, we have gone over the past century and a half from Reconstruction, to resistance, to recovery–and today, to a real need for reclamation. Forget reparations–we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin’ or broader forms of not just survival but triumph” (Kindle Loc 199 ff.).

POSTSCRIPT FEB 8th:My Facebook friend Suzanne Broughel recommended the great Tumblr blog on microaggressions where you can post your own.

See the shorter, tighter version here on the TEDFellows Blog.

What If Higher Learning Was All About Remix? (On Foucault)

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

For about 4 years now, I’ve been experimenting with an assignment of remix in writing and other practices in my classroom where students emulate and replicate being consumers of their own productivity inside a given text or framework. I was in a course exploring how one can be empowered by ANY communication, verbal or non-verbal. It was not an academic training, thankfully, but it was a 10 month course with a weekend long training in Los Angeles once every two months and meetups with local participants here in NYC every week for, yes, 10 months. The meetups were practice sessions for completing homework between the five weekends. The course was called Partnership Explorations.

If anyone knows me personally, they know that for years I’ve said that academia beat my love of reading out of me. Perhaps it started earlier when being book smart and “talking like white people” made me assign a separation from my people to reading. I loved Shakespeare as a teen and wanted to read Freud by my mother thought it was taboo for some reason she never really explained back when I was 14.

By the time I reached the Partnership Explorations course in 2004, I was eight (8) years into being a tenure-track professor. I taught at NYU then and I hated reading books and never read anything outside of work needs. I loved the Internet and probably read as much online as some do from hardback novels. But I resisted reading. Always fell asleep. LOL. I read from cover to cover one book in maybe 10 years, a confession no self-respecting professor should probably make, but it’s true. [The book was The Funeral Planner by Lynn Isenberg, a womanist entreprenurial comedy based around my alma mater, University of Michigan. It was mature, sophisticated Chic Lit.]

So when the course instructor of Partnership Explorations said there were 5 recommended books I confronted my bias. I loved the course but reading books… Each of the weekends involved sharing individually to a group of 300 participants about what you were learning about yourself and your conversations with 20 people we were expected to track in our lives.

I read one book completely. Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan and I read the first 50 pages of The Order of Things: The Archeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault. Not unlike in the halls of academia, everyone in the course found the book confounding and many hated it. Though I had exposure to Foucault’s work on sexuality and liked it in grad school, this was different. I LOVED it. But still didn’t finish it. My habits were then not servicing any interest in reading more. But the preface of that book wOw-ed me.

Thus began an experiment with slow learning for me. Teaching students to replicate the preface of the book (found here: The Order of Things, 1970) in my African American music courses, my jazz course and my hip-hop courses. I have them do it early, the first weeks of class, to throw them into the world of their own thinking and sorting – reordering the mental maps of the subject they are about to encounter newly and in new ways hopefully.

In all the years since 2005 when I began assigning it, I have never written my own version but I have meticulously edited over 200 versions, I’d say. Often rewriting it for them to see other ways of thought,  to instigate and agitate their thinking (vs. thoughting). Yesterday I wrote my first draft. Today my second.

From my non-academic training,  I often challenge myself to do the work that I assign in my classes. It should be a requirement, I have learned from this practice.  It was my students’ experimenting this winter intercession that inspired me to share my own version. I’ve learned so much from my students in this and other assignments about the “sociology” of people’s experiences with black women in hip-hop. It’s like taking a sociological sampling of culture.  I wrote them earlier today: “It’s your mind each of your need to consider learning more about and intervening in the social constructs you simply inherited that were begun by people long dead and gone but that we transmit and carry on unthinkingly about race, gender and music-making. This is your opportunity to shine! Here is mine…”

Prof. G’s Foucault Remix (2nd draft):

This began as a riff off a intellectual rhymebook not well known, nor understood, inside the ivory towers of its social commons where even PhD students front in abstractions, wastin their breathe on what they “took away” from some book as if they were jookin on a basketball court (not!). It began out of a non-academic course I took on discourses and the partnership of language to uncover what’s unsaid and unknown. It arose out of the pain that shattered, as I read my participation in academia, all the familiar landmarks of my former thought — black and female thought, the thought that brands the video vixen of our hip-hop age and our corporate geography — breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which I as a black woman, a performer, and a scholar had become accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing racist and sexist things students carried with them, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse their age-old distinction between desire and ambition.

