I, very unoriginally, have an obsession with black people. Especially the thug/life-50 cent type. The affinity for the Afro crowd is so cliché I almost considered giving it up at one point. But this phenomenon spreading through white middle class suburbia is hard to resist. For some reason, me and my peers are always trying to one up each other on our street cred (of which we really have none) and become more like our brothaz [sic]. It’s all fun and games when we jam Young Jeezy and strive to use “gat” in regular conversation, but I’m beginning to think this perceived cultural appreciation is simply racism in modern form.
Even now, I’m not sure what is that intrigues me exactly, but I can trace my slighted obsession back to the day I left Houston, TX. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: a truth I learned while immersed in white bread Thousand Oaks, CA. My love became absolute when I announced at a Young Women’s sleepover that I “really liked black people” and then the super cool Mia Maids delivered an issue of Slam magazine to my house. Moving back to Houston I went to a school with a 30% minority population, at least according to shoddy yearbook facts (they also claimed we only had 200 Asians . . . right . . .) I learned true R.E.S.P.E.C.T. when I got shoved by a shorty in the hallway for moving too slow. I learned there was one corner of the courtyard you just didn’t stand in unless you wanted to get doghoused (definition still unknown). What I never learned, however, was whether these people created the stereotypes or the stereotypes created them. It was hard for me to think anything but the former, when girls like Ufoma and Shameeqwa* wore their “apple bottom jeans and the boots with the fur” to class and made consistent C’s.
Enter Marti, a fellow coworker during my summer of temporary employment. Marti was an older black lady who liked to talk. She started her life story by relating to me how she’d been on food stamps, was currently on disability pay from the government, and had no husband. Just as my eyes started to glaze over, thinking that I’d heard this sob story before and it probably had something to do with the giant sitting in the room named Race, Marti’s story took a different toll. She had a college degree, was a Republican (gasp), liked to read Greek philosophy, and had previously been an international government employee until congestive heart failure and a run-out husband (who was white) left her broke. Marti started talking about how disappointed she was in her daughter: a musical genius, soccer star, and young mom who was throwing it all away to make it as a rapper. She wished her daughter would stop speaking “ebonics” and start speaking English. And this got me thinking. Maybe I’d got that chicken—and—egg situation mixed up after all. Maybe the stereotypes were creating the people. It’s not so hard to believe, since every time I turn on the radio I am reminded that “shorty wants a thug” or that it’s normal to “bag you like some groceries” (ew, seriously, who gets away with saying that? Answer: Young Jeezy, who is one of my least fav people ever). I can only imagine that some of my fellow classmates at Klein High were acting the way they had been indoctrinated to, through what they voraciously defended as their “culture”.
So here’s my point: kudos to all those who use rap as an art form and not as a way to capitalize off an already downtrodden ethnicity. Because ever so quickly the “culture” of thugs, drugs, and ho’s is finding its way into white mainstream America where it may permanently settle down. Can’t we embrace the culture that is actually culture? Like, I’m thinking, Diana Ross, Langston Hughes (my favorite poet to date, which is only partially due to the fact that his poems are short), Miles Davis, Scott Joplin, and even Talib Kweli (a cut above the rest of the rappers, in my opinion)?
In the words of my aforementioned favorite poet:
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America
*names have NOT been changed
