by Latoya Peterson

I am sure that you all have noted a bit of an uptick in hip-hop oriented content on the site. At first, I was planning to do a hip-hop week full of posts and content on hip-hop and hip-hop culture. However, after the feminism wars and reviewing all my research, I realized I had way too much information to cram into a week. So, you’ll just notice more posts about hip-hop on a regular basis. I’m planning to cover a lot of the social issues and global issues as well, so feel free to email me with recommendations - latoya@racialicious.com

Also, while putting all this together, I realized that hip-hop doesn’t speak to everyone. Music is often associated with racial groups, but as we have seen since music became an industry that there is no such thing as a hard and fast rule as to who listens to what.

With that, dear readers, I ask you this question: what are we listening to? Hopefully some patterns will emerge from your responses and we can focus some posts on that.

To get you started, here are 20 random songs I listened to today:

Beautiful - Goldfrapp
Love & Appreciate - Murs
Blue Collar Blues - The Far*East Movement
Everything is Everything - Lauryn Hill
Ride on Shooting Star [Japanese] - The Pillows (FLCL Soundtrack)
About a Boy (Nirvana Cover) - Cibo Matto
Nirvana - Elemeno P
Toxic (Britney Spears Cover, Remixed with ODB) - Mark Ronson
I’m Addicted to You - Anna Tsuchiya
You Need My Attention - Van Hunt
Top Back - T.I.
Who Needs Forever - Astrud Gilberto
Well Come [Korean] - Jinusean feat. Lexy
Ex-Boyfriend [Japanese] - M-flo feat. Crystal Kay
Ibabo [Korean] - The Wonder Girls
Amiga [Spanish] - Si*Se
Romeo - Basement Jaxx
Say How I Feel (Remix) - Rhian Benson feat. Slum Village
Astrosexy [Japanese] - M-Flo feat. Chemisty
Morris Brown - Outkast

(Photo Credit: Art.com)

by Latoya Peterson

Currently on the front page of the Washington Post:

The caption reads:

U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Altered
Unhappy with “confrontational” image, powerful federal arts commission wants Martin Luther King Jr. statue proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin reworked. (Photo: Lei Yixin)

The associated article about the project states:

A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too “confrontational” and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts thinks “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries,” commission secretary Thomas Luebke said in a letter in April.

By law, no project like the memorial can go forward without approval from the commission, the federal agency that advises the government on public design and aesthetics in the capital.

Comment at will.

by Latoya Peterson

This is a continuation of a series. See parts 1, 2, 3, and 3.5 for more details.

So it took me a while to write this part of the series, partially because I am still looking for a concrete answer to the following question:

Why do so many people want to focus more on class than on race?

Now, this is not to say that class isn’t an important issue. It is. And it is an issue that needs to be brought before the public for discussion more often.

However, I must say I find it a bit disingenuous when I am having a conversation about race, and someone chooses to chime in “No, you’re wrong - the real issue is class, not race. We need to be discussing that.”

Hence the reason why I titled the series “Has Class Trumped Race?”

I would argue no.

Class and race and two different things which encompass a wide range of experiences and scenarios. They build upon each other. Just like there is no one universal race experience, there is no one universal class experience on any side of the divide. Being upper-class and black is still different from being upper class and white. Being lower-class and white is a different experience from being black and working poor.

And most of this “class” analysis still falls into a few distinct binaries.

There is the separation binary, which indicates that all lower class people in a certain group and all upper class people in a certain group must act in set ways. I hear this most in class discussions in the black community, where someone will mention that certain problems only pertain to lower-class blacks and so we should not include them in the larger racial discussion.

There is also the black-white binary, which much of our racial discourse is based around, and leaves lower class and upper class Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, and the various generations of people born to immigrants out of the dialogue completely.

There is another binary which dictates that all discussions of race are really discussions of class because all the blacks/asians/latinos they know don’t have race problems, so it must only be a class issue. I generally hear these sentiments when I am dealing with white people who don’t want to talk about race.

The discussion today is not about whether or not class is worth discussing. I think I have made it clear that it is an enormous issue and one that must take a place of importance in our national dialogue, especially considering our current political and economic climate in the United States.

But what I want to know is why so many people want to insert a discussion of class over a discussion of race?

by Fatemeh Fakhraie

This Sunday, May 11, PBS will air a documentary at 10 pm EST entitled Stand Up: Muslim American Comics Come of Age. It explores five prominent Muslim American stand-up comedians (Ahmed Ahmed, Azhar Usman, Dean Obeidallah, Maysoon Zayid, and Tissa Hami) as they perform their sets, draw inspiration from their life events, and look back at what shapes their perceptions.

