Hip Hop Serving Up Plan for Failure

Hip Hop Serving Up Plan for Failure
Black Youth Need to Break Free of Prison Culture
By JASON WHITLOCK
AOL
Sports Commentary

What to do? That's the only thing left to ponder now that the hot mess that was NBA All-Star Weekend has left us with no choice but to deal with a problem that has been fomenting for 20 years.

Prison culture swallowed hip-hop culture, turning party music into a celebration of violence, hostility, disrespect and drug-dealing.

Prison culture created the Black KKK and negated much of the progress won by the civil-rights movement.

We can no longer afford to live in denial of these realities, and we must formulate a game plan to combat the self-destructive culture that is influencing too many young black men and women.

I offer no apologies for putting these issues on the table publicly. If anything, I apologize for waiting too long.

Prison culture is winning. It has corrupted a form of music that once gave us great joy and/or offered inspiration. Prison culture -- with its BET and MTV videos, popular movies, acceptance in the mainstream media and false gods -- Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg -- has perverted the American dream for black youth.

The blueprint for black success painted by pop culture and the mainstream media goes something like this:

Step 1: Four to five years posted up on the block building a small drug-dealing empire.

Step 2: Three to four years shuffling in and out of prison on drug-trafficking charges.

Step 3: Write and perform rap songs about dealing drugs, killing niggas, running from the police and bad-mouthing black women.

Step 4: Sign with a major record label that is anxious to make money off prison culture.

Step 5: Start your own record label and find other drug-dealers-turned-rappers or
wannabe-drug-dealers-turned-rappers to exploit.

Step 6: Buy a small percentage of a pro sports franchise, run around with NBA and NFL players and allow black and white members of the mainstream media to kiss your pinkie ring.

What to do about all of this?

Hip-hop/prison culture must be destroyed and remade. In its present, N-word-reliant, violence-promoting form, nothing good can come from hip hop. Just like the prison system, hip hop's popular music is another vehicle to imprison the minds and bodies of the youth who devour it.

Our children think they're participating in a culture that is meant to empower them. Hip hop -- disguised in low-hanging platinum chains, 24-inch rims, platinum grills and other flossy material possessions -- cripples black youth and infects them with a prison mindset that even NFL and NBA dollars can't seem to shake.

I don't hate hip hop. I hate what it has become. I hate what it has done to the minds and values of young people.

You think you're going to be the next Jay-Z. The reality is if you follow the principles celebrated in hip hop, you're far more likely to be the next Tookie Williams. Big Tigger and other hip hop groupies won't tell you that.

Hip hop is filled with hostility and disrespect, the tools needed to survive while incarcerated. Hip hop cares little about family and knows nothing of the rewards of parenting. You don't parent in prison; you baby-daddy in prison. Hip hop judges love by your willingness to embrace evil -- ride (kill) or die.

Just like the Ebonics language, the tattoos and cornrows are straight from the prison playbook. So are the sagging pants, which started as a way for gay prisoners to signal their availability for action.

The rappers love to tell you they're keeping it real, but they leave out so much to the hip hip/prison culture story. "Gangbanging" and being a "rider" is glorified. They don't tell you that much of the violence played out on the streets is directly related to the love affairs that play out behind bars.

You've heard that there's a thin line between love and hate. Well, when two people lay down, at least one person is getting up with feelings. It's easy for those feelings to turn hard and lethal when one person is forced to lie down.

But they don't rap about that. They don't tell you what's at the foundation of the most self-destructive culture in American history.

Prison values are being popularized through hip hop. Men who don't expect to or care whether they live past age 30 are passing on their values to kids. That's why hip hop is an instant-gratification movement. The civil-rights movement took a long-term approach; it was about sacrificing for the next generation.

America, with its repressive drug laws and get-tough-on-non-violent-crime political maneuvering, has incarcerated 25 percent of the black men from the "next generation."

Art is often born from pain. Should we be surprised that a culture has been born from the pain of black incarceration?

A white critic of my All-Star columns, Dave Zirin, asked me Monday: "If black men weren't in prison, don't you think they'd rap about something else?"

It was a great question. What came first, the explosion of American prison building or the explosion of gangsta rap? California, Ronald Reagan's state, was at the forefront of both explosions. They're both byproducts of the war on drugs.

They all need to stop -- gangsta rap, prison building and the fruitless war on drugs.

We need to reject prison culture. Take it off our black-owned radio stations, BET and MTV. Refuse to support it at movie theatres. Make Kanye West pay a price for telling black kids they're stupid for pursuing an education. (To give you an indication of how screwed up things are, Time Magazine put Kanye on its cover and hailed him a genius.)

And we need to fight for sweeping reforms to America's drug laws. We probably need to legalize recreational drugs and eliminate drug dealing as an extremely lucrative occupation. If it was legal, there would be less violence associated with the sale of drugs. If it was legal, there would certainly be far fewer non-violent drug users headed to Black KKK laboratories/prisons.

There also needs to be serious prison reform. We have this lust to see criminals severely punished. We seem to take delight in the fact that they brutalize each other while incarcerated. We want them thrown in the hole, denied the right to education.

We want them caged up like animals, and then we wonder why they act like animals when their mandatory-minimum sentences run out and they're set free to rejoin society. These black and brown, formerly non-violent offenders don't come home to our lawmakers' neighborhoods. They don't attend the same parties or frequent the same nightclubs as our lawmakers. They don't join Joe Biden's posse.

We have to deal with them. They're family. They're cousins, uncles, nephews, best friends from fifth grade. Ideally they need to come home to us more civilized than when they left. At the very least, we can't build prisons that specialize in manufacturing predators.

Our drug laws snatch them. Our prisons rape them of whatever humanity they had. And hip hop culture installs them as role models. The whole vicious cycle needs to be blown up or we're going to lose the next-next generation at an even more alarming rate than the previous one.