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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3450
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 - 04:53 pm: | 
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The Hip-Hop Generation, Raising Up Its Sons
By Natalie Hopkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 18, 2006; C01
I walk into a restaurant for the reception welcoming my classmates and me back to graduate school. I am holding our 10-month-old daughter, Maven, on my left hip, while my right hand clasps the hand of our 3 1/2 -year-old son, Maverick. As soon as we enter, Maverick spots Norm, a 40-something white guy who is in my PhD cohort. Though my son has never seen this man in his life, Maverick runs toward him as if greeting a long-lost uncle. Norm stoops down to accept the hug, grinning back.
While I'm being introduced to a few professors, I look up and Maverick's working the room like a gubernatorial candidate -- "Hi. My name is Maverick, what's your name?" -- and offering students and administrators a tiny caramel hand.
The next afternoon, my classmates and our professor, a 50-ish white woman, remark about what a great kid Maverick is. "You have a fine boy there," Norm says. My chest puffs up with motherly pride. My professor agrees, adding: "I just can't wait to watch him grow up, and see his wonderful career as a rap star."
Eeeeeeeuuuuuurrrrrk?
Stop the record. Rewind: "Rap star?" Did I miss something? Like Maverick break-dancing behind my back? No, that would only come months later, thanks to the soon-regretted purchase of the DVD "You Got Served." Had he burst into rhyme during dinner? Nope, Maverick had long since grown bored of his favorite rap song, a Black Eyed Peas hit he turned into a potty-training anthem.
So where, pray tell, would our professor have gotten the idea that my son would have a future as a rap star? I don't know which increased my blood pressure more: the assumption that a rap career was an aspiration we'd dream for our son, or my own deep embarrassment for the comment, and the urge to shield my son from such a core part of my own identity as a member of the hip-hop generation.
It's a tricky paradox. As parents, we see it as our job to make sure our son doesn't live down to fake notions of black masculinity that too often are epitomized in rap music. But we find it equally important for him to be unapologetically proud of the ingenuity, strength and vitality of black culture, which of course includes hip-hop.
My husband, Rudy, and I were born in the mid-1970s and are part of the hip-hop generation of parents. Cynicism is our biggest enemy. Rudy is that 30-plus-year-old who spends hours playing video games, watching the Cartoon Network and elbowing the teenagers in line each Tuesday for the latest hip-hop release. He's the lawyer going to work in jeans and T-shirt, blasting hip-hop in his windowed office. Me: I've built my career writing about black youth culture and music, and still take pride in getting my groove on at the club.
Our kids go pretty much wherever we do, except the club, from the classroom where I teach college students, to Rudy's office, to Sunday football with Uncle Celo, fight parties, housewarmings and barbecues. They are used to being the only kids there.
We named Maverick after an early 19th-century Texas cowboy, attorney and politician who refused to brand his cattle. He said if anyone found a cow without a brand that meant it was a "Maverick." That's what I want for my son: to resist all the voices urging him to pick a brand -- whether a brand of politics, of black masculinity or of sneakers. I want him to live up to his name and forge his own path -- whether as a scientist, race car driver or MC.
To be fair, the professor who commented on Maverick's future turned out to be someone who knew enough about hip-hop to understand that it can be an art and an honorable career path, despite the icky way the culture is depicted in mass media. But that still doesn't explain how she calculated Maverick's prospects based on his behavior at that dinner.
File it under further confirmation of what author and educational consultant Jawanza Kunjufu calls a "conspiracy to destroy black boys." That's the power of black masculinity, a force that is skewed and amplified before being broadcast by media. It's potent enough to cloud anyone's vision, even those who should know better. We have our work cut out for us.
Settling In
I was nearly nine months pregnant six years ago when we moved into a Victorian rowhouse in the transitional neighborhood of Bloomingdale in Washington.
Unlike our parents, who chose mostly white, suburban districts with top-notch school systems, Rudy and I wanted to live in a black community in the Chocolate City, in part to shield Maverick from the psychological trauma and alienation that Rudy and I both knew from growing up in white suburbia.
We admittedly had a lot of romantic notions about being role models and helping a city rebound. When I aired these notions in a 2001 in The Post's Outlook section, my cynical views about the racial implications of gentrification drew a great deal of controversy. (That cynicism turned out to be well founded; according to the latest housing data, blacks are no longer the majority of homeowners in D.C.) But back then, the direction the city was going in wasn't as clear. Soon after we moved, we met some of the young black boys in the neighborhood. "You're a lawyer?" our sweet neighbor Brandon, about 8 at the time, asked Rudy. "Why would you want to live here?"
