In my previous column on 28 Feb. 2001, there was a mistake that I would like to acknowledge first. Eminem did not win the 1997 Rap Freestyle Olympics in Los Angeles; he came in second place. (Thank you, Jakira Kaos.)
For those of you who don’t know, the media and our government have an agenda set, and it is to discredit hip-hop culture, as well as any other group or person that speaks about the failure of American society and institutions and how we need to change. The hip-hop culture has been in existence since the 70s but is a tradition rooted in Africa. When hip hop started in New York, many people turned to it as a way to get out of the gang life that they were involved with, just as now, a lot of former drug dealers turn to rap to begin living a legit life making legal money. However, because of the police state that we live in, that is not wanted.
You may ask yourself, why not? The prison/military-industrial complex is a multi-billion dollar-a-year industry. Companies such as Toys R Us, Microsoft, MCI, AT&T and others, as well as the government, make money off of building prisons, filling them up with people to work for pennies an hour and exporting products made by incarcerated people around the country or around the world. Because the labor is cheap due to the low wages, the profits that these collaborative corporations and government entities make are very large. Also, the miseducation that exists in our educational institutions results in people forming a long line knocking on the doors of our prisons and jails. About 70 percent of the prison inmates in the United States are illiterate, said Eric Schlosser in his Atlantic Monthly article The Prison-Industrial Complex. How did they sign or read their confessions? Did they know why they were being placed in a cell to spend, in some cases, the rest of their lives locked up?
The following is a radio-edit excerpt from Eminem’s The Way I Am off of The Marshall Mathers LP: Sometimes I just feel like my father, I hate to be bothered/with all of this nonsense it’s constant/And, Oh, it’s his lyrical content/ the song Guilty Conscience’ has gotten such rotten responses’/And all of this controversy circles me/and it seems like the media immediately/points a finger at me/So I point one back at em, but not the index or pinkie/or the ring or the thumb, it’s the one you put up/when you don’t care, when you won’t just put up/with the foolish crap they pull, cause they full of crap too/When a dude’s gettin’ bullied and shoots up his school/and they blame it on Marilyn (Manson) and the heroin/Where were the parents at? And look where it’s at/Middle America, now it’s a tragedy/Now it’s so sad to see, an upper class city/havin’ this happenin’/then attack Eminem cause I rap this way/But I’m glad cause they feed me the fuel that I need for the fire/to burn and it’s burin’ and I have returned.
Tim Wise wrote an interesting article on 6 March 2001 on AlterNet.org called School Shootings and White Denial. Here is a piece from it: I’ll tell you what went wrong and it’s not TV, rap music, video games or a lack of prayer in school. What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long. What affects the urban ghetto’ today will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you tomorrow, and unless you address the emptiness, pain, isolation and lack of hope felt by children of color and the poor, then don’t be shocked when the support systems aren’t there for your kids either.
What went wrong is that we allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of those who are anything but white like us. We ignore the warning signs, because in our minds the warning signs don’t live in our neighborhood, but across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on the rare occasion we have to drive there. That false sense of security the result of racist and classist stereotypes then gets people killed. And still we act amazed.
When were the first school shootings in this country? Why were Band-Aid type solutions only proposed in 1999? When will we work collectively together to bring about real transformation, and no longer reforms or concessions?
