So I take it you feel misrepresented?
Of course. There is me, as I am, with all of the institutional, political, economic, and structural racist policies, and then there is my image that fails to address any of this in a real way.
The misrepresentation leads to a public consensus about my residents. They believe, both those who reside elsewhere and, sadly, those who reside in me, that their poverty is their fault. That they are lazy, addicted, sexually promiscuous, and so on and so forth, and that this is the reason for the poverty, when the reality, as I’ve touched upon, is completely different. To give you a quick example, most people who live in me are not addicted to drugs or alcohol, don’t engage in criminal activity, and are not on welfare. This would come as a shock to those who absorb the images on TV and in movies and the rhymes of mainstream rappers.
America is a very individualistic society. So, as a result, poor people are blamed for their poverty and the rich are credited with their wealth, disregarding inheritance, class privilege, resources, et cetera. I mean, Bush is as responsible for his wealth as most of my residents are for their poverty.
Yeah. So do you think this has political ramifications?
Definitely. If the majority of Americans think that the poor are poor because of their own faults, then they’ll also believe that the poor should get out of it on their own. They believe the poor are undeserving. All of this is reinforced by popular culture, which literally makes fun of poor people. Their lack of education is laughed at, their squalor glorified, their struggle criminalized. People certainly don’t want to change the policies.
There’s this big thing about “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.”
You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don’t have any damn shoes!
What about the violence in you?
Violence? [shrugs]
Well?
Was Nat Turner violent?
Uh, I’m not —
Reminds me of Nat Turner, because he was not violent, he was responding to slavery, which was violent. The conditions in which my residents live are violent. There’s always been this attempt to demonize my residents. They call survival after a hurricane “looting.” They call protests against a system that keeps them poor “riots.”
Look, man, as long as I’m around, there will be desperation. What do you expect if you put the poorest folks together in one area, take away jobs, destroy social networks, police the hell out of them, harass them—I mean, seriously, what do you expect?
Is there anything else that you’d like to tell the post-hip-hop generation?
Organize, organize, organize. The time is now.
Thanks for your time.
Peace.
We were born into an unjust system;
we are not prepared to grow old in it.
— BERNADETTE DEVLIN
“And finally, how does it feel to be just twenty-three years old—and a professor?” asked the energetic host of the Pacifica radio program on which I was being phone interviewed.
“I haven’t started yet, however, the thing—”
“I’m sorry, brother Asante, I’m afraid that’s our time,” she informed me.
“Oh,” I grunted, feeling cheated.
“It was nice talking to you. Good luck to you this semester at Morgan State University.”
“A’ight, thanks, peace,” I said as I disappointedly hung up the phone.
I wanted to answer the question. I wanted to say that I truly was excited about the position; however, just as our interview was prematurely amputated, I was convinced that my professorship would be, too.
A few years before I was hired, artivist Amiri Baraka was offered the position of poet laureate of New Jersey by then-governor Jim McGreevey. Baraka—perplexed that he, given his highly publicized radical politics—would be offered a state gig, warned McGreevey, “You’re gonna get in trouble,” as he accepted the job. Sure enough, within a few months, after Baraka wrote and recited his book-length post-9/11 poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” there was trouble. The poem asks: “Who have the colonies / Who stole the most land / Who rule the world / Who say they good but only do evil / Who the biggest executioner / Who made Bush president? / Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying? / Who talk about democracy and be lying?” When Baraka refused to resign at the governor’s request, McGreevey, lacking the power to fire Baraka, opted to abolish the position altogether, thus giving Baraka the distinct moniker as the first and last poet laureate of New Jersey. On a similar note, I felt I was destined to become the first and last twenty-three-year-old professor ever appointed.
Why?
Because most colleges and universities, especially historically Black schools, are conservative institutions. I have the audacity to believe that poverty can and must be eradicated; that health care can and must be made free; that prisons should be converted into schools and rehabilitation centers; and that war is not the answer—thus making me, in the eyes of those that seek to conserve the unjust world as it is, a “radical.” Additionally, I understand that the exercise of education is never neutral. Education, in this turbulent time, is either engaged in integrating and conforming young minds to accept and maintain the world they’ve inherited or it is an exercise in liberation by which young women and men create, imagine, and participate in the transformation of their world. Because I coveted the latter—the transformation of the world—I knew that my job was not secure. For, in order to transform the world, one must challenge and confront the institutions that train and graduate custodians of the status quo.
