Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
So, in an attempt to limit his tyrannical oppression, I refused to submit. As Ras Baraka explained on The Fugees sophomore album The Score, “Cuz if you let a mothafucka kick you five times, they gonna kick you five times. But if you break off da mothafucka’s foot, won’t be no more kickin’.”
M.K.A.: Can you speak on the importance of knowing your rights?
Dead Prez: Coming out into these U.S. streets, prison streets, prison states, police states without knowing your rights is like a soldier without a weapon. You almost have no defense for the bullshit. And believe me they come at you with X amount of it. A lot of times if we knew our rights a lot of things that happen with the police wouldn’t have happened. Illegal searches and even some arrests wouldn’t even go down the same way. Knowing your rights is almost like turning your lights on with the roaches because they scatter and with the lights on there is your protection. I also believe that our protection is with the people because the people define what rights are you know what I mean. Getting pulled over for making an illegal right turn is grounds for being murdered in St. Petersburg, Florida. Tyrone Lewis was murdered for being a motorist. Often it happens to us, we’re tried and delivered a sentence of death so many times in our community by these terrorist police officers, so knowing your rights is one of the chief ways that you can defend yourself. But the struggle continues, the resistance is hot. The resistance is still hot.
We have always been resistant towards police brutality and treatment in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where these secret underground teams basically crawl the streets at night and abrogate brothers’ and sisters’ rights, patting us down looking for the gun knowing we got the gun, looking for everything else—you know all kind of unjust treatment in our community. We’ve always been resistant to it. It’s nothing new. We know that our first job is to be soldiers and be defenders of our rights so we began organizing ourselves. We organize with many community organizations and structures including people like the December 12th Movement or The National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, student organizations like Fisk.
“Step out of the car,” the officer ordered as he opened my door.
“You still haven’t told me what I was pulled over for? What was I pulled over for?” I insisted.
Completely ignoring my question, he says, “What are you hiding, boy?”
“Boy?”
“Fuckin’ nigger,” he vomited.
At that moment, I was faced with two distinct choices: life or death.
This is exactly his plan, I chuckled to myself as I chose life. He wants me to flip. He wants me to flip. Nope, I’m not givin’ in. Not givin’ in, I told myself, attempting to prevent my blood from bubbling, desperately trying to prevent the death, which was waiting above the scene like a vulture, from occurring.
“I know my rights,” I insisted, to which he threw my license and registration into my car and stalked off, frustrated at his impotence.
In France, the Black and Arab youth scream “Police partout, justice nulle part!” meaning “Police everywhere, justice nowhere.” So long as officers like L. Clark patrol neighborhoods in a predatory manner, there will be no justice—can be no justice.
M.K.A.: So, what does this experience prove or confirm to Dead Prez?
Dead Prez: More than anything it confirms, it supports the fact that we’re at war. And to me that was the most glaring thing that I probably learned out of that experience is that three years later we still don’t have an apparatus in place that can truly defend the people’s rights. We need some courageous soldiers, some really courageous soldiers to step up. Those of us who don’t have a whole lot of records, who ain’t gon’ face three strikes, those of us who feel like we know we have nothing to lose but our chains, just step up and take leadership. And I got to say if you see it you go get it, RBG means be “revolutionary but gangsta” but it also means “reading ‘bout Garvey” and “ready to bust gats.”
M.K.A.: Do events like this one shape your lyrics?
Dead Prez: Let me tell you something, as an emcee you know, is only one part of the person that is M-1, I’m not just a rapper. Now it’s time for me to use the propagandist in me to be able to put it into our culture as part of our resistance. You need that experience because people will ask what will you do when somebody robs your house or when the big bad wolf comes. But in these situations we need to know not to advocate the police at any point. And only in that experience do you learn the treachery of dealing with that man’s arm of his protection of capitalism, which is his army: the pigs. So that experience helped me know exactly what to do. It informed me as to what to say to people in my rhymes and in my life. We’re in a war and people automatically put your agenda up for you when you’re a rapper, like you get a car and a mansion and you’re good, you’re pretty much good, you go to jail for having a vest or some weed or hope that you don’t get caught up with a weed charge but that’s the life of a rapper. Now we put a new face on a rapper, we say to the members of the community when you fuck with me now I know how to organize, I know how to activate my community with the words that we say instead of a lot of times walking into the agenda that was put here before us and just doing the normal thing and cop a plea, which is what rappers normally do. So that’s what helps inform me, to act from experience to make it be part of our culture to be resistant. I don’t want to preach and Dead Prez doesn’t want to preach; I mean I can’t tell anyone right from wrong and what to do. All I can talk about is based off of my experience and I can tell you how to avoid traps, some of those traps. And I think with hip hop the general problem that we have, besides the fact that we don’t own hip hop as a property, is that we don’t even own it as an intellectual property. We don’t provide the agenda by which success is gained and most of the time we don’t achieve it. Zero percent of rappers don’t even got what rappers are supposed to have. So with that agenda being caught up in that way we find ourselves being caught up in a lot of meaningless discussions. At Morehouse a brother stood up and said, “What are we gonna do with all the twenty-four-inch rims and what are we gonna do with all the women with the tight-ass clothes?” I said, “Well brother, what are you gonna do?” I said you should “ignore it, you should organize in your community so that when people have the choice between twenty-inch rims and some semblance of freedom or justice they will choose justice.” So it’s my job to bring it back ’cause don’t forget that our biggest enemy is the red, white, and blue. George Bush is laying down more laws than any brotha that ever dissed you, I understand the game and so this is what I’m here to do.