September 11^th was a galvanizing factor for many of the comedians, and the special starts off by contextualizing the comedy in the face of continuing backlash against Muslim and Middle Eastern/South Asian communities. The attacks inspired Dean Obeidallah to reconnect with his Arab roots, leave his career as a lawyer, and start the Arab American Comedy Festival with Maysoon Zayid. It inspired Tissa Hami to leave her Wall Street job and do comedy. It roused Azhar Usman into the realization that the hijackers didn’t just seize the planes; they seized Islam, too. Continue Reading »

• BBC NEWS | Africa | Can Tanzania reap bumper harvests?
  “Mr Mchome sends text messages detailing the prices via his mobile phone to other farmers in the region. This gives them more power to demand fair prices from the traders.”
  (tags: international food economy)
• Finding the Working Class Amusing « Education and Class
  “Fox News analysts snicker their way through their demeaning analysis of class in America.”
  (tags: class)
• NYPD Sued For Using Fewer Resources For Missing Blacks / Stereohyped
  “The police […] didn’t help and closed the complaint that an officer had drafted out of pity. In the four days that followed […] Romona Moore was being raped and tortured by two men in a house a few blocks from her home.”
  (tags: racism)
• Clinton: Only White People are “Hard Working Americans” | RaceWire
  “We aren’t endorsing Barack Obama but rather any candidate that works to close the gaps of the racial divide by appealing to all Americans. It seems that isolating her success among working class white people to prove her electability may not be a good
  (tags: race politics)

by Latoya Peterson

One of the most annoying memes I hear keep popping up in the media and on various threads and boards is that “blacks are voting for Obama - why is it racist to say whites vote for Clinton? It’s a fact that black people are voting for Obama because he’s black, just admit it.”

Here’s why that assumption pisses me off - because that is an oversimplification of what actually happened. Clinton and Obama started out more or less equal in the eyes of the black community. Yes, some people were determined to vote black, no matter what. And some people preferred to go with Clinton as we have seen her work. And some people had the idiotic mentality that a vote for Hill is another vote for Bill, so vote for her. So at the beginning of this race, Hillary was the assumed nominee. Many of us were intrigued by Barack Obama, but not sold. After all, who was he? Even after winning Oprah’s backing, people were still skeptical of Obama.

As I have said many times before, when this race started, I was happy with either candidate getting the nod. Both showed dedication and leadership, and while their tactics differed, they had grand plans for improvement. With Edwards in the mix, the conversation about poverty and class actually became a mainstay of the election stump speech which was a welcome addition. Things were tense, but cool. We were going to see who was the better contender and that person would become our nominee.

This was supposed to be a battle of ideals - not a rehashing of race and gender relations in the United States.

And yet, here we are. Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor M.Dot

It’s challenging to criticize hip hop publicly.

My rationale is that Hip Hop gets hammered by the popular media, so why should I contribute further to it?

When given more thought, I see this as a poor reason to avoid criticizing anything. As an athlete I know criticism is feedback and nothing is improved without feedback. Professor evaluations are feedback. Customer service evaluations are feedback. Feedback is in many ways the oil that greases the improvement machine.

However, my reluctance to criticize may also be related to the tendency within the African American community to avoid airing our dirty laundry. On balance, I also know that dysfunction
flourishes when concealed out of sight.

As a teenager and full-fledged hip hop head, I never listened to Miles because I learned that he beat Cicley Tyson and was unapologetic about it after reading Pearl Cleage’s “Mad at Miles.” I bumped Coltrane, Roach and Blakey, but no Miles. One day, a few years ago, a film Professor and jazz lover who I respected, asked me how could I avoid Miles and listen to so much hip hop?

It was then that I began to see that I would have some reconciling to do regarding gender and hip hop. Continue Reading »

Seeking Avalon - Walk the Line

I was originally not going to comment on Melissa Bruen. Then I learned that there was backlash.

This story seems like a graduating journalist’s cry for fame. If I’m mistaken, then I am sorry, but I don’t buy into any of it. Sweet picture on the front page, and nice “swimmer’s build,” but I feel sorry for anyone who is actually a victim of assault and doesn’t have such a romanticized story to tell.

[…]

A young woman on a college campus walking back to her dorm is assaulted. She fights back. OTHER random men in the area then group assault her in retribution for her fighting off the first asswipe.

When I first read the story last night, the moment I read her taking more than one swing at the first guy I knew what had happened. You see there is a line women are supposed to walk without ever falling over. Comic bloggers and other fiction bloggers (women) talk about it all the time. We say “Madonna/Whore Complex” until those who aren’t getting it, just get sick of seeing it and tune it out. […]

During the first assault, Melissa Bruen was just a woman; faceless, without personality or autonomy of her own.. She was an ass to rub off on, an object that should just stand there and take it.