Despite my skepticism, though, the reality was that I was now a professor. Among the classes I was set to teach was a general studies course entitled “The Post-Hip-Hop Generation.” Months before, I’d published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “We Are the Post-Hip-Hop Generation,” based on conversations I was having with young people around the country who felt that hip hop no longer represented their desire for radical change and wasn’t apt to respond to the critical challenges facing our world. A month later, community organizers in Newark put together “Post-Hip-Hop Generation,” a panel discussion where music executives, DJs, rappers, and scholars came together to discuss, among other things, the ideas put forth in my article. Despite a lively discussion, nothing could match the promise of a class populated and taught by the post-hip-hop generation.
Zora Neale Hurston, who strolled across the Morgan State University (then Morgan College) campus as a student ninety years before I would begin teaching there, once remarked that “The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.” As my first day approached, I grew more and more anxious about my role in helping to hatch the future. And then the day came.
The scene: As I barreled down battered North Avenue on my way to teach my first-ever class at Morgan, I wondered if tomorrow would show up today. Then, just like that, I saw something, something in the way of things, a something that was actually a somebody—a somebody who nobody else seemed to see. That body, stiff and Black, was sprawled on the side of the road, pressed haphazardly against a filthy curb. Thoughts careened through my mind—Is he moving? Damn, he ain’t moving. Maybe he’s asleep. Nah, he ain’t moving at all. Why isn’t there a crowd huddled around this somebody? How come people ain’t stoppin’? Why aren’t cars pulling over? Why ain’t I pulling over?—as I sat at a red light. As the light turned, I snatched a glance at the clock: 10:40. My class started at eleven and I was about ten minutes away. You can’t keep going, I told myself. You made an observation, now you have an obligation.
I pulled over and shimmied out of my car.
With each step toward the body, came a new revelation: Stiff.
Blood.
Damn.
Dead.
Finally, I arrived to find a boy, not a moment older than I, shot to death on the busiest street in Baltimore, lying in a pool of crimson and garbage, as cars and people sped past.
“
Sorry… for… being… late,” I huffed to my new students, out of breath from sprintin’ across campus. When I explained to them that I’d just seen something terrible and horrifying, something even more terrible and horrifying happened. My students, all of them Black and most from Baltimore or Washington, D.C., were completely unmoved. In matter-of-fact tones they lunged into similar stories about poor Black men and women killed by the myriad symptoms of urban poverty and injustice.
“So, that doesn’t make y’all upset?” I asked.
“I mean, it’s life,” one student explained.
“So then, how does life feel?” I asked, which they answered in the frigid language of silence. They had, a long time ago, grown numb to the daily terror of the hellish conditions that were omnipresent. Later, a student explained to me that, for all intents and purposes, this somebody who I saw was “just anotha nigga dead.”
“Where you from, Professor Asante?” a student asked, surprised at my very visible outrage.
“Philly,” I responded—proud.
“And you never saw a dead body in Philly?” he quizzed.
Quickly, I began to recall my own experiences growing up in the Illadelph. I realized that not only had I seen dead bodies, but I’d seen people shot, stabbed, and brutalized, both by people who looked like them and by people who didn’t. However, since going away to fantasyland colleges—first to Lafayette College, then to the University of London, then to UCLA—I’d been removed from so many of the realities of the inner city. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten what it looked liked, but rather, I’d forgotten the feeling, forgotten the pain, forgotten forgetting, forgotten forgetting what I forgot to forget in the first place. Feeling it now, after six years or so, was wrenching. Sadly, during my childhood in Philly and my students’ childhood in Baltimore and D.C., the violent, unjust, and oppressive conditions, the disregard for Black life, had been normalized and naturalized to such a blunt point that, as one of the students, Shandel, put it, “it’s like the rain.”