This riff quotes a ‘certain true mathematics encyclopedia’ contributed to by the fellowship of Bernice Johnson Reagon (If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me), Audre Lorde (The Uses of the Erotic read here in her own words), Tricia Rose (Black Noise and Hip-Hop Wars), Jeff Chang (Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of a Hiphop Generation), Joe Schloss (Making Beats and Foundation), and many other oracle mathemeticians, an encyclopedia in which it is written that ‘humanity in hip-hop is divided into: (a) true to Rha Goddess not Gangsta, (b) masculine masoleum, (c) domesticated pornography sold to the white masses selling black behinds, (d) Sucka MCs, (e) a Blige(d) or Beyonce(d) , (f) Fiiiiiine!! (with an extreme nasal sound to intensify meaning and syncopation), (g) rhyme retreatists, (h) not included in the present classification = invisibilified, (i) dope fiends diggin in the crates, (j) bounce, bass, snap, house, (k) Is that your real hair cuz I can’t get a comb through it?, (l) whatevah, (m) just breaks on the Billboard charts that won’t last long if they hear its a female, (n) that from a long way off look like I got fries to go with dat shake and imma reach out and take that junk in the trunk public violence.

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing black women, women and girls everywhere as well as conscious fathers, apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of a rhyme and a video screen, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of patriciarchal and post-colonial system of hegemonic thought, is the limitation of our my own thinking, the stark impossibility of ever being without that.

The source of my remix/sample is the “Preface” from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970).

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

Hip-hop, Fathers and the reaction to having a daughter

A male friend of mine whom I had not spoken to for a while informed me that he had some good news to share. He had had a baby. She was now 7 months old. The proud papa is a traditionally minded Jamaican man. Opens doors. Thinks his future wife should never have to work if she doesn’t want to and definitely not while she is pregnant. Once told me that all men want a respectable smart business savy woman by day and a slut at night. He’s a young man doing quite well in real estate in Brooklyn. Despite his traditional thinking, he’s baby’s mama remains just a girlfriend.

Fatherhood relative to daughters is uniquely distinct from the relationship to a son. As the new daddy shared his newfound doting on this little 7-month old female being, he shared how it was affecting his listening habits relative to hip-hop. Born in Jamaica, he was raised up in the Caribbean enclave of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. (Go Brooklyn!!) He grew up a fan of Biggie and Jay-Z. He told me he especially admired Jay-Z as both rapper and business man (see post and video refuting that Jay-Z smacked a women in Africa in 2004). What’s interesting is that ever since my friend’s little girl came into the picture, his interest in hip-hop’s misogyny has done a 180º. He said essentially he listens differently to all the ways men represent women now. (Pictured: three-time Grammy Award-winning rapper and actor Chris Bridges aka Ludacris with his daughter).

I shared a not-so surprised acknowledgement of this phenomenon. It happened with Nas too and a host a men who love hip-hop whom I have known or written about. I wrote about Nas in a book to be released by Michael Eric Dyson in Jan 2009 devoted to the great Nasty Nas (more on that to come). Nas actually created the anthem “I Can” for his daughter because all the hip-hop out there was so misogynistic. I only wish men would realize, I told my friend, this revelation long before they had a female child. It’s imperative they begin to, that men are willing to discover the impact this music has on their disrespect of not only women, but themselves esp. in the public sphere.

According to Dr. Emerson Eggerichs in his book titled, Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs, the needs of men often differ from that of women. Men often yearn for respect, while women generally want to feel loved. That may be but perhaps we need a bit more of the reverse.

