At
the age of 71, I am a member of the progressive sector of
African-American intellectuals, the post-World War II civil
rights generation. The civil rights organizations I identified
with were the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women,
the Congress of Racial Equality, the A. Philip Randolph Institute,
the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,
among others. The leadership personalities I looked up to
and revered were W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter
White, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy
Height, James Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks,
Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Medgar Evers, and
Fannie Lou Hamer, to mention only a few.
However,
just recently several articles have appeared by members of
the post-civil rights era generation of Black academics that
amount to tossing poisoned darts at African Americans’ mainline
civil rights tradition and its courageous leadership figures.
One of these civil rights tradition-offending articles, penned
by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of Afro-American Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania, appeared in the New
York Times, September 27, 2002. In the op ed piece, Dyson
claims he belongs to a new generation of Black intellectuals
who consider leadership personalities like Martin Luther King
Jr. and Rosa Parks fair game for anyone’s comedic dishonoring.
He defended such dishonoring of King and Parks in the Black
people-offending MGM film, “Barbershop.”
Supporting
the mindless hip-hop style irreverence toward African-American
civil rights leadership, Prof. Dyson considers it some kind
of new freedom for Black actors and entertainers to
verbally dishonor Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and others. Dyson
approaches the analytically bizarre in his article when he
claims “that the barbershop…may be one of the last bastions
of unregulated speech in black America.” He also claims that,
“at the worst [civil rights organizations] are antidemocratic
institutions headed by gifted but authoritarian leaders.”
These
observations are not just bizarre, but outright falsehoods.
They are analytically wrong and serve as anti-Black ammunition
for conservative opponents of African-Americans’ civil rights
agenda. The fact of the matter is that millions of everyday
African-American citizens are fully aware of the unique, populist
give-and-take interaction between leaders and followers that
is typically experienced in branches of the National Council
of Negro Women, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the
National Bar Association, the African Methodist Episcopal
Church convention, Black women’s sororities, etc. Extending
forward from the Emancipation era in the late 19th
century, the nooks and crannies of African-American life have
been saturated with open speech, far more so than among
other American groups. Open speech is precisely what, for
example, Negro spirituals, gospel music, the “dozens,” dinner
table-talk, street talk, meetings of all kinds of African-American
organizations, have been about. Michael Dyson, an ordained
Black clergyman, might do himself well to revisit the folk
essence of African-American institutions, before he again
contemplates an affront to Black people’s honor.
But Dyson’s
article was a relatively mild version of the new Black leadership
pretense among hip-hop spokespersons, when compared with another
op ed article in the Boston Globe (October 2, 2002)
titled “There’s No Bridging The Hip-Hop Gap,” by Todd Boyd,
a professor of cinema/TV. Boyd’s grotesque slanders erupt
like weeds from a thicket of historical ignorance, as he attempts
to elevate hip-hop spokespersons to premier leadership status
among African-Americans. Let me explain.
Slandering
the ancestors
Todd Boyd
commences his historically vacuous article with a cynical
assertion that nothing associated with African-American life
and history warrants reverence from today’s young Black citizens.
He dismisses as valueless the courage, blood, sweat and tears
expended by Blacks in the long and tortuous struggle to smash
the cruel edifice of legal White supremacy. This intellectually
thuggish outlook embraced by Boyd and his hip-hop followers
– an outlook that honors nothing genuinely human – is packaged
in slick commercialistic lingo that adds to its profanity.
Boyd appears to be building a career on insults to past generations
of heroic American-American leaders and citizens who, in Martin
Luther King’s words, “fought the good fight.” Boyd’s words
drip with contempt for Black people’s civil rights tradition:
The
new-school hip-hop generation exists with a mandate to ‘keep
it real’; this has to do with a hardnosed truth about the
world and letting the chips fall where they may. There is
now a generation of black people in the United States who
find the ways of their parents and grandparents inapplicable
to their own lives.
In elaborating
this crude and nihilistic outlook – this ode to hedonism and
materialism, with its slap in the face of the heroism of our
ancestors’ struggle to smash American slavery and White racism
– Boyd wants the post-civil rights generations to believe
that the only important outcome of their ancestors’ struggle
was “assimilation into the mainstream.” This is a twisted,
barefaced lie. The facts of the matter are, of course, quite
different. Thanks to the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement,
multi-thousands of Black Americans have a greater number of
middle-class and good working-class jobs and hold authoritative
positions in industry and government. Yet they are in no serious
sense “assimilated into White society,” because White American
society still harbors the racist mystique in most of its sectors.
The vast
majority of us African-Americans who work alongside our White
American compatriots in industry, banks, retail stores, schools,
colleges, law firms, hospitals, in construction, etc., attempt
to cosmopolitanize and liberalize the mindset and attitudes
of White Americans, rather than defer to and get-along-with
old racist habits and attitudes of White Americans. The
goal of most Blacks has never been “to assimilate” into some
White “mainstream.” Boyd’s charge against the vast majority
of today’s middle and professional class Black Americans –
that they have “assimilated into racist White America” – is
nothing but a lie!