M.K.A.: Do you have a message to the youth, perhaps, that you’d like to express?
Dead Prez: If I had to deliver a message to the youth I’d say to keep your eyes open and your fist clenched. I’d say they can try to kill the messenger but they can’t kill the message, they can try to jail the revolutionary but not the revolution.
M.K.A.: Peace.
Dead Prez: Peace.
Although the racist, hostile, and violent attitudes police officers display in cities across America present a real problem, the new generation mustn’t be shortsighted in analyzing and solving this age-old conflict. Just as we cannot blame the teachers who are put in crumbling, overcrowded schools for the education problem or the soldiers on the ground in Iraq for the war, we must be committed to working our way up the ladder of power. It is there—among the decision makers—that the problems that plague all of us are preserved and maintained. Despite the anger that we may feel toward police, it is not guns that will save our collective lives, for they never have and never will. Instead, it is organizing in such a way to attack the injustice at its root and
save the lives of our unborn children and grandchildren. Most important, it is up to us to imagine a new system—a system not rooted in the past of America’s slavery days, but in the freedom of tomorrow.
*Fight the Power; Fuck the Police; Free the Prisoners; Free the People; For the People; Feed the People.
The only thing worse than fighting with your allies
is fighting without them.
— TRADITIONAL SAYING
Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor,
never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor,
never the tormented.
— ELIE WIESEL
“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” I soul-shouted from the center of my heart as I marched through the haze of downtown L.A. with a half million brown brothers and sisters behind me. Another half million in front. Across the United States—in Houston, Philadelphia, Lexington, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and everywhere in between—similar spirits were stomping, sweating, and singing songs of freedom and resistance—songs arranged with courage, inspired by revolution, organized peacefully, and played loudly before the whole wide world.
Unify with others who have also been denied
their existence to discover the magnitude of
our collective resistance.
— WELFARE POETS, “IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH,”
RHYMES FOR TREASON
I would have marched that day, May 1, 2006, even if I wasn’t in production on Super Imigrante, a documentary film about Latino immigration/migration in America. Even if I hadn’t spent months in the homes of undocumented citizens and in predominantly Latino schools, recording their struggles. Even if I couldn’t speak or understand Spanish, which, for the most part, I couldn’t. In fact, that day—which came to be known as “a day without immigrants”—was the first time in my life that I’d said more than “hola” in Spanish.
My voice grew louder as my ebony fist, in unison with all of the other fists, thrust toward the heavens.
“El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!”
The massive demonstrations were sparked by the racist attitudes and policies aimed primarily at Latino immigrants. Specifically, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (HR 4437), a bill introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Rather than provide a comprehensive, rational, and effective approach to immigration issues, Sensenbrenner’s bill vilified immigrants. Among its many provision, HR 4437 would make it extremely difficult for legal immigrants to become U.S. citizens; would make it a felony to aid or transport any undocumented worker including family members and relatives; would make all immigrant workers subject not only to deportation but also imprisonment; and would drastically disrupt the U.S. economy by instituting an overly broad and retroactive employment verification system without creating the legal channels for workers to acquire verification.
“El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!”
My comrade and codirector, Abraham, whose dad had left Mexico, his country of birth, in the tattered trunk of a battered Buick, knew that I didn’t speak or understand Spanish, his native language.
“Yo, want me to tell you what that means?” he asked me as we filmed the shimmering sea of tan faces that transformed L.A.’s smoggy landscape into a cloudless one; both the vision and the focus was clear.
“I already know what it means,” I told him as our wide eyes met and our heavy heads nodded to the invisible rhythm of common understanding.
At that moment, he knew that I knew without knowing.