Some men think nothing of making a living pimping women as bling

AMERICAN WOMEN & HIP-HOP (11/28/07)

Last November NBC Nightly News did a series called African American Women: Where They Stand. It included the video linked above. In it, Irv Gotti, a hip-hop producer/director argues that some women just can’t help themselves on the video set and claims no responsibility in the matter. The head of The Inc (Formerly Murder Inc.) record label, Gotti says it’s hard to market female emcees because they have to be good to look at, too, and he says he asks his 15 year old daughter to confirm if the women in his “scantily-clad videos” look hot. He uses her as a litmus test!! Train ‘em young in the art of misogyny and women will keep the practice going — that’s hegemony at its best. Why they don’t call me on these shows as an expert?!??!! I could say I don’t know, but I am starting to realize it’s because they don’t know I am here. Press releases, baby! I haven’t gotten my own word out in that realm. That’s what 2008 is about – getting on the top of the roladex.

This past week, I finished a essay about misogyny relative to the music and videos of Nas for a book to be published in 2008 by Michael Eric Dyson. This essay might be my PR in this larger conversation about hip-hop, gender stratification, and power. Wanted to share some “axioms” I came up with the generate thinking outside the box. They are ratehr obvious but they are not generalizations in the manner we mostly here about misogyny.

Here’s a sample:

Years ago, I read a chapter by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a queer studies scholar, that had me question the limits of my available thinking about sexuality despite my expertise in the study of gender and the body. As a professor of hip-hop music, her writing left me with a provocative thought: What would help students interested in hip-hop question the limits of their own thinking about misogyny and its impact on women and men? Hip-hop discourse rarely steps away from cliché conversations about misogyny, so I created a list of axioms following Sedgwick’s lead concerning Nas and masculinity in hip-hop. The list includes ideas most know but don’t seem to consider in their analysis of hip-hop (cf. Sedgwick 1993):

• Sometimes Nas [and other male artists] spends a lot of time rapping about manhood and masculinity, other times not.
• Some male and female hip-hop heads, of all races and all classes, experience Nas’s portrayal of masculinity as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and differences. Others do not.
• Many male and female heads have their richest mental/emotional/kinetic involvement when Nas rhymes about acts they don’t do, or even don’t want to do (“Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with” – “The Thief’s Theme” from Street’s Disciple).
• Sometimes Nas’s performances are embedded in gendered contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness to actual relationships in his life (e.g., brothers in hip-hop, his father, his wife, his daughter, to children); sometimes it is important that they not be (murderers, Mafia bosses); at other times, it may not occur to Nas, his audience, or his critics that they might be.

I want to get people to think about, consider, that there is little willingness in hip-hop to go to the edge of what’s familiar and look beyond simply labeling songs and videos as misogynist to discover what drives not only individual misogyny, but the institutional subordination of girls and women relative to wealth (economic power), power (political power) and prestige (social status) (cf. Weber 1968).

Instead we often settle for what is widely accepted as true. Keepin’ it real, which has fast become cliché in and of itself, is no longer expanding knowledge. It is limiting it. (Do no reprint without permission of the author, Kyra Gaunt © 2008).

Irv Gotti’s logic escapes me but I’ve heard it before. Doesn’t even matter what he said. What I am left with is how often men are asked questions about the misogyny in hip-hop and their answers tend to be cliché, accomodating, justified, and a rationalization at best. They have no compassion or sensitivity to the real lives affected by the subordination of women in rap videos.

“If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” – Upton Sinclair

This quote appeared in Al Gore’s film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and it’s so fitting relative to what this male directors are up to and up against.

Irv Gotti: “People with real jobs and real lives …just want to be entertained!” You could say the same thing about when whites loved to gather around and watch black men (and in some cases women) being hanged. It was a social event and the murderous activity was also an incovenient truth back when. This is one of the things that is at the heart of the lack of intimacy, trust and generosity among the black youth and in our communities.