Where racist caricatures of African Americans once justified evils including slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, redlining and eugenics – stereotypes reinforced by mainstream Hip Hop are used to justify apartheid schooling, segregation, unequal application of the law under a failed War on Drugs, police terrorism, and an out-of-control predatory prison industrial complex. In minds sickened by the cultural implements of white supremacy, we become less than human and therefore unworthy of the respect and consideration human beings deserve. We become a fragment of our dynamic selves, or as the framers of the United States Constitution once put it, “three-fifths of all other persons.”
Hip Hop in the mainstream, the contemporary “commercial theatre” to quote Renaissance man Langston Hughes, does not sound like me. What is passed off as Hip Hop and projected as a reflection of me – the African, the black American, the founder of the genre – is a sliver of my total experience twisted to resemble traditional dehumanizing stereotypes that have long been used to justify injustices inflicted upon the collective black community.
This book was truly revelatory, pick it up today!
