BET THE NEW KKK? SAY WHAT????

An excerpt from a writing by Regina Bradley, PHD Candidate at Florida State University. See more at http://redclayscholar.blogspot.com/

From the jump, Watkins’ approach, not the majority of his points, are troubling. Instead of focusing on the corporatized blackness and pathology that BET spreads – which, by the way, is the premise of the essay – Watkins frequently targets Hip Hop via attacking Lil Wayne. Per the usual scapegoat argument, which is played, African Americans’ demise will be through Hip Hop. If the devil ain’t making us do it, Hip Hop is. Watkins’ essay reads like a witch hunt, with Weezy as the dreaded straw man (pun intended).  

What is touched upon, but not driven home, is the understanding that Hip Hop, like many other forms of black cultural expression, is commodified and corporatized. There is a tangled and messy relationship between capitalism, Hip Hop as an enterprise, and the black folks that it is deemed to reflect. What Watkins’ argument and the majority of consumed rap music boils down to is the search for the real and reality in this awkward moment of American history.  This moment where Hip Hop, once a black thang, is now an American thang. A moment where no clear markers of black or white publicly pull weight like previous decades. A moment where we have a black president who, because he referenced or was referenced in Hip Hop embodies what it means to be black to a nonblack audience while unemployment and poverty levels in the black American community are ridiculously high.  Enter here Weezy, Ross, Jeezy, and them,  who are in our face and in our ear canal every fifteen milliseconds, that say THEIR story is the real black experience. And we support that, download it, and post our renditions to social media sites like ratchet.com.

What Watkins was trying to get at, I believe, was our lack of accountability and blind consumption of this “relevant blackness” because it is shoved in our face on the regular. The danger becomes when we simply recycle what we see through our actions, in our conversations, and thought processes without any critical thought.

Perhaps more penetrating about Watkins’ article was the lack of solutions to challenge what BET and corporate America hashes out. An often overlooked concern is the much needed but lacking intergenerational dialogue to discuss the urgent state of affairs in the African American community.  We need a space to talk and critically engage in conversation about the contemporary, Post-Civil Rights African American experience. We need a willingness to start and sustain dialogue between black youth and older folks who witnessed the blatant racism before and during the Civil Rights Movement to situate why these representations are problematic.

And, obviously, we need a space to confront and complicate this one dimensional understanding of (corporate) Hip Hop as sold out. Hip Hop’s agency and purpose needs to be reconsidered, reinterpreted, and reclaimed as a voice for a variety of folks. Hip Hop may be marketed as a hyperblack, hypermasculine, hyper-pathological space, but its audience is much more diverse. We can no longer be comfortable with these typecasts of what it possibly means to be (insert adjective here) and black.  

It is too simple a solution to simply blame BET and Hip Hop for the violent reality that people of color face on a daily basis. Actually, this is dangerous. If we continue this destructive path of blind acceptance and do not question what is being marketed and produced, then yes, we are the new KKK – Korporate Kullud Kommodities.

Now THAT is some scary shit. No hood required.