Realizing the damage these images had upon the psyches of both Blacks and whites, Frederick Douglass, in 1848, denounced minstrel shows as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” Despite this, however, these stereotypes were highly profitable both economically and politically and continued to invade every form of media available. An early instruction manual for would-be cartoonists advised students:
The colored people are good subjects for action pictures: they are natural born humorists and will often assume ridiculous attributes or say side-splitting things with no apparent intentions of being funny…. The cartoonist usually plays on the colored man’s love of loud clothes, watermelon, crap shooting, fear of ghosts, etc.
These same characters and stereotypes, introduced at the dawn of cinema when D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a film that depicts the KKK as national heroes, became the first Hollywood blockbuster, are still alive and well today. Moreover, because of advances in technology and distribution, they have become even more pervasive and widespread and thus more damaging.
The hip-hop and post-hip-hop generations, the first groups to grow up in legally desegregated America, possess a worldview that has not been shaped by the sociopolitical institutions that our parents and grandparents were a part of, many of which, because of desegregation, have since withered away. Where the Black church, community centers, and family were once the primary transmitters of values and culture, today it’s a potent mass media concoction of pop music, film, television, and digital content—all of which are produced and disseminated through a small handful of multinational corporations.
Evidence of this intensified mass media onslaught can be seen, for instance, in the astronomical increase in advertising. Corporations, aware that “pop music, film and fashion are among the major forces transmitting culture to this generation,” as noted in Bakari Kitwana’s The Hip-Hop Generation, have intensified their efforts to reach us. Consider that in 1988, corporations spent $100 million on advertising targeted at children. By 1998, that number ballooned to $2 billion, and today that number exceeds more than $6 billion. In addition, the nature of these ads has morphed from straightforward product promotion to manipulative, sly programming interwoven into shows dubbed “reality” that are anything but. The reality is that while corporate America has realized the vast influence mass media has on youth, national leadership has been lethargic in addressing the ramifications of this reality. This is an area where the post-hip-hop generation, born amid a digital information age and having learned from the mistakes of both the hip-hop and the civil rights generations, must take the lead. Examples of the post-hip-hop generation taking initiative on this can be seen in the proliferation of organizations and individuals dedicated to media education, awareness, and literacy. Individuals like Kiri Davis, a young filmmaker who, at sixteen, directed A Girl Like Me, an award-winning short documentary, illustrate the damage of stereotypes on young African-Americans. In the film, Kiri places a black doll and a white doll in front of the children and asks them to choose the doll that is the nicest, the most beautiful, and the doll that they’d prefer to play with. Fifteen out of the twenty-one children preferred the white doll. When asked why he chose the white doll as “the nice doll,” one child responded “because he’s white.” Kiri tells me that although she was saddened by the children’s responses, “it’s up to us to change that, to create new images and celebrate ourselves.”
James Baldwin once said that in order to understand “what it means to be a Negro in America,” we must engage in “an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.” These myths, then and now, are perpetuated primarily by white institutions looking to both meet their bottom line and, by creating and reinforcing “myths” of Black inferiority, justify racist state oppression in the minds of the rulers and the ruled.
Before, during, and after slavery, the white corporate and political structure recognized that control over the Black image is not simply important to enslaving and oppressing Blacks, but absolutely central. Central to both the masses of whites who needed to believe, as “Christians,” that Blacks were not human beings in order to oppress them, or at least not oppose their oppression. And central for Blacks, on the other hand, because these images not only imposed an inferiority complex but also validated their oppression. After all, “It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality,” Baldwin added. It should be noted that even before European enslavers hit the West African shores of Elmina or Gorée Island, they’d produced and disseminated images of Blackness that supported the notion of white supremacy and justified the institution of slavery. Those that profited from slavery realized early on that their domination was contingent upon their control over how Blackness was portrayed. This notion of image control has been an important one for America not just in its subjugation of Africans, but in various other ideological conflicts. Italians, for instance, have long acknowledged that during World War II, the real victory for America came not from landing in Anzio or Salerno, but rather from Hollywood films that sold Italians on the idea of an American consumer society. The physical battle, in that regard, was a mere technicality.
In her essay “Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation,” filmmaker Pratibha Parmar writes that “Images play a crucial role in defining and controlling the political and social power to which both individuals and marginalized groups have access.” She concludes by reminding us that “the nature of imagery determines not only how other people think about us but how we think about ourselves.” Without media education and literacy, “we just slot in, we buy into it and accept their depiction of us,” a young woman explains at a media awareness conference in Newark.
