Essay 4187

From The New York Daily News…

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Good riddance
Burying the N-word, driving stake through the heart of hip-hop’s demons

By Stanley Crouch

We have all become accustomed to as much hustle and hot air from so-called black leadership as we have the kind of substance that has inarguably made the United States so much more civilized than it was when racism held sway.

That familiar hot air is why some people scoffed when the NAACP had its yearly convention last week in Detroit and symbolically buried the N-word in a pine box to the cheers of hundreds gathered for the ceremony.

Kwame Kilpatrick — the so-called hip-hop mayor — said something that seems to suggest a major shift in cultural consciousness, one aimed to attack the dragon of gangster rap and everything else that degrades and dehumanizes.

“Today,” Kilpatrick said, “we are not just burying the N-word, we’re taking it out of our spirit. We gather burying all of the things that go with the N-word. We have to bury the pimps and the ho’s that go with it.”

I think columnist Errol Louis is right when he says that this could be as large a change in vision as the point at which Jesse Jackson told black America that it should no longer think of itself as anything other than African-Americans. The white folks bought it so fast that we are now stuck with it, regardless of the term’s inaccuracies.

There was no confusion on Kilpatrick’s part or on the parts of others who addressed the issue of the degradation. In the opening address of the convention, NAACP National Board Chairman Julian Bond alluded to the firestorm of sudden consciousness brought about by Don Imus when he insulted the Rutgers basketball team. “If he can’t refer to our women as ‘ho’s,’ then we shouldn’t either.”

White people looking on might wonder why all of the ongoing uproar now. It has been at least a decade since Delores Tucker alienated herself from young black people when she called out hip hop and the parent corporations that promoted entertainers whose stock in trade was obscenity, glamorized criminality and misogyny.

Tucker, who died in 2005, was viciously attacked in hip-hop material by both Tupac Shakur and Eminem. As the girlfriend of a high-profile member of the civil rights establishment said of the matter, “They all shied away from criticizing the content of rap music because they were afraid of having their names put in rap songs, which would alienate them from young black people.”

That no longer seems to be the case. This all started when Tipper Gore led the fight to have labels put on recordings that contained lewd material — before the issue of censorship confused the discussion and chased her from the field.

Tucker, urged on by women such as Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore, fearlessly fought the dragon and soon found that she was alone because of the cowardice that distinguished those who should have stood with her. She accepted support from Bill Bennett, a move interpreted by the hip-hop defenders as a betrayal of black entertainers and black people at large. That worked for 10 years.

But now it is clear that group solidarity and supporting ambitious young men have nothing to do with accepting material that promotes violence and criminality while degrading and dehumanizing women.

It is an expanding moment of awareness in which we can all share. That is why the NAACP was absolutely right in symbolically burying the N-word — and the pimps and ho’s that went with it. The dragon of hip hop continues to receive more wounds from a growing number of dragon slayers.