I didn’t know the linguistic translation into English, but I knew the emotional translation. I didn’t know that the lines I sang were from a song written by Chilean composer Sergio Ortega, but I knew that they were written for those of us who were, at that moment, writing history with the boiling ink that surged through our bodies. I knew that human beings weren’t “illegal.” That, actually, employers who exploit vulnerable workers are the criminals. That Chicano children—like African, Native American, Asian children, et cetera—need to learn about their history and their people’s contribution to the world. That wrenching apart families is wrong. And that searching for a better life, just as the heroic, green card-less immigrant Superman did when he fled Krypton, is a human right.
“El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!”
When the rain falls
It don’t fall on one man’s house.
— LAURYN HILL, “SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY,”
MTV UNPLUGGED
When Mexico welcomed Africans who’d escaped the shackles of slavery in the nineteenth century, they were doing the same thing I was doing: recognizing the connectedness of struggles against oppression and domination. Historically, it has been the failure to recognize this connectedness, combined with strategic campaigns by those in power to ensure disunity, that have kept the oppressed oppressed. As raptivist Immortal Technique explains:
Black and Latino people don’t realize that America can’t exist without separating them from their identities, because if we had some sense of who we really are, there’s no way in hell we’d allow this country to push its genocidal consensus on our homelands.
Blacks and Latinos in America are both suffering under the same oppressive system of structural racism and domination. As Latina activist Elizabeth Martinez points out in her “Open Letter to African-American Sisters and Brothers”: “We’re both being screwed, so let’s get together!”
It is because we are “both being screwed” that we need to resist those people who seek to divide. Those poor Blacks and whites who scream that “the Mexicans are taking our jobs!” “No,” we must explain to them, “rich white men are giving away your jobs to workers who they can not only pay less, but also workers who are more vulnerable. Workers whom they feel they don’t have to pay at all. Workers who can be threatened with deportation.”
The river of resistance to oppression flows far beyond African-American or Mexican struggles. The resistance is, indeed, a river. And that river, although it may pass through many countries that claim it as their own, is just one river. This hit me, on a spiritual level, when a Salvadoran friend of mine called me from Malcolm X Park in Chicago where thousands of people from different neighborhoods and ethnicities had formed a human chain as a symbol of their togetherness. The fact that this chain of solidarity was happening in Malcolm X Park couldn’t be more fitting. For it was Malcolm who knew, toward the end of his life, that the fundamental problem is not between Blacks, whites, browns, yellows, reds, or any other racial category, but rather, between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing, the exploited and those who do the exploiting—regardless of skin color.
Malcolm realized that the only way to fight oppression is to unite with people who share the same spirit of resistance against inhumanity and injustice—and those spirits may, and in fact should, have different colors, genders, religions, et cetera. We may not always agree on the fine points, but those who are fighting against oppression must unite. Malcolm, for example, just before his death, visited Dr. King in Selma. Although for years they’d publicly disagreed on many issues, Malcolm offered his hand in friendship to Dr. King, explaining, “We may differ, Martin King, on tactics, we may differ on philosophy, we may differ on many things, but you are black, and I am black, and let’s not forget that, and let’s stand together on that basis!” This fraternal act had a contagious effect as Dr. King, just weeks after he won the Nobel Prize, went to Newark, New Jersey, to see Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) to extend the same statement of brotherhood that Malcolm made to him. They believed that being Black was enough to establish unity. Today, we must take that brotherhood and make sure it is motherhood, sisterhood, and simply hood. We must unite not simply around color, for we know now that oppression comes in many colors, and we must simply be against it in all of its colors.
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What unites me with my Latino/a brothers and sisters, now, again, is the struggle—not for civil rights but to the higher level of human rights. It is important that we never fall into the trap of demoting human rights issues to civil rights struggles. When we do that, we limit the involvement and influence that the international community can have. Let us never forget that the Latino struggle in the United States is not one that is solely under the jurisdiction of the Untied States, but it is an international issue of human rights. For when we elevate our causes to the level of human rights, the world hears us—as they heard Paul Robeson’s deep baritone. “You are our children,” he told us, “but the peoples of the whole world rightly claim you, too. They have seen your faces, and the faces of those who hate you, and they are on your side.”
We see this idea of solidarity and unity in the late Tupac’s art gallery of a tattooed chest. Directly in the center is a charcoal-colored AK-47 with the words “50 Niggaz” hovering above it. The idea behind the tat is that if “niggaz” in all fifty states united, we could bring about radical change. I say it’s time to take Tupac’s idea to that next level: 50 Nationz.
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Page 16