Dominant images teach us, as a young girl once confided in me, “to hate myself. My hair. My skin. The way I talk. Everything.” They tell Black women that their natural state is not beautiful; that they are mere sex objects and “nappy-headed hoes” and push Black men “toward a fantasy of Black hypermasculinity” where “Blackness means a primal connection to sex and violence, a big penis and relief from the onus of upward mobility,” as John Leland puts it in Hip: The History.
This means that the images produced by and for whites to justify Blacks’ oppression, images of savages, of laziness, of pimpism and gangsterism, have been embraced by Blacks. It means that the images that taught white people to hate Blacks, to oppress them, have ultimately resulted in Blacks hating Blacks. And it is this reality that is most tragic. Tragic, not simply because these images are produced, but because they have been accepted and internalized and even reproduced. Baldwin writes in “My Dungeon Shook” that his grandfather “was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” I knew, as I looked at my brother, that he, we, made the same mistake.
“His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality,” is the way Harlem Renaissance scholar Alain Locke, discussing the challenges of the New Negro, put it in his 1925 article “Enter the New Negro.” Locke was attempting, by collecting and publishing the writings of Blacks during his time, to redefine Blackness in the popular imagination. He recognized that the New Negro had to defy the dominant stereotypes not just in art, but in everyday life. He writes:
Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective soci
al mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.
It’s startling that today, more than eighty-five years later, we are dealing with the same shadow, a shadow not even cast by our own Black bodies. A shadow that, as Locke writes, is “fiction,” but is paraded as real. And this is reel Blackness.
With rap videos, movies, music, news, advertisements, our minds have been shaped by one-dimensional, stereotypical, racist, and, most of all, limiting images of what Blacks can be. Because of the post-hip-hop generation’s overexposure to media-recepting technologies, these images—a multiplex of comfortable violence, sexism, machismo, and conspicuous consumption—bombard us 24-7. Although they may not reflect our reality, their sustained and continuous presence can determine it—determine the real.
The reel becomes the real.
In 1994, at twelve years old, I stayed in the house for nearly a year. When I did go outside, I didn’t wander beyond the ring of our home phone.
Why?
Because I couldn’t miss the call from my brother.
Brrrinnnnggg. Brrrinnnnggg.
I was the first to pick it up.
“ ’Ello,” I would say in a budding, out-of-breath voice.
“You have a collect call from the state correctional facility,” the operator would say in monospeak. A smile would split across my face as I pressed 1 and accepted the call.
“What’s up, lil’ brother?” My big brother would ask sincerely. A few minutes into our conversation, he’d say the magic words: “Play somethin’ for me,” and he called the other inmates to the phone so they could huddle up and listen to my selections. I remember putting the phone to the speaker on my boom box and bumpin’ “Life’s a Bitch” off of Nas’s Illmatic:
Keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high
’Cause life’s a bitch and then you die.
As a preteen, I became a remote prison DJ and as I rocked the crowd of inmates, I began to see just how powerful hip hop was as my brother and the other inmates erupted in awe, repeating, like scripture, the lines: “Keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high / ’Cause life’s a bitch and then you die.” It was clear then, as it is now, that the hip-hop generation was using rap music, almost exclusively, to shape, develop, and define both public personas and personal identities.
Although for the hip-hop generation, “keeping it real” became the ultimate barometer of one’s character, the post-hip-hop generation realizes that because we do not control how “real” is constructed, defined, and disseminated, this image is not real at all. Rap may serve as the most visceral example of the performance of reel. As writer William Jelani Cobb, in To the Break of Dawn, writes, “‘Real’ is to the rap industry as ‘All-Natural’ is to the fast food supplier, as ‘New and Improved’ is to the ad agency. As ‘I Solemnly Swear’ is to the politician.” Hip-hop culture, and in particular rap music, is particularly unique in this because “The blues artist may sing about evil, but is not required to be it or live it. The rapper is judged by a different set of credentials—the ability to live up to his own verbal badness. To get down to the denominator, hip hop has come to understand itself in the most literal of terms,” concludes Cobb.
