Ladies, stop buying
into rap's misogyny
Black women's fight needs more voices
The movement that young black women and their mothers and grandmothers are bringing to challenge the spiritual bilge of the worst of hip hop is clearly the most important American cultural movement of this new century.
It reveals that black women have begun to break away from all of the conventions that button their lips when they find themselves disturbed by rap's demeaning lyrics and videos.
The regular defense of the worst of hip hop is that these images should be accepted because they provide a way for black men at the bottom to become successful. An additional aspect of this defense is that young men are making so much money one should not mess with the flow of the dough. The next defense is that anything that makes money is good - especially if it is not illegal. At the end of the argument is the manipulative racial ploy that black people should not use "white" standards to attack something that comes out of the neighborhood, that arrives from black street culture. This last point has been far too successful for far too long among middle-class blacks, who are often made to feel as if they have lost contact with their roots and should never question anything "authentically" black, lower class and street.
Illness kept me from a panel discussion Tuesday on the images of women in rap. (It was presented by the Center for Communication -
www.cencom.org - at the Fashion Institute of Technology.) I wanted to be there because every one of these "defenses" needs to be refuted. But according to Michaela angela Davis, an editor from Essence magazine, the audience included some younger black women who see nothing wrong with what isgoing on in rap. Such women do not think there is anything wrong with the images of black women as sluts, scantily clad nubile meat.
There were those who even likened the rap videos to what is seen in the behavior of Paris Hilton or on "Girls Gone Wild," with white college women exhibiting all kinds of nude, lewd and dubious behavior. That was countered by arguments that black women at the bottom are not in college and will not get degrees or move into affluent lives by embracing the street ethos.
I surely missed something, but it seems like some young people are missing even more.
Originally published on March 24, 2005
