White People And Hiphop: Tourists, Expats, Or Colonists?

Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s major-label debut “Finally Rich” has sparked verbal sparring among rap critics about cultural tourism and hiphop. This valuable conversation began with a glowing review by Jordan Sargent, and an angry response from RapRadar’s Brian “B.Dot” Miller. The central controversy is over the responsibilities we have when we talk about hiphop, and who should be allowed access to and influence over those conversations. Sargent is white, and Miller is black. Miller insisted on the New York Times ArtsBeat podcast that his distinction between tourism and legitimate participation in hiphop culture is based upon tenure and not melanin, and the disagreement over Chief Keef does not break along simple racial lines at all. But there is a natural suspicion of white voices in hiphop discourse.

The controversy over Keef is in many ways about the age-old lyrics vs. music wrestling match over how to value hiphop. Craig Jenkins has already eviscerated the “community of gatekeepers” who insist Keef’s lyrical content removes him from serious consideration or threatens to destroy hiphop. I’ll try to add something to the parallel thread about cultural tourism, white privilege, and good intentions.

Suspicion of white folks in conversations about hiphop is natural, and more valid than most acts of cultural gatekeeping. American history makes this inescapable. We’re a superpower built in record time thanks to 400 years of stolen labor and stolen lives, and another 150 of systematic oppression of the descendants of that thievery. (That that oppression is now abstract rather than legislated does not make it disappear.) This makes white appropriation of black cultural output inherently more problematic than, say, a Greenwich-born Bentley-driving 17-year-old who finds her angst validated and channeled in the music of impoverished Appalachia. Or a dentist’s son pouring the pain money can’t treat into an identification with music by blue-collar drug-addicted pop geniuses. The honky-tonk bar crowd might be wary of the rich girl, and the punk club might be angry to learn the mosher among them is going home to financial security and a nuclear family. But class divisions may go unnoticed, and even if they don’t the gap in privilege that financial class breeds is limited, and most of all, impermanent. Progress for the rich is, to borrow a phrase, fragile and reversible.

When it comes to hiphop, the privilege gap between the outsider and the insider is based on hundreds of years of brutality. When suburban white privilege comes to the rap show, it’s crossing a hell of a lot more space, and that space is going to be enforced by society far into the future. (To steadily decreasing effect, inshallah.) Straight, white, and male is the easiest difficulty setting in life. Even the white kids who were dealt a bad socioeconomic hand are holding it at a damn good table. And again, history: However sincerely we participate in hiphop culture, we’re beneficiaries of systematic oppression finding an outlet in the anthems of the systematically oppressed. This is the source of the suspicion that sometimes greets white hiphop heads, and which lingers to some extent even after we succeed in proving our sincerity and depth of knowledge or curiosity about the culture. This is why some people call us tourists even after we’ve stayed awhile and taken up residence in hiphop culture.

There are a lot of us expats, in an ill-defined space between those raised on black music and culture and those just-visiting dilettantes. We think we’ve earned some standing (and some codeswitching). But some folks regard us more as colonists. And that’s not a crazy sentiment, especially as regards white folks’ interest in violent drug rap. Dave Bry’s New Republic piece does a nice job of explaining why:

For me, a white person, a rap fan who does in fact enjoy Chief Keef’s album, for musical reasons, much the same as I enjoy Waka Flocka Flame’s music, even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message—a person who likes to think that I can compartmentalize various elements of artistic expression, and appreciate music without any agenda—it’s worth giving hard thought to what it means that a black person is saying that she can’t. It’s worth ruminating on how deeply and insidiously white privilege and the black lack thereof infect every aspect of life in America—even something as simple as enjoying a good pop song. […] We want it to be different, us well-meaning white people. Maybe that’s even part of why we listen to rap music, or part of why we started to, anyway, because we want to do our best to make amends, to bridge the divide. We don’t want to be outsiders; we don’t want for there to be such a thing as outsiders. We want it to be different, but it’s not.