We have never regretted our decision, but some days, the choice feels a lot like class suicide. Both Rudy's and my parents hadn't fled poverty in the Caribbean, made it through college and the corporate world only to have their grandchildren dodging crumpled Red Bull cans and crack baggies on the sidewalk.
Then, of course, there are the local public schools. I was pushing baby Maverick around the neighborhood in a stroller one day when I decided to check out the local elementary school, Gage-Eckington. I walked in and asked for a tour from the vice principal.
She wearily led me around and answered my questions. No, she told me, there is no PTA, but if you're interested, we probably could use your help to get one started. She pointed out that I didn't have to enroll my son in this school: In Washington, you can apply to go to any school in the city through a lottery. "Do your homework," she advised me. Look at test scores, and demographics of the schools. She had just left a teaching job at a highly functioning school "across the park" -- that's Washington's euphemism for the white part of town, west of Rock Creek Park. The difference between the educational experiences was stunning. "These kids here have real problems," she told me.
When I shared the exchange with Rudy, he was apoplectic: Well, if they keep chasing off motivated parents, no wonder the school is in trouble! Right, I told him. We can get some of our neighbors together, write some grants and push through a specialized Spanish bilingual program. We don't have to chase the white folks to provide a good education for our son.
School Decisions
Three years later, our lofty goals became a casualty of busy work schedules. We didn't have the time to overhaul a school! I acted like a good buppie and followed, to the letter, the advice of that vice principal. I got on the Internet. Scoured test scores. I searched for addresses that were west of Rock Creek Park. I looked for an enrollment with a relatively low free-lunch (read: poverty) rate, and at minimum, a sprinkling of white students, so Maverick would know what they look like.
Phoebe Hearst Elementary, the school we were admitted to via the D.C. public school lottery, draws kids from all over the city to form a student body that is almost 70 percent black, with the rest Latinos, whites and Asians. Test scores are top-notch, and it is quasi-privatized by a PTA that raises tens of thousands of dollars to hire art, music, dance and science teachers and do school repairs -- perks that are scarce in the rest of the traditional public school system. The day I went to visit, I saw two of Rudy's former law school classmates doing the same. We immediately agreed to try to get our sons into the pre-K class of Mr. Jenkins, a dynamic young brother who'd been highly recommended to me in one of my annoying-but-informational mommy listservs.
Being middle-class parents in a highly competitive place like D.C. often means that we treat our children like NFL free agents, constantly on the hunt for a better deal. Despite all this hand-wringing, angst and endless research, not a day goes by that I don't question the decisions we've made about Maverick and threaten to bolt in an entirely new direction. Educational experts disagree about what is the best school setting for black boys. From untested charter schools to traditional public schools to private schools, the plethora of choices can drive you crazy.
Beyond the Neighborhood
Each day, ours looks more and more like a neighborhood our parents would want for their grandchildren. Our block has always been quiet, and we are extremely close with our neighbors, with a running club, garden club and barbecues. Each day, the streets get cleaner, crime decreases.
The dilemma in raising our black son remains: What if our culture is the problem? It's like the artist Mos Def says, We are hip-hop. It's our attitude. It's where we choose to live. It's the music we listen to, the values we raised ourselves on. Every day, we lament the current state of hip-hop, but even more, we lament the sad state of black reality that it caricatures and reflects, especially when it comes to black boys. I see hip-hop as a cry for help, for direction.
'The American Way'
A year ago, during a visit to Indianapolis, where I lived as a teenager, I decided to stop by to see my old high school principal, Dr. Eugene White, a black man who is an educational rock star in Indiana. He had become an award-winning superintendent of the wealthy suburban Washington Township school district where my high school was located. A few weeks before my visit, he had decided to take a job as superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. He had overseen unparalleled gains in black achievement in Washington Township. Now, he said, he wanted to go to the larger, less affluent urban district "to help them out." He had just sent out letters to the parents of low-achieving black boys who'd been plucked to be part of a specialized academy.
When we talked in his downtown office about my own experiences with Maverick, Dr. White could sense my wistfulness about not going through with the plan to stick with our neighborhood school. He quickly set me straight. "You never get a chance to do this but one time. This is your chance," he said. "You have the means to give him the best, whether that's in a school that is public or private. You've got to send him to a place that's ready for him. You've gotta find places that believe that he can be a Master of the Universe. If you are lucky enough to live in a community where you don't have to pay for that, good for you. If not, make that investment, it will pay you right back. You cannot feel guilty. You are not selling out. That's the American way."
