A Guest in the House of Hip-Hop by Mickey Hess

Author:Mickey Hess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2018-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

Nine

SIT DOWN—CENSORSHIP, GRANDSTANDING, AND SHUTTING YOUR MOUTH

“Is it my place to give my two cents,” asked Macklemore. “Or should I stand on the side and shut my mouth?” Hip-hop, a music genre that flourished in the Nineties with black men fighting censorship, had finally ceded the stage to a white man asking what it was ok for him to say. The lyrics above come from “White Privilege II,” where Macklemore questions if a white man should join in chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Plenty of other white folks had asked themselves that question and decided the answer was no, so they’d taken to chanting All Lives Matter instead. They pretended they couldn’t hear the parenthetical too at the end of Black Lives Matter, but it was there, and they knew it was there. Putting it on the T-shirts and picket signs would have sounded too supplicating, but there was no denying it hung there unstated, its absence making the point even stronger. Throughout the history of this country, it’s been a societal given that white lives matter, so there’s no reason to hold up signs stating that. That’s why the people who believed the slogan Black Lives Matter expressed an anti-white sentiment countered with their own rallying cry of All Lives Matter, because if white people went around holding signs that said White Lives Matter, there’d be a parenthetical Only at the beginning.

Black Lives Matter was already saying All Lives Matter. They were saying it to a country whose Constitution designated “free Persons” from “all other Persons” and where the young male descendants of those “other Persons” were still, more than 200 years later, nine times more likely than the descendants of the “free Persons” to get killed by the police—so likely, in fact, that around 1 out of every 65 young black men who died were killed by cops.1 Outside of that all-important context, the phrase “All Lives Matter” sounds like it could be a corollary (plus one) of the rallying cry from just a year earlier: “We Are the 99%” Did the unity of the 99% vs. the 1% give way to the separatism of Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter, or was the unity never there to begin with? I am not laying our longstanding division at the feet of this recent movement—politicians have strategized to divide us for centuries: during the American Revolution the British army turned colonists against slaves and slaves against colonists;2 in the decades after the Civil War Northern carpetbaggers moved South to get freed blacks to vote against white southerners; in 1960, President Lyndon Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”3 Nixon’s aide John Erlichman later admitted Nixon had declared war on drugs in order to continue a campaign against black people in a country that would no longer (or

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