It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (9 page)

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.

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:

“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 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.

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:

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,

Indeed, polices have changed. Programs, too. From Vietnam → Iraq; Nixon → Bush; ghetto → ghetto; and oppressed → oppressed, the freedom that previous generations fought for still eludes many. The post-hip-hop generation may be closer to freedom than my father’s generation, but being close to freedom ain’t freedom. Just as one cannot be half-pregnant, half-free is not a reality, either. To recognize this is not a matter of political orientation. Radical, moderate, or conservative, it’s obvious that the status quo, as far as the majority of young Blacks is concerned, is dysfunctional. If this strange place, where the lives of Black children are stunted before they ever start and where ignorance is celebrated, is not dysfunctional, then what is?