Exactly. And that's also the American problem. Much of the hip-hop generation has been about remixing, restoring, renovating. We have an opportunity to do something that goes beyond our own children and our bragging rights. For the sake of all black boys floundering in public schools, I hope we can shed our own cynicism long enough to figure out a plan to rebuild.
Adapted from "Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip Hop Generation" by Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Y. Moore (Cleis Press).
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/17/AR2006101701087_ pf.html |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 5603
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 - 05:46 pm: |
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Maverik!? Maven!? Forget Rap; how detrimental is giving your son a name that refers to a stray calf and your daughter one that describes a "know-it-all". Cynical is right. LOL. |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 6718
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 21, 2006 - 09:19 am: |
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I find it interesting that Cleis Press and The Washington Post would publish the equivalent of some sista's blog.
But, oh well...
On the point she (appear) to be making:
There are certain things that help maintain and improve ANY society and culture of people. They include love and honor of family/friend/community, mutual respect & cooperation, respect for and enforcement of law & order, discovery & scholarship, earnest/consistent effort & industry and fair/accurate measures & exchanges of value (i.e., money). Sadly, MUCH of what's most lauded in hip-hop appears to flaut these vital tenets. |
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3457
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 21, 2006 - 03:02 pm: |
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“On the point she (appear) to be making…”
See that's what I'm talking about, Abm. That’s why I posted it: what point IS she making? That hip-hop is a bad thing. Or selling out your people is a bad thing...or a good thing. Or that selling out one's people, for the hip-hop generation in particular, is a bad thing. Or is she saying that it's a good thing? That it's all good? And if I understand your point correctly, the behavior that she describes of herself in the article mirrors the hip-hop culture anyway; so what the hell is she running from and/or trying to shield her kid from? Y’know??
Hope I didn't lose you!
(‘Twas my own little version of HIP-HOP...*wa--wa-wink*! …lol.) |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 1038
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 21, 2006 - 04:29 pm: |
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"Sadly, MUCH of what's most lauded in hip-hop appears to flaut these vital tenets."
On the money bro! From what I see and hear, hard core rap and hip hop is the complete antithesis of the social virtues and civility you mentioned. Like Chaka Khan once said; “We’re living in the dark ages of music!”
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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3461
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 21, 2006 - 07:35 pm: |
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AANNNDDDD ANOTHER ONE!! (Woo-hoooo!!!!):
Why I Gave Up On Hip-Hop
My 12-year-old daughter, Sydney, and I were in the car not long ago when she turned the radio to a popular urban contemporary station. An unapproved station. A station that might play rap music. "No way, Syd, you know better," I said, so Sydney changed the station, then pouted.
"Mommy, can I just say something?" she asked.
"You think every time you hear a black guy's voice it's automatically going to be something bad. Are you against hip-hop?"
Her words slapped me in the face. In a sense, she was right. I haven't listened to radio hip-hop for years. I have no clue who is topping the charts and I can't name a single rap song in play.
But I swear it hasn't always been that way.
My daughter can't know that hip-hop and I have loved harder and fallen out further than I have with any man I've ever known.
That my decision to end our love affair had come only after years of disappointment and punishing abuse. After I could no longer nod my head to the misogyny or keep time to the vapid materialism of another rap song. After I could no longer sacrifice my self-esteem or that of my two daughters on an altar of dope beats and tight rhymes.
No, darling, I'm not anti-hip-hop, I told her. And it's true, I still love hip-hop. It's just that our relationship has gotten very complicated.
When those of us who grew up with rap saw signs that it was turning ugly, we turned away. We premised our denial on a sort of good-black-girl exceptionalism: They came for the skeezers but I didn't speak up because I'm no skeezer, they came for the freaks, but I said nothing because I'm not a freak. They came for the bitches and the hos and the tricks. And by the time we realized they were talking about bitches from 8 to 80, our daughters and our mommas and their own damn mommas, rap music had earned the imprimatur of MTV and Martha Stewart and even the Pillsbury Doughboy.
And sometimes it can seem like now, there is nobody left who is willing to speak up.
I remember the day hip-hop found me. The year was 1979 and although "Rapper's Delight" wasn't the first rap song, it was the first rap song to make it all the way from the South Bronx to Hazel Crest, Ill.
I was 12, the same age my oldest daughter is now, when hip-hop began to shape my politics and perceptions and aesthetics. It gave me a meter for my thoughts and bent my mind toward metaphor and rhyme. I couldn't sing a lick, but didn't hip-hop give me the beginnings of a voice. About the time that rap music hit Hazel Crest, all the black kids sat in the front of my school bus, all the white kids sat in back, and the loudest of each often argued about what we were going to listen to on the bus radio or boombox. Music was code for turf and race in the middle-class, mostly-white-but-heading-black suburbs south of Chicago.
