washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

• Arrrrrgh!
• GTFOH
• Are you kiddin me?!!

These were three, quickly paced responses that I had on Zoom this morning, in the middle of three webinars today after another person typed into the chatroom that she places the responsibility (or maybe it would be more precise to call it: the blame, or the culpability) for the president’s rise on “early 2000s hip hop.”

WHOA. WHOA. WHOA. Don’t attribute his rise primarily to hip hop.

That was my initial response. Rather than consider this challenge, this woman double-downed on her assured all-knowing that hip hop’s defining characteristics are coveting capitalism by any means necessary. That’s a perverted misunderstanding of Black music, as if Black people aren’t writing rhymes about excessive force and the everyday legacy of slavery from Quickbooks to Princeton, Georgetown, Emory, and every other higher learning institution that was scrounging endowments and buildings off of the backs, sweat equity, and sales of people who were enslaved.

See, herein lies the complexity: that I agree that Black culture and Black music is the tip of the cultural spear. I agreed with that, but not with the blame she assigned to hip hop for Trump’s ascendancy in the U.S. in the 21st Century. To agree with that dominating influence of hip hop negates the Tea Party, invisibilizes Citizens United, and obfuscates from the timidity of Democrats from Gore-Lieberman in 2000 to Chuck Schumer being the modern day equivalent of Neville Chamberlain.

Where I am in some agreement is that Black people, Black life, Blackness in all of its iterations, shades, sounds, languages, anatomies has an outsized influence in this world. This is one presentation of disproportionality — oftentimes, I’ve known disproportionality as the omnipresent ills and imbalances in housing, health indicators, educational opportunities for people of color vis a vis Whites people in the western world (because it is Whites in North America as well as Europe, Australia, and South Africa and Zimbabwe, too) that arise from racism baked into social institutions born out of imperialism and colonialism. And, a quick reminder: when I write racism what that means is the White supremacy perpetuated by White people, not due to the daily lives of people of color. To confuse which race of people is at the core of racism is an illiteracy of power and position in society.

<Streiht Up Menace by MC Eiht>

Hip hop is influential but hip hop is not the main ingredient in the rise of the raging White supremacists of the 21st Century. Misogynists within rap or hip hop are a small slice of the musical genre. People who don’t listen to rap music, or don’t know much about it aside from the headlines generated by racist, fearful mainstream media outlets, don’t know much about the liberatory ballads and beats of Black music.

This microaggression in a chat reminds me of multiple interactions over the last year I’ve had with White people freaking out over my t-shirts. One shirt was a screenprint of Christopher Wallace, better known, especially to those who don’t know 90s rap music, as Notorious B.I.G., when some frail White woman approached me at a bakery attempting to denigrate rap music. Again, this was someone attempting to say how all rap music was violent, angry, and nasty towards women. She finished her sentence and I spoke up to name her ignorant platitude. I wasn’t gonna waste my breath reminding her about Salt n Pepa or The Boys, TLC or the Roots, Queen Latifah or Kwame, the Boy Genius, People Under the Stairs or KMD. She’s forgetting Cardi B’s candor; but Ima guess that she didn’t forget about Taylor Seifts defiance against angry, White men. And, in terms of contemporary hip hop, I figure she doesn’t know: Little Simz, No Name, Jidenna, or Michael Kiwanuka. That’s the inconsistencies of sloppy double standards that presents as anti-Blackness. This sloppiness is most often spewed by Whites, but they do not have a monopoly on anti-blackness as today’s microaggressions were courtesy of a Brown woman, and there are plenty of self-loathing Black people regurgitating the racism that’s been pumped into our psyches for generations.

A few months later, I was wearing another political t-shirt that was pink said: FREE PALESTINE. I wore it one day in December that exposed the fractures in friendship after old friends interpreted those two words with my complicity with rape, killing of civilians as I stand publicly opposed to the genocidal warmaking of the Israeli Defense Force and their enablers and accomplices in all the administrations, Democrats and Republicans alike, of the U.S. government.

<I’m a Thug by Trick Daddy>