STOP SINGING ALONG … TO THE HATRED

by Alexander Zubatov

Kate Forrinstall is absolutely right that it’s time for us “to stop singing along” to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” and many other “black” anthems … but the reasons we need to stop singing along are not at all those politically correct considerations of cultural appropriations that she proposes. Rather, it is time for us, as a culture, to stop singing along to these bitter tirades against law enforcement, these giddy celebrations of bare-faced anti-white bigotry, black nationalism and black supremacy, these pounding paeans to unrepentant materialism, debased sexuality, lewdness and vulgarity, these destructive and self-destructive glorifications of crime, drugs, guns and violence, these proud proclamations of misogyny, homophobia and toxic intolerance in every form. We, as a culture, must be better than this, must demand more of ourselves and of the others in our midst.

As I have described in detail here, https:[email protected][email protected]-98eeea6b6151, over the course of the past decades and especially the past few years, we have allowed hate-filled, resentful have-nots and their lackeys and apologists among the left-leaning white elites that dominate the media and academic institutions to use our history of slavery and anti-black discrimination as a sharpened sword being wedged ever more deeply into the heart of our civilization. But there is a difference between admitting the mistakes that were made in America, as we should, and basing present policy on a cowardly overreaction to those mistakes, as we are now doing. When we insist on deploying our economic and intellectual machinery in an ongoing, never-ending crusade against the long-dead soldiers of the last war, we will always lose the war that is going on right now, the one we cannot see because we are too blinded by history.

This present war is a culture war for the soul of America. We have a choice: will we embrace and commit ourselves to our uniquely Western values of free speech, equality of opportunity, tolerance of those (but ONLY those) who agree to tolerate us and a culture that proudly asserts and defends those values, or will we crumble before and kowtow to the outrageous and unconditional demands of those who spit in our faces and insist on seeing only the evils our ancestors have perpetrated, while failing to recognize their glorious achievements? This much is undoubtedly true: we have not always lived up to our own exalted ideals of liberty, tolerance and equality of opportunity … but this is no reason to abandon those ideals, but rather, to keep going, dig deeper, try harder and inch ever closer to the goal. There are and will always be those race-obsessed hatemongers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates — that prominent neoliberal black mascot of the white elites (those all-too-familiar white elites who feel better about themselves when they join in full-throated navel-gazing denunciations of their own culture) — who insist that America is a nation built on white supremacy, that this is a country that was evil from the outset and to the core. Whatever shards of truth such critiques may contain within them, we must recognize that they are and will always be shallow simplifications: America is many things and “contain[s] multitudes,” to quote the great ecumenical poet of our civilization. It cannot be reduced to simplistic and reductive formulae that equate it solely with transcendent goodness or reprehensible evil in whatever form. Our difficult task always was and still remains to weed out the bad while keeping the good intact.

In pursuit of that task, it is time to stand up to the anthems of hatred emanating principally from black America that we have allowed to commandeer our airwaves for too long. When we allow Beyoncé to use a ritualistic national American event such as the Superbowl to flip the literal and proverbial bird (as she does in her video for the song she sang) to “white” America (whatever that is), we prove ourselves little better than those weak, fearful Romans who lost their way and willingly handed the institutions of their once-great empire over to the barbarians. While Beyoncé invokes the spectre of anti-black police violence, we know now that the Ferguson story and its aftermath was built on a thin tissue of lies, with black activists and their elite white allies making a martyr of Michael Brown and a mythology of police brutality out of what is, in reality, no more than a story of a small-time criminal killed while violently resisting arrest, with race having nothing to do with this discrete incident. We also know now that, despite the diet of disinformation fed to us by the race-baiting, sensation-peddling media and the out-of-touch entertainment industry, the tale we are told of an epidemic of anti-black police brutality is unsupported by actual evidence (see http://www.copinthehood.com/2015/04/killed-by-police-2-of-3-race.html & http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429094/black-lives-matter-wrong-police-shootings).

Music can be many things to us. It can entertain and distract us. It can move us. It can send us soaring up toward the highest reaches of our souls. Or it can drag us down into the gutter. And, when it contains political messages, it can also mislead us in the way all propaganda does, by substituting emotional appeals for reasoned arguments. Undeniably catchy though some of it might be, too much hip hop to which we are regularly subjected falls into those latter categories. It dumbs us down, vulgarizes us and leads us astray. And too many — WAY too many — of us are blithely singing along. It is high time to stop the music. #BoycottBeyonce is a good start, but the boycott must go way beyond one artist, who is far from the worst offender. We must purge our playlists of all the hateful hits. We must demand that the radio stations we listen to, the television shows we watch, the stores we frequent and the clubs and bars we turn to for a good time turn off the spigot inundating us in a polluted stream of vulgarity, anger and bile. As much as Beyoncé and those like her might be counting on us to be seduced by the groove and, like her backup dancers, get in formation and fall in line, it is incumbent upon us to vote with our voices and our wallets, to tell her that her formation is out of step with the ideals of a nation in which we want to live.

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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

Some of his articles have appeared in Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.

He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).