One day, our bus driver tried to defuse tensions by disallowing both. Left without music, some of the black kids started singing "Rapper's Delight." Within a couple of lines, we all joined in:
Now what you hear is not a test
I'm rappin' to the beat.
Then the white kids started chanting: Dis-co sucks, dis-co sucks, dis-co sucks, dis-co sucks, repeating the white-backlash, anti-rap mantra of the era.
The white kids got louder: DIS-CO SUCKS, DIS-CO SUCKS, DIS-CO SUCKS, DIS-CO SUCKS.
So we got louder, too:
YA SEE, I AM WONDER MIKE AND I LIKE TO SAY HELLO
TO THE BLACK, TO THE WHITE, THE RED AND THE BROWN
THE PURPLE AND YELLOW.
Then the white kids started yelling until their faces suffused with color.
And so we started yelling rhymes that I still know to this day, some of which my kids know and, I bet, so do some of the kids of those white kids who screamed at us from the back of my junior high school bus, raging against change, raging against black people, or, who knows, maybe just not appreciating our musical stylings.
SO I RAPPED TO THE BEAT LIKE I NEVER DID BEFORE.
We rhymed and the white kids disappeared before our eyes because we were in another world -- transported by the collective sound of our own raised voices, transfixed by our newfound ability to drown out their nullification.
We felt ourselves united, with the power of a language we didn't begin to understand. "Rap at its best can refashion the world -- or at least the way we see it -- and shape it in our own image," said Adam Bradley, a literature professor at Claremont McKenna College who is working on a book about hip-hop poetics. It has the capacity "to give a voice that's distinctively our own and to do it with the kind of confidence and force we might not otherwise have."
I grew older, and my love affair with the music, swagger and semiotics of hip-hop continued. There was Kurtis Blow, Melle Mel and the seminal Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:
Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge
I'm tryin' not to lose my head.
I learned all the rhymes played on black radio, because do you remember when MTV wouldn't touch black music at all? I got to college and started getting my beats underground, which is where I stayed to find my hip-hop treasures. Public Enemy rapped "Fight the Power" and it could have been the soundtrack to CNN footage of Tiananmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall:
Got to give us what we want
Gotta give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We got to fight the powers that be.
I was young and hungry and hip-hop was smart, and like Neneh Cherry said, we were raw like sushi back then, sensing we were onto something big, not realizing how easily it could get away from us.
* * *
Of course, the rhymes were sexy, too, part of a long black tradition starting with the post-emancipation blues. It was music that borrowed empathy and passion from exultations of the sacred, to try to score a bit of heaven in secular places.
It was college, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the post-civil rights, post-sexual revolution, newly grown hip-hop generation imagined that we had shed our momma's chastity-equals-black-uplift strictures anyway. So when MC Lyte rapped, "I ain't afraid of the sweat," well, you know, we waved our hands in the air. Besides, it was underground music, adult music, part of a wide range of expression, and it's not like we worried that it could ever show up on the radio.
Hip-hop was still largely about the break-beat and dance moves and brothers who battled solely on wax. It was Whodini, Eric B. & Rakim, Dana Dane, EPMD, A Tribe Called Quest. And always and forever, Lonnae Loves Cool James. I knew all LL Cool J's b-sides and used to sleep under a poster of him that hung on my wall. I still have a picture of the two of us that was taken one Howard homecoming weekend.
And if, gradually, we noticed a trend, more violence, more misogyny, more materialism, more hostile sexual stereotyping, a general constricting of subject matter, for a very long time we let it slide.
In 1988, EPMD rapped about a woman named Jane:
So PMD (Yo?) Why don't you do me a favor?
Chill with the bitch and I'll hook you up later
She's fly, haircut like Anita Baker
Looked up and down and said "Hmm, I'll take her."
But by last spring, it was Atlanta-based rapper T.I.:
I ain't hangin' with my niggaz
Pullin' no triggaz
I'll be back to the trap, but for now
I'm chillin' with my bitch today, I'm chillin' with my bitch today.
Nearly 20 years later and T.I. can't even be bothered to give his "bitch" a name.
We were so happy black men were speaking their truth, "we've gone too long without challenging them," as Danyel Smith, former editor of Vibe magazine, put it. And now, perhaps, hip-hop is too far gone.