With the first swung blow of self defense she was MADONNA. She became a good girl who was suitably disgusted. The problem is, the MADONNA must be perfectly feminine and submissive while insisting that raw, unwanted sexuality not touch her. She must cajole and coax decent behavior for the sake of PURITY.

Women who’re trained in self-defense do so / can do so in order to give up having to play the MADONNA. Playing that role leaves you in the shower for hours trying to scrub away not just the touch of the invader, but something akin to self-hate, that you had to mollify an assaulter in order to survive. Survival is everything. It is the ONLY thing. But it can leave a film.

Melissa Bruen took a second swing and a third. She wanted this asswipe to know his advances were. not. welcome. And she fell, tumbling across the line to WHORE. The whore is not a good girl. She can be a virgin and she’s still not a good girl. Good girls know their place. Good girls don’t claim power. Good girls don’t say no and follow it up with pressure and physical hurt. Continue Reading »

by Guest Contributor Alex Alvarez

Interracial and interethnic dating has as much, if not more, to do with “Family Matters” as my own family. So, in order to try to describe the experience of being in an interethnic relationship, I have to first evaluate the culture popping up all around me. Grab some Cheez Puffs or chicharrones, put aside your distaste for cheesy, alliterative snack food references, and let’s get to this.

Should you ever feel inclined to Google “Interracial Dating,” as I do not do often on a Tuesday night, you’ll find a lot of dating sites aimed at hooking you up with someone of another race. Not information about interracial dating, not tirades against it, not advice, not thoughtful writing on the subject, but, rather, dating sites with names like “Salt and Pepper.” Discovering this made a little light blink on and off in my mind’s eye reading “Fetish! Fetish! Fetish!” I’ll admit to feeling conflicted about interracial dating as it relates to the fetishization of a group. Who am I to make the distinction between preference and prejudice? That concern always takes the form of a certain cringe I’m never without when thinking about the subject, but when I see evidence of people actively going out and searching for someone of another, specific race or ethnicity, well. That action toes the very fine line between personal preference and …and what, exactly?

This isn’t racism in the traditional sense of hating or fearing a group of people, but there does seem to be the impression that the fetishized group is somehow either aesthetically or sexually superior to other groups or that, taking that a step further, they are somehow subhuman, objectified, interchangeable receptacles for sex and attention. I don’t want to advocate the idea that there are different levels of racism, but this particular brand is so hurtful because it occurs so subtly and, for the most part, disguised as a compliment. When a man who is darker than me compliments me on the paleness of my skin, as I often encounter with Latino men, it insults and devalues both of us. I’m reduced to my body parts, and he buys into the idea that white skin is inherently beautiful. Continue Reading »

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

I, along with Baratunde Thurston of Jack & Jill Politics and Casey Lartigue of The Casey Lartigue Show were on News and Notes yesterday to discuss the latest string of protests over the shooting death of Sean Bell, Tuesday night’s Democratic primary results, and the death of an interracial marriage pioneer.

Click here to listen

by Latoya Peterson

The new season of the Real World is on. This one is The Real World XX: Hollywood.

Wendi saw something shady and dropped us an email. *sigh* I rolled over to the MTV site to see what new manufactured racism for ratings was in store for me.

(Please note - the videos are embedded but now direct you to the MTV website. I don’t know why that is happening.)

They don’t dissapoint, do they?

In the video, the housemmates fight and the white, southern roommate Kim starts calling the black, braided roommate Brianna ghetto. The fight escalates, screaming starts, more allegations of ghetto, Brianna calls her a white bitch, and then we get to my favorite quote.

Kim: “I don’t care where you’re from, if you’re from the most inner city…blackville.”

Continue Reading »

• Excuse Me, Do You Work Here? | RaceWire
  “Why is it every time I walk into a Home Depot people ask me where to find the plumbing fixtures? It’s not like I walk around wearing an orange apron. And why is it that when I dress up for a black tie event, people let me know that their table could use more wine.
  (tags: race stereotypes)
• The Cult of Veganism; or, Sit Down & Shut Up, Little Brown Girl « Vegans of Color
  “It is no secret that a lot of people of color, for instance, are put off animal rights issues because of racism & colonialism in the movement.”
  (tags: veganism race class)

by Guest Contributor Duniya, originally published at Muslimah Media Watch

Although still a male-dominated realm, women have been an important part of the hip hop world both as artists and consumers. Anaya McMurray, in her journal article* Hotep and Hip-Hop: Can Black Muslim Women Be Down with Hip-Hop? explores the relation of Black Muslim women to hip hop music and asks the question, “Can Black Muslim women be a part of hip hop and Islam?”**

McCurray says that unique spaces in the discourses surrounding Islam are often ignored, consequently ignoring certain groups of Muslims, including Black Muslim women. Black Muslim women have become “agents in negotiating Islamic faith and hip-hop culture.” She aims to examine the ways in which Black Muslim women create unique spaces and negotiate Islam and hip hop in their music, as well as ways in which society represents Islam and hip hop which marginalize Black Muslim women. She does so by discussing the works of Erykah Badu, Eve, and herself as Black Muslim women hip hop artists.