“I’m trapped between me as a person and me as J.O. the rapper,” Baltimore emcee John Jones, who has just come home from serving jail time, tells me. “When I was inside [prison], I was rappin’ a lot more positive. But now that I’m out, my rhymes is more on some negative stuff because that’s what people want to hear. It’s a different kind of prison,” he explains. This prison is erected by the need to respond to stereotypical and racist portrayals of Blackness and maintained by our cultural obsession with the “real” and inability to see through the traps. This crowds and distorts not only the aesthetic space that Black artists create in, but also the average Black woman or man, like J.O. or my brother for example. Under the banner of “keeping it real,” the hip-hop generation has been conditioned to act out a way of life that is not real at all. The hip-hop industry (as opposed to the hip-hop community) has been successful in framing an authentic Black identity that is not intellectual, complex, creative, educated, or diverse, but a monolith of violence (only against other Blacks!) and sexism. These images are not just harmful domestically, but are beamed around the world as a statement about universal Blackness. As a student in London I experienced, firsthand, the effects of this global distortion when my Nepalese roommate, once he discovered we’d be living together, asked to be transferred because he “feared for his life.” After a discussion, he confessed that his irrational fears were not the result of ever being around Black folks (he hadn’t), but consuming, in Nepal, the negative images about African-Americans. “I thought you’d shoot me,” he confessed to me later.
This ethos translates to hip-hop films, as well. Hood films, unlike, say, Italian mafia flicks, are supposed to capture and define what it means to be Black. Take, for example, the fictional film Menace II Society whose official tagline was “This is the truth. This is what’s real.” Filmmaker Byron Hurt, whose documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, introduces the film with this observation:
We’re like in this box. In order to be in that box—you have to be strong, you have to be tough, you have to have a lot of girls, you have to have money, you got to be a playa or a pimp, you have to be in control, you have to dominate other men, other people. If you’re not any of those things, people call you soft or weak or a pussy or a chump or a faggot, and nobody wants to be any of those things so everybody stays inside the box.
So why do we continue to stay in these boxes? Perhaps it’s because of the American golden rule: those with the gold make the rules. So, essentially, white teenage boys, the primary consumers of rap music, spend billions of dollars on images and music produced by white corporations that reinforce these stereotypes. Fixed on meeting bottom lines, corporations in turn leverage their excessive amount of capital and power to produce, perpetuate, promote whatever’s on sale—thus employing a disproportionate influence on our minds.
This process of white consumerism, which is age-old, has taught Blacks that there are hefty profits to be made by living down to white expectations. Many of today’s artists feel as prominent Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset did when her first novel, There Is Confusion, was rejected because, as one editor put it, “white readers don’t expect Negroes to be like this.”
“Yo, I’ll kill you nigga… I’m moving kilos of coke… I’m strapped with AKs, semis, Glocks, shit from Russia… yaddy, yaddy, yah,” J. O. tells me about the topics young Black rappers feel they have to discuss. “That’s the shit that most niggas is on. Why? Even though it ain’t true, ’Cause if it was you’d be under the jail, they know, just like I know, that that’s the shit that sells. Negativity. Drugs. Guns. Bitches. There really is not an alternative. You either rap like that or you don’t sell. That’s where you gotta come from if you wanna make it.”
“Even if that’s not really you?” I ask.
“Yup,” he confirms.
My brother felt the same way.
In the hip-hop world, keeping it real has become the measuring stick for one’s connection to the ghetto. The ghetto has become the repository of all that is real, and everything else is not. The problem with this is that the ghetto in mass media is not the real ghetto.
The ghetto doesn’t exist and the Gulf War never happened. French theorist Jean Baudrillard shocked people when he published the book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard argued that the war was largely a TV event, experienced by the masses more like a video game than an actual situation of war. Baudrillard explained this theory as hyperreality and
asserted that we can no longer distinguish between imitation and reality—and that we often prefer the imitations because they have been gutted of any societal consequences.
The ghetto then, as most experience it through mass media, doesn’t exist either. It, too, is reel. Wrenched out of its sociopolitical and racial injustice context, it is transformed into an urban playground. It allows people to listen to “ghetto music,” without examining the issues that allow such a place to exist.
“What makes it so difficult is to know that we need to be doing other things…. They want [Black artists] to shuck and jive, but they don’t want us to tell the real story because they’re connected to it,” says rapper David Banner, who is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he also served as president of the student government. Banner is right on; whites and even upwardly mobile Blacks who consume reel “ghetto” music have made a fetish out of Black disenfranchisement. And because the music is lite, they are not forced to deal with the reality that it is racist policies—exclusionary zoning laws, real estate industry discrimination, redlining, parasitic corporate development, and the Department of Transportation’s highway projects that tear apart viable Black communities—that create the ghetto in the first place.
On the Black-hand side, Blacks in the ghetto see a highly stylized, depoliticized version of their environment, and on the other, Blacks outside of the ghetto are told their experience is inauthentic. In this market-driven environment, truly important ideas about love, caring, and service are disregarded as incidental or lost completely. For those of us who are already battling issues of inadequate education or poverty, warding off these harmful ideological ideas is even more challenging.
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Page 3
