Was Geraldo Right?

Not that Geraldo hasn’t regurgitated his fair share of bullshit all over the fancifully set dinner table of American media in his time, but could he have a point?

GR believes that over last 10 years, hip hop has inflicted more damage upon brown people than racism. Hmm. Such a statement makes sense to Geraldo, because he has not the depth of perception to visualize the total, debilitating landscape of modern-day racism.

When I go apply for a job, no white man is going to say, “Nigger, you lost?” then have me whimsically tossed from the front door of the office, Uncle Phil / Jazz style. This is 2015, and it’s no longer in fashion to bare the stark ugliness of one’s full, naked racism (for the most part, that is). What a callous, white prosecutor will do instead is apathetically recommend a 10-year prison sentence when 8 months will suffice, despite that fact that I’ve served my country fighting a war based on capitalism and profit somewhere in the Arabic part of the world, as in the case of my cousin who was recently imprisoned.

This is where the sticky, vile tentacles of racism grip black lives and toss them into oblivion. Surreptitious, clandestine, institutional racism detailed in books like The New Jim Crow — this is the racial war where black Americans are meeting a merciless defeat. The vicious cycle of poverty, of educational endowment based on meager property taxes, which produce schools and subsequent educations unfit for bright, black minds — this is where black Americans are meeting a horrendous, merciless racial defeat. The drug war where blacks are incarcerated at alarming rates compared to their white counterparts, where they are then relegated to second-class citizenship upon release — this is where we lose racially.

These realities represent the subtle racism behind the scenes, slowly and maniacally manipulating the destinies of an entire people. GR is indeed wrong. But without being able to envision and understand this wide-angle, 1080p view of modern racism, I know that he is entirely unaware as to why.

GR also fingered tattoos as another suspect in the police lineup — a notion that I completely agree with. Imagine a young, 17-year-old brother who decides to cover his forearms, neck, and hands with tattoos. You may look cool now young homie, but you’ll be judged by those tattoos for the rest of your life. You most likely won’t become be a doctor, or a lawyer, you probably won’t sell stocks on Wall Street, or get funding to start a tech company. You’ve probably just sealed the box on your own future opportunities and secured it properly with several tight wrappings of duct tape.

But, I have the insight to look beyond the obvious. The reason that young 17-year-old adorns his body with tattoos is because he’s systematically been robbed of vision. He has no concept, no notion of a future where he is a doctor, or a lawyer, or the founder of a tech company. Those are things only seen on TV: they have no reality in his mind. His imagination has been snuffed out, and instead of looking beyond his immediate circumstance and being able to ask the question, “What if?”, his mind is shackled to the tight orbit of unfortunate and grim blocks in his immediate neighborhood, where hustlers pump crack into the eager veins of the community, where normal life is hard life, where you don’t dream because dreaming implies that you’re better than everyone else, where the people making all the money, the people who inspire the only dreams that are vivid and tangible, are the people also covered in tattoos.

It is insight and understanding you lack, GR.

Now, before you become excited over this swift and lethal literary karate chop that I’ve thrown at GR and click away from this poignant river of information, let us not take hip hop off the hook. Because hip hop needs some blame. Yea, I said it. Hip hop is wonderful. It’s a culture, a way of carrying yourself, a form of existence that flowers in the minds of humans in every continent on this earth, a never-ending tidal wave of slang talkin’, dj’in’, fly dressin’, rhyme spittin’, struggle fightin’ consciousness — beautiful, positive, empowering.

If hip hop is a tidal wave, music is the rumbling earthquake from deep beneath providing its kinetic, vigorous momentum. And hip hop’s primary music, rap, comprises rhythmic poetry. And that rhythmic poetry is formed by words. And a substantial portion of the words that define hip hop poetry are goddamn terrible.

Bitches, hoes, peeling wigs back, killing niggas, getting money, new rims… the negative side of this poetry is a neverending river of dreck. Some of this poetry is misogynistic, it’s homophobic, it erodes a sense of financial intelligence, it glorifies a life spent climbing a nonexistent drug ladder — from the soldier mixing crack with the baking soda on the stove, to the captain flying out to Columbia to deal directly with the coke connect. It extols, in great detail, the imaginative murder of other black men, the mistreatment of black women, the flooding of drugs through black communities.

I could borrow from my own argument to provide cause and understanding behind the treacherous side of hip hop lyrics (obviously the negativity doesn’t represent the full spectrum of the music). The words are the results of another vicious cycle spinning like a hurricane throughout the hoods of America: Things are terrible; poverty is everywhere; I write lyrics based on what I see; on what I know; which reflect my environment; people in my environment identify with it; my music is successful; the youth listen and internalize; they identify; they seek to create their own poetry; and so on and so forth.

Life in the places where some of the best hip hop has been birthed is bitter; the circumstances in these locations slice the wide panoramic of potential and possibility into a narrow, focused kaleidoscope of hopelessness. A narrow, bitter view of the world produces narrow, bitter words.

But even though I understand it, it doesn’t mean I can so easily excuse those lyrics, which spill out from the hood onto the stage of the world. It doesn’t mean I should just accept the potential harm they may cause.

I was lucky enough to have a father who would take the opportunity to remind me that 99% of the music I was consuming from rappers was bullshit. As I grew up and made my way through the entertainment industry, I learned this to be true.

But what about the young brown brothers who don’t have a father to tell them what’s real and what’s a mirage? What about the brown brothers who absorb the negative right along with the positive?

Before we whip out our own shiny and polished opinions, are any of us really equipped to gauge the damage delivered, if any, after a lifetime spent absorbing the bleak and dismal pictures painted by the negative side of hip hop poetry? Can long-term exposure to the negative imagery developed by our favorite, clever MCs be harmful to the developing mind? I’m not sure, but maybe we should entertain the notion that damage can be caused.

GR, I realize that you were trying to point out a few of the negative aspects of the culture and music, but you went too far and mistakenly tip-toed into a thick, funky wad of shit. Hip hop is not a perfect culture. The culture does not produce perfect music. Then again, there is no such thing as a perfect culture. Hip hop is and was a mirror, born out of a need to reflect the urban world of the people inhabiting it. Some of that reality was grisly, and the reflections of that reality continue to exist. Yet, while hip hop music certainly does trace reality’s graphic images, it couldn’t carry racism’s jock strap.

We need more people to look beyond the obvious, to see Oz behind the curtain, in the darkness, pulling knobs, yanking levers, smashing big red buttons and shit. They would then realize that colorful circumstances weaved into the American socioeconomic fabric are not as black and white as they seem.