We want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. (Quoting “The Wire” sagely is another primary identifier of us would-be expats.) I don’t agree with Bry about Chief Keef on artistic grounds – based on two spins of “Finally Rich” and video evidence of his formulaic plug-and-play vapidity as an emcee, I want badly to side with Keef’s critics – but he’s dead on that it should be impossible to consider the Keefs and Flockas and Gunplays of the world completely outside of moralized critique, no matter how much serious white fans of their music might wish it so. Still, I think Bry missed a spot.

When he says he enjoys thuggish rap “even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message,” he’s pleading innocent of partaking in ign’ant shit as escapist fantasy. This seems disingenuous. Part of the appeal of everybody from Keef to Nate Dogg is that they give us access to a synthetic blend of toughness, indomitability, and limitless sexual potency that most of us don’t actually enjoy. Those banal lyrics and deplorable messages aren’t just part of the fun– they are the fun. That folks like Bry or myself aren’t enjoying this stuff in a mocking or ironic way does not make it completely above-board. We’re getting sincere enjoyment from something that makes us feel more alive, but as his piece notes so eloquently, we don’t live with the consequences when the music stops. Insofar as we white sojourners praise and download this stuff because it lets us play gangster, we’re taking advantage of the privilege gap Bry discusses.

And that gap puts the lie to the expat aspirations of even the most sincere and versed of white hiphop heads. Jamelle Bouie’s recent piece on his decision not to carry a flatscreen TV to his friend’s house alone, for fear of being taken for a thief, reminded me that my tourist status can’t be erased by my own actions. It’s imposed by the culture around us that assumes the worst about a black face – an attitude with much deeper roots than rap music, but which has been drawing strength from rappers for decades.

But Chief Keef can’t be responsible for that attitude. Neither can any other rapper. Images of black virility, self-determination, and power have scared white folks since long before Ice Cube nailed the motives of white cultural reactionaries in an interlude on his 1992 album “The Predator.” Every white hiphop head should check their privilege almost constantly. That privilege does not oblige us to be silent about our tastes or criticisms– much the opposite, in fact. It obliges us to speak a lot, because it obliges us to speak carefully and inquisitively, and recklessness always takes fewer words than consideration. Just playing good rap for our friends isn’t being down for any cause unless we’re also participating in the conversation about systems of oppression. Hiphop kickstarted that conversation long before we got here, and however much time we’ve put in learning this culture we should always acknowledge that we’re guests.

Otherwise, we’re not just tourists or commuters to hiphop, free to walk unjudged through the streets our musical heroes depict. We’re worse than that. We’re subconsciously preying on that privilege in order to enjoy feeling Like A Bawse in private. We’re colonizing the music of someone else’s struggle.

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Statement by the President on Enhanced State Department Rewards Program

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For Immediate Release January 15, 2013 Statement by the President on Enhanced State Department Rewards Program

Today I signed into law S. 2318, the Department of State Rewards Program Update and Technical Corrections Act of 2012. This legislation will enhance the ability of the U.S. Government to offer monetary rewards for information that leads to the arrest or conviction of foreign nationals accused by international criminal tribunals of atrocity-related crimes, and of individuals involved in transnational organized crime.

This powerful new tool can be used to help bring to justice perpetrators of the worst crimes known to human kind.  This includes individuals such as Joseph Kony and other leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), as well as certain commanders of M23 and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).  All of these individuals face charges before international criminal tribunals for horrific acts, including attacks on civilians, murder, the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and rape. We have made unmistakably clear that the United States is committed to seeing war criminals and other perpetrators of atrocities held accountable for their crimes, and today’s legislation can help us achieve that goal.

The legislation also authorizes the U.S  Government to offer rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of individuals involved in transnational organized crime, such as money laundering and trafficking in persons, arms, and illicit goods.  This important new tool will support my Administration’s Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, bolster our fight against the scourge of modern slavery, and protect our national security.

Blog posts on this issue January 17, 2013 1:45 PM ESTWatch: Four Kids Who Want President Obama to Do Something About Gun Violence

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January 17, 2013 1:24 PM ESTRegional Round Up: Now is the Time

Editorial pages across the country today are lauding the President’s broad approach to address curbing gun violence in our nation

January 17, 2013 11:39 AM ESTCountdown to Affordable Health Insurance

Learn more about the new Health Insurance Marketplace, which will kick in come October and mark the beginning of new health insurance and tax credits for millions of Americans.

