I've been thinking about why there is such an emphasis on maintaining a tough or hard image in rap music as discussed in Thursday's class and I think this excerpt from Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech, which was given here in Philly in 2008, provides a bit of an explanation.
"Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us."
When former slaves entered the workforce very few had any education that would land them anything more than a poor paying manual labor job similar to the work they did as slaves. So, the African American community has been playing catch up with the rest of the nation since the abolition of slavery. I think because African American males were unable to assert their masculinity economically, as is the norm in America, they began asserting it through a more feasible means of physical power. Do you agree? Do you think this in any way justifies the violence?
Missy I think you're absolutely right. In a society where African Americans have been treated so poorly, it is not a surprise that they have resulted to violence as a source of physical power. Now, even though violence is not the answer to solving any of the problems, I do feel it is their way of coping with the pain that they have felt over the years.
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