Published in USA Today…
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‘Gangsta lit’ poisons black audiences
Commentary by Yolanda Young
Gangsta rapper 50 Cent has partnered with MTV/Pocket Books to create graphic novels as explicit as his lyrics: “They say I don’t sound like a killer well how a killer sound? I bet I grab a foe pound and back that ass down.” (I’m A Hustler 2000).
“Fitty” will fit right in to the gangsta lit/ghetto fiction/street lit genre in which venereal disease and automatic handguns are practically characters.
A 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that Hispanic and black males had the lowest rates of literary reading, at 18% and 30% respectively. Though reading rates are falling for all groups, from 1992-2002 African-Americans had the largest decline, from 45.6% to 37.1%.
Reading literature is important because it expands one’s vocabulary, perspective and intellectual capacity. And though some might argue that any reading is better than none, the reader ingests poison when metaphor and imagery are replaced with sex, violence and expletives.
There is a lot of it out there already. Though it is difficult to obtain accurate sales numbers because of their guerrilla marketing tactics (these books can be found at car washes, street vendor tables and martini parties), the telltale of their profitability is that titles such as G-Spot, Bad Girlz and Payback Is a Mutha are showing up in mainstream publishers’ catalogues.
At a forum on the subject at this year’s Book Expo in Washington, it was suggested that these books merely provide readers with what they crave and know. Perhaps in part, but these publishers are just doing a better job of reaching blacks in less traditional settings.
Consider Vickie Stringer, who was in prison from 1994-2001. She self-published her first novel, Let That Be the Reason, which depicts the lives of women in drug trafficking. In 2001, she founded Triple Crown Publications, the imprint of choice among many young black readers. Her publishing house is named for the crew she hung with during her drug days. Stringer seems to hustle books much the way she did drugs.
An unseemly prospect to many, but so too was the dearth of blacks I found at a Washington book signing for the thirtysomething African-American writer Colson Whitehead. In their stead was a crowd of white seniors who live in the affluent neighborhood where the signing was held. The MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient and writers of his ilk must do what 50 Cent, Stringer and even Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison have done — find and seduce a black audience. Morrison found hers at church gatherings for her Love tour, but they can also be found in classrooms, social clubs and beauty salons.
Distasteful maybe, but not as much as a generation consuming venom.
Yolanda Young is author of On Our Way To Beautiful.
2 comments:
this is something i talk alot about with other writers... The publishing world--based in NYC is largely white-run. They care about what they can sell to mainstream america and what they can sell period. Not unlike a certain other industry we're all familiar with.
Having dealt with publishers a lot in the last couple years, their belief about black readers is this:
Black women will only read "Mah Man done me wrong/I need some good dick" books.
Black men don't read books unless they're in prison.
young black people will only read about certain black celebrities.
The reading public only wants to read about MLK and only him reminding everyone that he had a dream that we could someday get along well enough to have interracial sex and pretend that everything else is okay whether it is or not.
And of course, books about black music and black musicians--provided that they're written by whites.
i could write more, but it's an enraging topic. mainly because, like the ad industry so many mainstreamers play dumb or play the "if black folks would just do more" card.
Trust, we are doing more. Screw KNOCK THE HUSTLE. There are THOUSANDS of books by BLACK authors left out every damn year because they don't fit some stupid construct that makes people comfortable.
There is no "chick lit" explosion for black female authors. There is no OPRAH's Book Club for Black female authors save for Maya Angelou and that's because OPRAH's SoccerMom audience has a very particular idea of what type of black people they'll accept.
Same for the New York Times best-seller's list...
lemme stop. this crap just gets to me.
The writing up front reminded of Eddie Murphy’s SNL classic Prose and Cons:
“See the watchdog. Do he bite? KILL my landlord.”
20 years later and what was a joke is now reality for some.
I think music in general has killed reading for all teenage demos, which is worrysome. Unless they're in the national honor society, when's the last time you heard two kids talking about the last book they read?
Yet, they can give you the top 50 off their iTunes playlist in a heartbeat.
Why read when you can hear about life on the streets in 3:43 seconds you know? It's like putting a gun to my kids head now to get them to read.
When they were younger it was easier, but they have so many media choices as an alternative to reading.
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