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Will Obamacare Go the Way of Prohibition?

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Steve Benen on MSNBC’s “The Maddow Blog” dismisses congressional efforts to repeal all or parts of Obamacare and admonishes conservatives to get with the program. Why? He says Obamacare “is here to stay.”

What makes Obamacare untouchable? Congress considers countless pieces of legislation “to amend” this legislation or that statute. Already, Congress has just repealed Obamacare’s massive long-term care entitlement.

Consider a public policy that was so “settled” it became part of the Constitution.

Ninety-four years ago today, the 18th Amendment was added to the Constitution. It prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes.”

The 18th Amendment was enacted with far more support than Obamacare. Congress conducted no committee hearings on the proposed amendment and spent a mere six hours in debate before approving it. Three-fourths of the states ratified it a mere month later—lightning speed for an amendment to the Constitution. The then-relatively new Progressive movement was all for the change, as Progressives wanted government to solve social problems caused by wayward individuals—in this case, alcoholism.

The 18th amendment proved unworkable. Even after approving it, states were reluctant to enforce it. Plus, the policy led to unforeseen problems, including the rise of organized crime (it took over the alcohol industry) and a decline in tax revenues.

Finally, in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified to repeal the ill-conceived 18th Amendment, rendering prohibition an odd moment in American history.

What does this mean for Obamacare today?

Like Prohibition, Obamacare was no model of careful deliberation. Members of Congress voted for it without ever reading it. They were encouraged to pass the bill “so that you can find out what is in it,” then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously commented.

But Obamacare passed by just a few votes, a narrow partisan majority. It hasn’t been fully implemented and is already a “managerial nightmare,” according to Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko. “Administration officials have missed deadline after deadline, failing to provide crucial information,” Owcharenko writes, “because overhauling one-sixth of the economy is riddled with innumerable unintended consequences that are nearly impossible to avoid.”

And like Prohibition, Obamacare remains unpopular. It’s never enjoyed support from even half of the American people, and its positive rating is likely to go down as taxes and health care premiums go up. And next year, the feds are going to have to enforce an unpopular mandate.

In 1919, Progressives managed to enshrine one of their favorite social policies in the Constitution. It lasted for 14 years before being repealed. In 2010, liberals sidestepped the Constitution entirely and rammed a poorly written, unpopular law through Congress. That was three years ago.

Conservatives, we’ve got 11 years to beat Prohibition’s record.

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The Dangers Of Putting More Armed Guards In Schools

The National Rifle Association outraged many when CEO Wayne LaPierre blamed the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre on violent video games, natural disasters, and corporate media. Deflecting calls for tighter gun regulations, LaPierre also attacked school security and demanded more armed guards in schools. Since LaPierre’s incendiary press conference, the NRA’s approval rating has plummeted.

Though the NRA’s image has suffered, the gun lobby’s proposal to put more armed guards in schools has become one of the most popular ideas in the gun violence debate. According to a new NYT/CBS poll, 74 percent of Americans believe more security guards would help prevent mass shootings in public places like schools, movie theaters or malls. President Obama’s comprehensive plan to prevent gun violence also called for hiring as many as 1,000 more “school resource officers,” or law enforcement officers with the power to arrest students.

About a third of all public schools already have armed security guards, and the demand for school policing has made it the fastest growing area of law enforcement. But studies have been unable to show that armed guards make schools any safer. Two of the most deadly shootings in US history, at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech, occurred on campuses with security guards.

While no discernible link between safer schools and armed guards has been established, there is one clear impact. Student arrests shot up when school resource officers became more prevalent in schools after the Columbine shooting. Even controlling for poverty level, schools with armed officers have nearly five times the rate of arrests for disorderly conduct. As states beef up their security after Sandy Hook, more students are at risk for being treated like criminals. One Pennsylvania county immediately hired armed guards who are reportedly searching childrens’ lunch boxes. Local governments in Utah, Florida, Tennessee and Texas also started hiring armed guards after the NRA speech.

