From
Hip Hop – Beyond Beats and Rhymes
Dr Jelani Cobb “a lineage of Black men wanting to deny their own fragility”
Conrad Tillard “We’re playing a role from the time we’re six or seven years
old.”
Chuck Creekmurr “society limits the range in which men can express emotion.”
Chuck D “the dominate image of masculinity in hip hop is the cat who can be
confrontational, but not confrontational with the right cat.”
Hollywood Movies: “a nation that supports a culture of violence”
Black males 14 times more likely to victims of violence.
“Challenging the notion that it’s ok for Black men to die early.” Chuck D “Black
death”
“Black males have taken the notion of Black women th is not that different from
19th century white images of Black women.”
Chuck D: “Follow the crumbs to the Big Bad Wolf”
“Only certain images of Blackness that they’ll allow to fall through the space.”
“White
male power structure that controls the labels, controls the radio.”
“In order to be successful in this game you gotta be thuggish.”
67% of buying audience is white.
“If the KKK was smart enough, they would have invented gangster rap.”
“BET one dimensionalizes us” “This
is all systematic” “People follow
the program that’s been laid out for them.”
“Hip hop is trapped in a box.”
Clear Channel Communications is
the number one radio station owner in the U.S. "Clear Channel owns, operates,
programs, or sells airtime for nearly 1,200 radio stations; it also has equity
interests in 240 international stations. Clear Channel owns a 90% stake in one
of the world's largest outdoor advertising companies, Clear Channel Outdoor
Holdings, with more than 910,000 display locations worldwide. In addition, Clear
Channel owns or manages about 50 TV stations and sells spot advertising for more
than 3,300 radio and TV stations through Katz Media. The company has agreed to
be taken private by an investment group led by Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain
Capital." [1]
From:
The Black Family in the Age of
Incarceration Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Atlantic
From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration
rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From
the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a
historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to
707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail
population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000
people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of
the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In
2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10
times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male
high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared
with only 13 percent of their white peers.
…
Through
the middle of the 20th century, America’s imprisonment rate hovered at about 110
people per 100,000. Presently, America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for
people in prisons and
jails) is roughly 12 times the rate in Sweden, eight times the rate in Italy,
seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia, and four times
the rate in Poland. America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia—and with an
autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000, compared with
our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition. China has about four times
America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold half a million more
people. “In short,” an authoritative report issued last year by the National
Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is
unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”
He then goes on to show how crime
first grew and dropped at the same rate in Canada and Europe and Australia as in
the US while none of those grew their incarceration rates.
…
Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four
went to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school,
seven in 10 did. “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s
most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written.
“Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to
adulthood.”
It
is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of all parolees in Los Angeles and
San Francisco are homeless. In that context—employment prospects diminished, cut
off from one’s children, nowhere to live—one can readily see the difficulty of
eluding the ever-present grasp of incarceration, even once an individual is
physically out of prison. Many do not elude its grasp. In 1984, 70 percent of
all parolees successfully completed their term without arrest and were granted
full freedom. In 1996, only 44 percent did. As of 2013, 33 percent do.
…
Ex-offenders are excluded from a
wide variety of jobs, running the gamut from septic-tank cleaner to barber to
real-estate agent, depending on the state. And in the limited job pool that
ex-offenders can swim in, blacks and whites are not equal. For her research,
Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One
white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record,
and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal
record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of
both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man
more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal
record. The black man without a
criminal record fared worse than the white man with one.
“High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men,
implicating even those (in the majority) who have remained crime free,” Pager
writes. Effectively, the
job market in America regards black men who have never been criminals as though
they were.