* * *
At the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, rappers Snoop Doggy Dog and 50 Cent embellished their performance of the song "P.I.M.P." by featuring black women on leashes being walked onstage. This past August, MTV2 aired an episode of the cartoon "Where My Dogs At," which had Snoop again leading two black bikini-clad women around on leashes. They squatted on their hands and knees, scratched themselves and defecated.
The president of the network, a black woman, defended this as satire.
Hip-hop had long since gone mainstream and commercial. It was Diddy, white linen suits and Cristal champagne in the Hamptons. And it was for white suburban boys as well as black club kids. And it now promoted a sexual aesthetic, a certain body type, a certain look. Southern rappers had even popularized a kind of strip-club rap making black women indistinguishable from strippers.
I don't know the day things changed for me. When the music began to seem so obviously divorced from any truth and, just as unforgivably, devoid of most creativity. I don't know when my love turned to contempt and my contempt to fury. Maybe it happened as my children got older and I longed for music that would speak to them the way hip-hop had once spoken to me.
Maybe as the coolest black boys kept getting shot on the streets while the coolest rappers droned: AK-47 now nigga, stop that.
Maybe as the madness made me want to holler back: "Niggas" can't stop AK-47s , and damn you for saying so.
Last year, talk show host Kelly Ripa gushed to 50 Cent, a former drug dealer turned rapper, about how important his movie "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " was while black women around the country were left to explain to their own black sons, " Sometimes, darling, black boys get shot nine times and they don't live to brag about it on the mike . "
And a few weeks ago, watching the Disney Channel cartoon short "Fabulizer," I seethed when the little white character lamented that his "thug pose" wasn't working.
While the mainstream culture celebrates the pimped-out, thugged-up, cool-by-proxy mirage of commercial rap, those of us who just love black people have to be a little more discriminating. "Sometimes," writes sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy, "when you dress like a gangsta, talk like a gangsta and rap like a gangsta often enough, you are a gangsta."
My husband, Ralph, and I try to tell Sydney that rap music used to be fun. It used to call girls by prettier names. We were ladies and cuties, honeys and hotties, and we all just felt like one nation under the groove. Sydney, I tell her, I want you to have all the creativity, all the bite, all the rhythms of black rhyme, but I can't let you internalize toxic messages, no matter how cool some millionaire black rappers tell you they are.
Sydney nods, but I don't know if she fully understands.
* * *
I was born to be the Lyte
To give the spark in the dark
Spread the truth to the youth
The ghetto Joan of Arc
-- MC Lyte
Last spring, I got together with some other moms from the first generation of hip-hop. We decided to distribute free T-shirts with words that counter some of the most violent, anti-intellectual and degrading cultural messages: You look better without the bullet holes. Put the guns down. Or my favorite: You want this? Graduate! We called it the Hip-Hop Love Project.
Others are trying their own versions of taking back the music. In Baltimore, spoken-word poet Tonya Maria Matthews, aka JaHipster, is launching her own "Groove Squad." The idea is to get together a couple dozen women to go to clubs prepared to walk off the dance floor en masse if the music is openly offensive or derogatory. "There's no party without sisters on the dance floor," she told me. In New York, hip-hop DJ and former model Beverly Bond formed Black Girls Rock! to try to change the portrayal of black women in the music and influence the women who are complicit in it. "We don't want to be hypersexualized," said Joan Morgan, a hip-hop writer and part of the group, but we don't want to be erased, either.
Finally, it feels like we've gotten back to what black women are supposed to have always known: that it is better to fight than to lie down.
My daughter says I don't like black voices and I could weep that it's come to this. But instead I listen to the most conscious hip-hop that comes my way: Common, Talib Kweli, the Roots, KOS, Kanye West, who blends the commercial with commentary. I close my eyes to listen as Mos Def says:
My Umi said shine your light on the world.
And still, always and forever, Lonnae Loves Cool James.
I keep my CD player filled with old-school tracks and I fill my kids' heads with the coolest, most conscious, most bang-bang the boogie say up jump the boogie songs from when hip-hop and I were young. Sydney says I don't like black voices and I say: Ax Butta how I zone/ Man, Cleopatra Jones .
I make Sydney listen to songs from when rap said something, but my daughter is 12 and she laughs at me. Rap says something now, Mommy, she says.
Lean wit' it
Rock wit' it
Lean wit' it
Rock wit' it
She snaps her fingers and I just nod. Change is gonna come. Meanwhile, her song is catchy. And there are no bitches!
At least not in the chorus.
oneall@washpost.com
Previously published in http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lonnae-oneal-parker/why-i-gave-up-on-hiphop_b_3200 3.html |
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