A new influx of SROs into schools prompted by Sandy Hook will only worsen the nation’s already robust school-to-prison pipeline. Shortly after Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves announced a $7.5 million plan to hire law enforcement officers to patrol schools, several civil rights groups released a harrowing new report detailing Mississippi students’ abuse at the hands of these types of officers:

The report, which is to be released Thursday, found that in one Mississippi school district, 33 of every 1,000 children were arrested or referred to juvenile detention centers; that in another, such referrals included second and third graders; and that in yet another, only 4 percent of the law enforcement referrals were for felony-level behavior, the most often cited offense being “disorderly conduct.”[...] In addition to statistics, the report described episodes in which a child was taken home by the police for wearing shoes that violated the dress code, and a school where misbehaving students were handcuffed for infractions as minor as not wearing a belt.

Black students were far more likely to be punished by these officers, even in racially mixed schools. The Justice Department is currently pursuing a lawsuit against Mississippi over the abuse of these armed guards, and the state’s House of Representatives held a hearing on the report on Thursday morning. Still, Obama and state lawmakers are rushing to send in more armed guards who will likely make the problem even worse.

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Partisanship perverts the NLRB

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When former SEIU Associate General Counsel Craig Becker left his post at the National Labor Relations Board in December 2011, he quickly segued into a cushy job as the AFL-CIO’s co-general counsel. Likewise, a year later, former management lawyer Brian Hayes exited the board after his two-year term and immediately landed a plum position representing management with one of the nation’s prominent labor law firms.
 
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In 1935, Congress established the NLRB as a body made up solely of “three impartial Government members” to represent the public interest in labor disputes. An impartial NLRB was seen as crucial because of the contentious nature of labor relations in the United States.

But 78 years later, NLRB members on both sides of the labor-management debate use the post as a stepping-stone to bigger things. The damage, of course, is decisions made while on the board could well be altered by members’ desire to increase their marketability after their service.
 
The problem goes back to at least 1953, when President Eisenhower nominated management lawyer Guy Farmer and corporate industrial relations expert Albert Beeson to the board – the first NLRB members to come exclusively from the management side and adjudicate in their favor. 
 
During a hearing before a Senate committee debating the Beeson nomination, James Carey, an official with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, said it would be impossible for him, a union leader for more than 20 years, to act impartially – and the same would go for a company lawyer. George Meany, president of the American Federation of Labor, said he worried this would give board members a “predisposition to the employer viewpoint.”
 
Today, the tables are turned, and it is Republicans who are complaining, and with good reason: All of the Obama administration appointees to the board came either from unions or union management (except for Sharon Block, who nevertheless sides with unions on every vote).
 
As a result, unsurprisingly, unions have benefited from a variety of Obama NLRB decisions. The board overturned longstanding legal precedent last month when it ruled a television station must continue to deduct union dues from the paychecks of workers who authorized such deductions even though the collective bargaining agreement those dues supported has expired. Hayes noted the union bias in the majority decision in his dissent:
 
"The bargaining process is better protected by preserving the settled rules with respect to both management rights and dues checkoff. It hardly advances collective bargaining to require that some portions of negotiated agreements — i.e., those favorable to the union — survive contract expiration, while others — those favorable to the employer — do not."
 
In January 2012, President Obama justified tossing aside the rule of law when he used recess appointments to fill vacancies on the board by saying, “the American people deserve to have qualified public servants fighting for them every day - whether it is to enforce new consumer protections or uphold the rights of working Americans.”
 
One of those “qualified public servants” was former union lawyer Richard Griffin. Maybe if President Obama wasn’t in such a rush to put Griffin on the board he would have discovered Griffin was named as a defendant in a federal racketeering case filed in October by several local union members, which accuses him of covering up the embezzlement of local union funds.
 
For decades, the NLRB has been transformed into the epitome of all that is wrong with Washington D.C.: A wasteful highly partisan agency that does more harm than good.
 
Why should the public pay $283 million in tax dollars for an agency harboring alleged criminals that inflames labor strife and confers benefit to a narrow, private interest?
 
We shouldn’t, the NLRB and its members are an arbitrary interference to expedient due process and the rule of law. Simply abolish the board then allow the 40 NLRB administrative law judges to continue hearing administrative cases and have the appropriate district court take appeals. These judges have some semblance of impartiality, serve long terms and are not as likely to seek future private-sector employment. Removing the redundant, partisan NLRB members will bring back some certainty to labor-management relations.
 
