Author Meets the Critics: Pimps Up, Hoes Down: Hip-Hop's Hold on Young Women

The Hip-Hop Archives @ Harvard
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.495.8508

March 22, 2011
4:00pm - 6:00pm

Author Meets the Critics

Pimps Up, Hoes Down: Hip-Hop's Hold on Young Women
by Tracey Sharpley Whiting

Critics

David Ikard (Florida State University)
Shayne Lee (Tulane)
Mark Anthony Neal (Duke)

The Scholar's Cypher

Angela Ards
Glenda Carpio
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Wayne Marshall
Nicole Hodges Persley
Gwendolyn Pough
Scott Poulson-Bryant
Lisa Thompson

Adam Mansbach Responds to Boston Globe Screed on Hip-Hop Studies

from the Boston Globe

Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam

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special to NewBlackMan

Adam Mansbach Responds

Dear Alex,

I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)

Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."

You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?

"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.

All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.

It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.

Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.

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Adam Mansbach's latest novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Mansbach’s previous novel, the bestselling Angry Black White Boy (Crown), is taught at more than sixty colleges, universities and high schools. A satire about race, whiteness and hip-hop, it was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and the recipient of an Honorable Citation from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards and a PEN/Faulkner Writers in the Schools grant.

The Ivory 'Wire'

January 3, 2010
Blackboard | Curriculum

Deconstructing ‘The Wire’
By AMANDA M. FAIRBANKS

NEARLY two years after the final season of “The Wire,” the acclaimed HBO series that counts a devoted fan base among collegians, scholars are finding compelling sociology in the gray-tinged urban life it chronicled.

Courses are cropping up in catalogs across the country.

William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, is the latest to announce he will teach a course on the show, next fall out of the black studies department.

For the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when Dr. Wilson gathered scholars, activists and the show’s creator to analyze the series’ impact, he did not mince words: “It has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publications, including studies by social scientists.”

This semester at Duke University, Anne-Maria Makhulu, a professor of cultural anthropology, will introduce a course that explores cities — “urbanization, de-industrialization, the ‘ghetto,’ the figure of the queer thug, hip-hop, and many other aspects of urban black experience” — through “The Wire,” which was set in Baltimore. The waiting list is almost as long as the enrollment cap.

Read the Full Article @ The New York Times

The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Rage of the Thinking Class
by Mark Anthony Neal

Most accounts of the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for disorderly conduct have described the 58-year-old Harvard scholar as the pre-eminent black scholar in the country—a leading public intellectual. Gates is loosely aligned with a particular generation of black public intellectuals like Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia J. Williams, and Manning Marable who came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s—paragons of a contemporary American “thinking” class.

While many of these public intellectuals engaged a representational politics that interrogated the realities in which race, gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity are lived within American society, Professor Gates took the concept of a “marketplace of ideas” at face value; his “public” was rarely discrete from the marketplace. He boldly proclaimed that he was an intellectual entrepreneur and branded the field of Black Studies, much like Russell Simmons helped brand hip-hop and Barack Hussein Obama successfully branded himself as “change.” Few of us at elite institutions that can claim that we haven’t benefitted from Professor Gates’ entrepreneurial vision for the field of Black Studies.

According to a statement by his attorney—the equally prominent Harvard legal scholar Charles Ogletree—Gates had returned home from a trip to China where he was working on a documentary for PBS. Upon his return Gates found that his front door was jammed and after entering his home from the rear, turning off the alarm, Gates with the help of his driver jarred open the front door. Shortly thereafter Gates observed a police officer in his doorway who preceded to tell Gates that he was investigating a burglary. What ensued afterward is up for debate with the officer claiming in his report that Gates was belligerent, among other things, and that Gates at one point told the officer he would follow him outside to “see his mama.” That the officer implies that Professor Gates used language more appropriate for a Blaxploitation character from 35 years ago suggest that neither individual was doing much listening in this exchange. That said, few would begrudge Professor Gates’ rage or anyone else’s for that matter, in response to the questioning his right to be in his own home. The randomness of the officer’s assault on Professor Gates’ civil rights challenges claims that his privilege might protect him in such cases.

Though Professor Gates might be unknown to the average viewer of BET, in the parlance of his profession he is easily one of the most recognizable “Negroes” on the planet. That he is legitimately the most well known black person at Harvard University and Cambridge at large is beyond dispute. That any Cambridge police officer would not recognize Professor Gates or adhere to the confirmation by campus police that the figure he was arresting was indeed Professor Gates raises obvious suspicions—yet another iteration of the “uppity Negro” backlash that has reached a fever pitch in the Obama era. Thus Professor Gate’s charge of racism, in light of a Cambridge, MA police officer accosting him in his own home strikes a particular chord. Never given to the professional machinations comprising contemporary race politics—he’s been more Ralph Bunche than Malcolm X—Professor Gates’ response to the officer’s actions is so out of character that those familiar with the scholar’s professional profile would have to assume that the officer had crossed some line. Indeed the Cambridge police thought so also; the charges against Professor Gates were dropped.

But the attention that the case has attracted raises more troubling issues about which black bodies really matter. Few blacks—and fellow black scholars for that matter—are fortunate to have Charles Ogletree on their speed dial; or edit an on-line magazine in collaboration with The Washington Post and Newsweek Magazine. Indeed Antwi Akom, a professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at San Francisco State University didn’t have such a profile when he was arrested in front of his campus office in October of 2005 while retrieving books.

Without asking for or allowing Professor Akom to produce his campus ID, the officer arrested him while his children sat in his car. Professor Akom was formally charged with resisting arrest. Campus administration remained silent about the case, though the charges were eventually dropped months later. Professor Akom’s case didn’t generate the kind of attention that the Gates case has, but Professor Akom benefitted from a network of scholars and activists who spoke out about a clear case of racial profiling and Professor Akom’s unimpeachable reputation. What’s to be said though, for those folk for which such experiences range from a regular nuisance to real incidences of terror and death, far too frequent to even document?

This was a point that was made by one of my former students who upon hearing about Gates arrest, the former student joked that perhaps Gates should have been “carrying those DNA results from African American Lives when he found out he was 67% white.” As the former student, currently a teacher in New York City, further explained “if you put an officer in a position where they can be helpful, by answering their questions and asking for assistance, it can defuse a very tense situation…The louder you get the more you resemble Raekwon Jenkins and the closer you get to jail. Be compliant and if you still feel like you were wronged then file a complaint later.” His points are well taken and a product of the common sense logic that is developed within the context of a world where the kind of confrontation that Gates had is so commonplace. Call it every day survival instincts. Our concerns should reflect the regularity of such abuse, not just the selective outrage that befits those of more privilege.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. An author of several books including the recent New Black Man, Neal is a regular contributor to The Root.com and SeeingBlack.com.

Remembering John Hope Franklin: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mark Anthony Neal

from The Root

John Hope, the Prince Who Refused the Kingdom
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

For decades, John Hope Franklin railed against the often segregated academic field of 'black studies,' deriding it as intellectual Jim Crow. But there would be no black studies without him, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

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The Living Link That Expired
By Mark Anthony Neal

Black intellectuals remember the late John Hope Franklin, the courtly gentleman scholar who connected generations of black thought.