Boyd even
has the gall to package this Big Lie in pseudo-radical language:
“Hip-hop,” he tells us, “having come about in the aftermath
of civil rights, sees this assimilation as being akin to selling
one’s soul to the mainstream [white] devil.” I could hardly
believe my eyes when they fell upon this sentence, this arrogant
and inept ploy by Prof. Boyd to, first, co-opt Minister Farrakhanesque,
Black nationalist militant lingo (“the mainstream [white]
devil”), then attempt to make it applicable to the phony militant
patina of hip-hop verbalism. Such contortions suggest just
how pathetic hip-hop minded Black intellectuals like Boyd,
Michael Dyson, Tres Ellis, and their circle have become in
the quest to claim for themselves the mantle of “new Black
leadership.”
The fact
of the matter is, there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously
radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and values.
It is sad that there are university academics among us like
Michael Dyson and Todd Boyd (respectively at the University
of Pennsylvania and University of California) who fail to
recognize the political emptiness of most hip-hop expression.
Hip-hop entertainers and its entertainment modalities do not
represent a “new worldview” for African Americans. Quite the
contrary, the “hip-hop worldview” is nothing other than an
updated face on the old-hat, crude, anti-humanistic values
of hedonism and materialism.
Printer
friendly version of Hip-Hop cartoon
The “hip-hop
worldview” is far from being a viable post-civil rights era
message to African-American children and youth. It is seldom
a message of self-respect and self-dignity as Black individuals
and as American citizens, a message of discipline of one’s
emotions, discipline towards education, discipline and respect
toward one’s parents, and discipline and respect towards friendship
among peers of both sexes – this last being a discipline so
badly required to reduce unacceptable levels of violence among
African-American youth. It is ironic, in fact, that Black
youth in poverty-level and weak working-class families who
struggle to design a regime of self-respect and discipline
in matters of education and interpersonal friendship, get
no assistance whatever in these respects from hedonistic,
materialistic, nihilistic, sadistic, and misogynistic ideas
and values propagated by most hip-hop entertainers. The cruelty
of the irony is compounded because many hip-hop entertainers
come from working-class backgrounds, and yet lack awareness
of the injury done to the life chances of themselves and their
peers by the warped values that are the hallmark of hip-hop.
This is truly sad indeed! Truly sad that Professor Todd Boyd
can claim that hip-hop represents a new leadership paradigm
for African-Americans.
Contempt
for the Black legacy
Of course,
hip-hop can claim to be associated with a certain kind of
achievement. The genre has fashioned an entrepreneurial and
commercial accumulation breakthrough among African-Americans
in the Black/White pop entertainment relationship. As Todd
Boyd is happy to report in his article, “the hip-hop generation
has produced several black figures on Fortune magazine’s
list of the richest people under 40.” However, hip-hop entertainment
gains in African-American business ownership are hardly the
only important entrepreneurial advances among African-Americans
in the post-civil rights era, as anyone who keeps up with
the nearly 30-year-old Black Enterprise journal is
well aware.
Whether
they recognize it or not, Todd Boyd, Michael Dyson, and their
hip-hop intellectual colleagues have become advocates of anti-human
and Negro-minstrel skewed dynamics in contemporary African-American
entertainment. It is utter nonsense to pretend that this amounts
to a new kind of leadership paradigm for African-American
society. Yet this is precisely what Professor Boyd claims
in his article. He writes with pride that “Whereas the civil
rights generation found its calling in politics and the pursuit
of political institutions, this hip-hop generation has contempt
for these institutions and finds [commercial] culture to be
the primary means of expression.” Thus, for Todd Boyd and
also Michael Dyson, African-Americans worthy of respect today
are not “Thurgood Marshall, Medgar Evers, James Meredith,
Fannie Lou Hamer…etc.,” but “Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, Russell
Simmons, Master P., Queen Latifah, and Missy Elliot.”
Clearly,
something quite awful has gone wrong in the intellectual character
of the new advocates of hip-hop culture like Boyd and Dyson.
Their intellects have become saturated with inhumane, politically
useless and morally repugnant pop entertainment modalities.
Interestingly enough, there is an effort – hopeful perhaps
– to capture some of the élan generated by hip-hop entertainment
and translate it into genuine social and political activism,
the kind of activism Todd Boyd has “contempt” for. A group
calling itself the First Active Arts Youth Conference has
emerged with this goal in mind, and launched its inaugural
event in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, on September
21st, 2002. (See Renee Graham, “Stirring Consciences
with Hip-Hop,” Boston Globe, September 20, 2002.) If
such a new trajectory within hip-hop modalities is to succeed,
it clearly must disengage from the typical dynamics which
have thus far defined the cynical character of hip-hop.
Dr.
Martin Kilson received his BA degree from Lincoln University,
Pennsylvania, and his PhD from Harvard University, where he
taught from 1962 to 1998. He was the first Black granted full
tenure at Harvard. Kilson is Frank G. Thomson Research Professor,
Harvard, and recently completed,
“The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African-American
Intelligentsia.”
www.blackcommentator.com
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