It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (4 page)

I found
him
.

“Peace,” I lobbed as I climbed out of my car.

“ ’Sup, Malo,” he greeted me as I walked into the part-liquor, partbodega, part-Chinese food spot where we agreed to meet. Hearing that name—“Malo”—took me back. Malo, the last part of my middle name Khumalo, was what I preferred to be called in my early teenage years. When people would ask what my name meant, I would ignore the Swahili definition of Khumalo, which means “prince,” and instead offer the Spanish definition of
“malo,”
which simply means “bad.” I’m reminded of my adolescent confusion every time I snatch a glimpse of my brown bicep where, at fourteen years old, I engraved “MALO” in Old English typeface into my young skin on the day that I was both arrested and expelled from school.

Our warm embrace was interrupted by the screeching of bicycle wheels.

“Yo, what’s the deal?” hurled a grown man, his face engulfed in a serrated beard, as he zoomed in on a bright-pink kids’ Huffy.

“ ’Sup, nigga,” he threw back as the rider pulled up.

After a three-way dap was exchanged, I watched the two as they told lies to each other; lies about “bitches” that they “fucked” and “bitch-ass niggas” who they “fucked up.” After each lie, they’d laugh and dap again. It was pure performance. But neither of them would ever acknowledge themselves as actors, instead it ended with:

“Uzi, you’s a real-ass nigga, man. I’m out,” the bearded man said as he peddled off, disappearing around the corner.

“Uzi?” I turned to him and asked, thinking about the dysfunctional family of submachine assault guns.

“Yeah—yo, that’s what niggas call me ’round here,” he briefed me.

Uzi? I’m not callin’ him that
, I thought to myself.
His mama ain’t name him Uzi
.

In fact, not only did his mama not name him Uzi, but she would adamantly disapprove of the name. I knew this, of course, because
she’s my mother, too. Our mother—the soft-spoken Queen from Brooklyn—who asks me, every time my big brother is arrested, every time the police trample her door down in search of her firstborn son, or every time the word “nigga” flies from his blunt-burnt lips, “Where does he get it from?”

“I don’t know, Mom—not from you, though,” I usually say in assurance, trying to prevent my mother from blaming herself. It’s not her fault, it’s no
one’s
.

My brother, whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a year because I was away in school and he didn’t have a phone, was my childhood and adolescent hero—a “true thug.” I used to boast about him to my awestruck middle-school crew. That was ten years ago. On this day, our reunion, he was homeless, jobless, and on the run from the police.

“Let’s go for a ride,” I suggested. I wanted to talk about his performance; to dig deeper into what I remember “Malo” going through as a teenager and what I suspected my brother was still going through. I figured the car ride would be my opportunity.

“Yeah, c’mon,” I said, as we pulled off.

Just ask him. Just ask him why he’s frontin’
, I urged myself.

“So, what’s the deal, man?” I asked him.

“What you mean?”

“From my heart, don’t take this the wrong way. But sometimes I feel like you’re frontin’. Puttin’ on an act. You know I know the
real
you,” I explained, putting it all out there.

After a round of awkward silence: “I’m stuck, man. Trapped. Like this is who I’ve gotta be,” he tells me.

Interestingly, my brother’s feeling of entrapment (and he’s not alone) supports an idea that writer Alice Walker dubs “prison of image,” whereby society’s stereotypes function not as errors, but rather forms of social control. In my brother’s case, this prison of image led him to multiple stints in prison proper.

When Black men and women find themselves trapped inside the hellholes of the prison industrial complex, we usually point to poverty, inadequate schools, and/or broken households—all symptoms of institutional racism—as primary antagonists. In my brother’s case (and he’s not alone), his symptoms were different—since he was raised in a middle-class, two-parent household. However, the cancer of racism was the same. This does not mean escaping personal responsibility; however, many in the post-hip-hop generation have recognized that perhaps the most pervasive form of racism, one that is seldom tagged as such but cuts across geographic, gender, age, and class lines, is representation vis-à-vis mass media. Even in the face of relative progress made in electoral politics and education, African-Americans have made hardly any progress on the critical front of representation in mass media. Of course most Black men and women are in the prison system as a result of poverty rather than pop culture; however, the bombardment of negative stereotypes exacerbates an already dire crisis even further and in some cases, like my brother’s, creates crises out of relative stability.

If one simply (and unfortunately) turns on the TV or radio, images of people of African descent remain virtually unchanged from the racist stereotypes promoted before and during slavery. Although there have been minor updates to the Black shadow cast on screen, the formula has remained fixed. Fixed, for the Black woman, has been Jezebel, the lewd mulatto; Sapphire, the evil, sex-crazed manipulative bitch; and Mammy, the Aunt Jemima nurturer whose sexuality has been so removed that she is best portrayed by Martin Lawrence
(Big Momma’s House)
, Tyler Perry
(Diary of a Mad Black Woman)
, or Eddie Murphy
(Norbit)
. For the Black man, fixed has been Bigger Thomas, the white-woman-crazed brute; Jack Johnson, the hypersexed, hyper-athletic super thug; and Uncle Tom, the asexual sidekick.

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:

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: