Thedewsperspective

Pound Town by Cornell Dews

The older I get, the more I find myself aligned with the thinking of C. Delores Tucker, in regards to our beloved Hip Hop culture and music. This isn’t an editorial about C. Delores Tucker so I won’t go into length or detail attempting to explain her stance on Hip Hop in the ’90s, but I will encourage you to do your research.

As a child, or young adult, when I questioned or couldn’t understand things that seasoned adults would say or do, my grandmother would tell me, “just keep on living.” Well, at the age of 50, though my sight may fault me at times, my Zeelool glasses support my vision, allowing me to see more clearly. Recently I began to engage anyone who’d entertain my thoughts in a conversation about today’s most prominent women in rap. Obviously, if we’re talking about the most infamous women in rap today we’d have to start with the likes of Sexyy Red, Glorilla, Ice Spice, Cardi B and any other manufactured woman from a perceived background who can utter words all while twerking. Now don’t get me wrong, Jay already told us that we, “can’t knock the hustle” so I understand that a lot of these young women just see this as an opportunity to cash in monetarily. However, as a teacher and a father who raised two young ladies, is this the imagery of women that I want projected onto and permeating the impressionable young minds of my “daughters”?

I’ve been an Educator for 25 years. My focal targeted population to work with throughout my entire professional career has been black males who were deemed at-risk youth. Many of these boys earned this unwanted distinguishment because they were raised in single parent households, in impoverished communities, exposed to criminal activity throughout the neighborhoods and had no positive male actively engaged in their life. At one time, black boys were the hottest commodity in our country that prompted donors, philanthropists and government agencies to funnel millions of dollars into programs that committed to serving them. And like many, I wholeheartedly jumped headfirst into doing the work to serve these black boys who were deemed at-risk. I’m sure, like others, I could relate to them. Hell, I might’ve been deemed “at-risk” at one time. But interestingly enough, even though we made an assertive commitment to teach, mentor, and coach these boys from despair, we never had the same collective focus and attention on our girls who were impaled by the same damaging debris.

Our daughters are also being raised in single parent households, in impoverished communities, exposed to criminal activity throughout the neighborhoods and have no positive male, and in many cases, no positive females actively engaged in their life. So who do they look up to? It’s easy to say, Hip Hop and rap music should not be the greatest influence on our children. But I’m telling you from both personal and professional experience and knowledge, it is. And the rest of the world knows it, that’s why Madison Avenue uses it to sell every product imaginable.

So who’s influencing our children? For this particular editorial, to be more specific, I ask, who’s influencing our most vulnerable little girls? A few weeks ago, I asked both my adult daughters, “do y’all think it’s coincidental or intentional that we see and hear an influx of sexual degradation and violent exploitation in the music rapped by black female artists”? And is it coincidental or intentional that we’d have this happening during a time that we have a black woman hold the second highest position in our land in Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris, as well as Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman to serve on the highest court in our land. Both my daughters told me that they didn’t think it was intentional. But the more we talked, the less certain they seemed.

Regarding our beloved Hip Hop culture, I’m starting to hear the word “plant” used a lot, as if COINTELPRO is still prevalent. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I just find it strange. But hell, you know what else I find strange? I find it strange that for the majority of the 50 years of Hip Hop existence black men rapped just as explicitly about sex, crime, murder, drug dealing and every other heinous blight on our community, and we celebrated that shit. And personally, I was influenced by a lot of that dumb shit. I remember I… Naw, I won’t tell that story. Just know that I was one of those young impressionable minds that was influenced by the music. Now as a seasoned adult, my concern for our youth and the impact of our culture on their young impressionable minds is the same as my elders from the ’90s who were concerned about the potential damage of “gangsta” rap on young fertile minds like mine then. We should’ve listened to C. Delores Tucker. Freedom of speech is too expensive when it’s done at the detriment of our culture.

I won’t pretend to have the answers. Nor will I stop supporting the culture of Hip Hop. I’m just going to do the other thing that my grandmother always told me to do when I didn’t understand something, PRAY.