When speaking of Erykah Badu we find out that the Islam McMurray tells us Badu follows is that of the Nation of Gods and Earths, or Five Percenters. Five Percenters are those who follow the teachings of Clarence 13x, a former member of the Nation of Islam. Five Percenters do consider themselves Muslims but not in the religious sense - in the political sense. Therefore, many mainstream Muslims do not consider them Muslims. And in reality their beliefs have very little in common with Sunni or Shia Islam. McMurray tells us how Badu does create a space for Muslim women in her songs by rapping about Five Percenter practices - practices which encourage men and women to remain within their respective, traditional roles. Beliefs which seem quite sexist but ones which Badu says are quite flexible, in her music. However, as Five Percenters have so little in common with mainstream Islam, and in fact consider themselves a part of a political movement rather than a religious one, using Badu to represent Muslim women in hip hop struck me as false advertising. She does not, from my understanding, represent the religion but rather the political movement.

The situation of Eve is not so clear. She has been quoted as saying that she finds Sunni Islam beautiful but cannot follow it properly. McMurray argues that, according to her calculations, Eve is a Muslim woman, though even McMurray admits she cannot be sure. McMurray reads Eve as a Muslim woman. Eve refers to Allah in her work as well as thanks Allah on her CD credits. Additionally, McMurray tells us that her own personal communications indicate that she is Muslim. McMurray makes an interesting observation about people’s assumptions about Eve and her religion. In one song Eve says “I thank Allah every night and pray there’s no turning back.” In many online lyrics sources this line is written as “I thank the Lord every night and pray there’s no turning back.” McMurray tells us that people, on all sides (within and without) just cannot fathom Eve as a Muslim so would never assume that she would use “Allah.” She tells us that people have never even asked the question of her being Muslim despite her use of “Allah”. Continue Reading »

Antidrown - “Ohh Myyy Godd!”

When dealing with issues of women in Muslim countries, even the compassion that comes from some women in the US sometimes takes the form of “Oh my god!” I know, stoning is a savage idea and it’s appalling. But when you say “Oh My God!” to make yourself feel better, it shows. It makes you seem not genuine, because it has that little bit of satisfaction that comes with disassociating yourself from such an appalling act. After all, it’s not the human society who is committing this act, it’s “them,” it’s those countries. When you think about domestic violence in these countries:”Oh My God!” It doesn’t make you think about prevalence of domestic violence in the US. It doesn’t make you say, “yes, we have the same problem, what can we do together to fix this?” Because you think there is something inherent about “them” that makes them more suitable for domestic violence,”the women must be sheepish and submissive, their religion makes it ok, their men are savages” but you sound so concerned: “Oh my god, those poor women, it’s so preposterous!” as if it doesn’t happen in your homes.

Womanist Musings - East vs. West Feminist Divide

When we look in askance at the practice of polygamy we must remember the FLDS compounds. When we question the Burqa, we must remember its binary opposite uniform, the sexualized female western body. Both are limiting and seek to construct women as other. Patriarchy is reinforced each and every time feminism refuses to see commonality. Continue Reading »

by Latoya Peterson

So, I grabbed Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology over the weekend and I cannot put it down. Seriously y’all - every spare minute I spend pouring over the pages. While this one is more intellectual than Chickenheads (which makes it a little less accessible) Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elaine Richardson, Aisha Durham, and Rachel Raimist brought it in this collection.

I’ll be posting excerpts a little later, but I just had to share the table of contents:

Forward, Mark Anthony Neal

An Introduction of Sorts for Hip-Hop Feminism, Gwendolyn D. Pough

Section One

B-Girls, Femcees, Graf Girls and Lady Deejays: Women Artists in Hip Hop, Rachel Raimist
Proven Presence: The Emergence of Feminist Politics in Cuban Hip-Hop, Sujatha Fernandes
Sista’ Outsider: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop, Eric Darnell Pritchard & Maria L. Bibbs
With Style and Grace, John Rodriguez
This DJ, Shaden Tavakoli
Beyond Every Ceiling Is the Sky, Darlene Anita Scott
Less Hustle, More Flow: The Role of Women in Hip-Hop Culture, Beatrice Koehler-Derrick Continue Reading »