“It just happens and all you can do is try to get inside but at some point, we all get wet, some more than others, though,” she proverbed. “I know,” she chased, “that things were different back in the day but all people care about now is what’s on BET. There’s no respect. Nothing. So what can we do?”
Truth is: I didn’t know. I was in the classroom, like she was, in search of answers to that same question. I did know, however, that the fact we were having this discussion was a kind of proof that there were small fires beneath the surfaces of apparent apathy.
“Things were bad back then, too,” another student offered. “The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.” My goal, as professor—which comes from the Latin “profitieri” meaning “to declare openly”—was not only to “declare openly,” but to reveal that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are in the same week; to show that injustice, inhumanity, and poverty, conditions of our color rather than our character, are not as natural as the “rain,” but instead, were the most unnatural conditions human beings could be subjected to. And, perhaps most important, engage with them in a process that could improve our communities. As bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom:
The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.
“Never doubt,” I told my class, evoking the words of the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, “that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
“But it’s different now. It’s not like it was backntheday,” Shandel insisted. She was right.
The struggle ain’t right up in your face, it’s more subtle
But it’s still comin’ across like the prison tunnel vision.
— THE ROOTS, “DON’T FEEL RIGHT,” GAME THEORY
The racism our parents’ generation endured—legal segregation, lynching, hoses, dogs—was certainly more “in your face” than today, and that is precisely the danger of today. What we are experiencing is the manifestation of what President Richard Nixon told his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
One of my students, Ryan, explains the frustration of knowing something is afflicting you, yet being unable to clearly identify it. “It’s like a huge mosquito,” he tells the class. “No, it’s a big-ass wasp with a deadly stinger that you can’t see but it is constantly biting you,” he says about invisible institutional oppression. “Eventually, since you can’t see the damn thing, you start to think that there is no big-ass wasp, that maybe something is wrong with you. But I know, from reading and just being aware, that the wasps are real!”
Young people are the most dangerous clan of folks to the oppressive power structure, because we are, many of us for the first time in our brief lives, thinking critically about the world we were born into and are outraged. We have always been instrumental, not only in recognizing the flaws in our society, but engaging in corrective action. When Huey Newton founded (along with Bobby Seale) the Black Panthers he was just twenty-four years old. The Panthers were a response to the state-sponsored racism that oppressed the masses of Black people. They asked, as former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal asked the graduating class at Evergreen State College during his historic commencement speech that he delivered from death row, “Why was it right for people to revolt against the British because of ‘taxation without representation,’ and somehow wrong for truly unrepresented Africans in America to revolt against America?” Furthermore, they understood that “For any oppressed people, revolution, according to the Declaration of Independence, is a right.” The Black Panthers created the Ten Point Program that set an agenda to address what they considered to be the most urgent needs of oppressed people.
WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE.
WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS.
WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY.
WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.
WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES.
WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION.
WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U.S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR ALL PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY.
WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
What struck my class most as we read the Ten Point Program—which concludes with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—was how many of the issues that the civil rights/Black power generation struggled against are still prevalent today and must be faced by us.
“We don’t even have to make a new list,” a student remarked. “We still don’t have those things—still.”
“Okay, so do we have decent housing?” I posed.
A chorus of “
nos,” “nopes,” and “uh-uhns” fluttered back.
“What about health care? We got it? Y’all got it?”
“Nah.”
“What about police brutality—is that still happening?”
“Man, I got beat up by the cops yesterday on my own block for no damn reason. See,” one student shouted as he pulled up his shirt to reveal a combination of dark smudges—all too familiar marks of the beast.
For the students who thought the Panthers’ goals were utopian, we summoned the words of Emma Goldman who told us that “every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.” For the students who believed the demands of housing and health care were unrealistic and too radical, we checked out the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Human rights should never—must never!—be perceived as too lofty or radical. This occurs, however, because of the incessant onslaught from systems that don’t recognize oppressed people as people, generating a sense of undeserving-ness of even basic human rights. Forty years after the Ten Point Program, much has changed and yet, sadly, too much has stayed the same. It was Malcolm X who advised,
Policies change, and programs change, according to time. But the objective never changes. You might change your method of achieving the objectives but the objective never changes. Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality—by any means necessary.
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Page 6
