Los Angeles--Struggles toward Multiethnic Community by Edward T. Chang Russell Charles Leong

Author:Edward T. Chang, Russell Charles Leong [Edward T. Chang, Russell Charles Leong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Minority Studies, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9780295997773
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2017-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

ARMANDO NAVARRO is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Riverside.

Race, Class, Conflict and Empowerment:

On Ice Cube’s “Black Korea”

JEFF CHANG

I. Locating the Spaces of Struggle

Amidst the tempest between Du Soon Ja’s conviction and sentencing in late 1991, Los Angeles rap artist Ice Cube issued a brutally terse fictional judgment of his own on a song called “Black Korea.” With an audio snippet from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, he placed himself as a customer in a Korean American-owned corner store trying to purchase a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. What should have been a simple transaction was about to become another aggravating experience.

As the music bursts forth, the scene is set for an ugly confrontation. Ice Cube confronts two prejudiced, “Oriental, one penny counting” proprietors. They follow him suspiciously as he walks through their store. Their close scrutiny infuriates the rapper, who turns and leers at the woman storekeeper, “Bitch, I got a job.” At the song’s bridge, the shop erupts into argument when his friends raise their voices in his support.

By now the original Spike Lee scene has been transformed, fully stripped of all its irony and humor, left with only the raw racial conflict. Then the heavy bass surges back and the song rushes along to its pitched conclusion. First Ice Cube issues an economic threat, “Don’t follow me up and down your crazy little market, or your little chop suey ass will be the target of a nationwide boycott.” In a final defiant gesture, he raises the prospect of a racially vengeful conflagration. “Pay respect to the black fist,” he yells, “or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp, and then we’ll see ya because you can’t turn the ghetto into Black Korea.” The Korean store-owner has the last word: “Mother fuck you!.”

Tension between African Americans and Asian Americans is a subtext running throughout the album, entitled Death Certificate, which finds Ice Cube partially repudiating his previous street gangster pose and replacing it with an emerging nationalist perspective. But his new embrace of blackness comes with an antipathy for Asians. On “Horny Lil’ Devil,” a track about black male emasculation, he gets so energized from wiping out the “devils” (variously seen as white sexual harassers of black women, racists, and “fags”) that he runs around to the corner store to beat up the “Jap” owner. On “Us,” he fumes at “sellouts” and calls for black racial solidarity when he sees “Japs grabbing every vacant lot in my ‘hood to build a store and sell they goods.”

Ice Cube’s comments on Asians were not a new development in hip hop music. Dating to the 1990 Red Apple Grocery boycott in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, rap sometimes served as a forum for young urban blacks to express their feelings on tensions related to Asian Americans. Queen Mother Rage, a rapper affiliated with Sonny Carson’s Blackwatch Movement, denounced “the Orientals hungry for each piece of our prize.” On a single called “To Be Real,” she cautioned, “Check the incidents and the innocence.

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