Kovacs is a labor policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Insttitute.

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Republicans Extinguish Right-Wing’s Calls To Impeach Obama

Republicans have characterized Obama’s executive actions preventing gun violence as “a power grab,”, pledged to introduce legislation nullifying his orders, and even floatedimpeaching the President for allegedly overstepping his Constitutional powers.

On Wednesday night, former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey offered a reality check for alarmed conservatives. Appearing on Fox News’ Hannity, Mukasey clarified that no court would find Obama’s gun violence prevention initiatives unconstitutional:

MUKASEY: I don’t think it’s unconstitutional in the sense that I don’t think it’s something you could get a court to find unconstitutional. We could have a debate about whether it’s consistent with the constitution or not, but there is a limited number of things that will get you into court to have that decided, and I don’t think any of the things you’ve enumerated are among them.

Reagan’s solicitor general Charles Fried also poured cold water on GOP comparisons of Obama to dictators and tyrants, noting many of the provisions are calls to action or carry out existing law: “These are either standard exercises of presidential power, or even more benignly, standard examples of the power of the president to exhort the public or state officials to be aware of certain problems and to address them,” he said.

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Senate Judiciary Chair Declares Defeat In War On Drugs

The Senate’s most senior member lamented the utter failure of the so-called “War on Drugs” and other draconian criminal justice policies Wednesday morning. During an address on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 2013 agenda, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) expressed alarm over high rates of imprisonment, harsh mandatory minimum sentences and federal crackdowns of marijuana laws legal under state law. “We have imprisoned people who should not be there and we have wasted money that should be spent on other things,” he said.

There are too many people, too many young people, too many minorities, too many from the inner city who are serving time in jail for people who might have done the same thing but have the money to stay out and are not there. What I say is if you have a youngster in the inner city buying $100 worth of cocaine for example could end up going to prison for years. If you have somebody on Wall Street buying the same 100 dollars from their local dealer, if they’re caught, they’ll be reprimanded and they may even have to do on Park Avenue a week of public service. That’s not right.

Responding to a question on the acclaimed War on Drugs documentary The House I Live In, he added:

[T]he fact that so many people, especially young people, go to prison for a relatively minor thing, a drug offense. And then you ask, why can’t they get jobs afterward? Why do they have problems from then on?

I think we have spent tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on the so-called War on Drugs. Well, we’ve lost.

After laying out Judiciary Committee plans to effectively protect public safety by prioritizing the immediate reauthorization of the Republican-obstructed Violence Against Women Act and holding hearings on gun violence prevention, Leahy focused on those elements of the criminal justice system that send the wrong people to jail – and for too long.

“I say this as a former prosecutor … I think the reliance at the state and federal level on mandatory minimums has been a great mistake,” he said. “I’m not convinced that it has lowered crime, but I know it has imprisoned people who should not be there.”

He also advocated for national standards and oversight of forensics testing, saying, “If you have labs that do not give you right results, and you think you can close a case by sending the wrong person to prison, you’ve done nothing for the safety of people” and “you have tragedy of having an innocent person in prison.”

Responding to a question about federal enforcement of marijuana laws, Leahy reiterated his concern that federal resources are misallocated to marijuana crackdowns while murders and robberies go unsolved. “It was also my feeling as a prosecutor,” he said. “I found more important things to do.” President Obama expressed a similar sentiment recently when he told Barbara Walters the administration has “bigger fish to fry” than target marijuana users, but that has not stopped prosecutors from cracking down on medical marijuana distributors in seeming compliance with state law.

Leahy joins a number of world leaders, including Bill Clinton, who have recently blasted the failed War on Drugs approach. Mandatory minimum sentences, discriminatory crackdowns and criminalization of public health issues are all a part of the tough-on-crime system that has sent more of our own to prison than any other country, under the guise of improved public safety.

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Skinny CEO, Fat CEO

 Highlight transcript below to create clipTranscript:  Print  |  Email Go  Click text to jump within videoWed 16 Jan 13 | 02:45 PM ET Is it better to have a skinny CEO or one who needs to drop a few pounds? CNBC's Jane Wells reports.

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