Rap Artists and Racism

George Bush, Dan Quayle and now Oliver North use “Hollywood” as a screen to try to silence black rage as exemplified in Ice-T’s song “Cop Killer.” But that song is an allegory about a long and well-documented history of white police brutality. Its homicidal fantasy is expressed in relation to a tradition of organized and legally sanctioned white violence against African-Americans from Jamestown in 1619 to Rodney King in 1992. By denouncing Ice-T in the name of “law and order” (whose law, whose order?, one might ask), Bush and company--as with Clinton in his criticism of Sister Souljah--seek to reclaim white privilege to judge blacks and reaffirm white innocence over issues of race. The way is thus cleared to blame the victims.

According to this logic, rap music reinforces rather than criticizes racism; and blacks simply by being black provoke rather than suffer violence. Bush hears in black music the threat to whites instead of black anger at their continued brutalization. In this way, Ice-T, Sister Souljah and Murphy Brown have become the Willie Hortons of this campaign, furnishing both parties with minstrel masks to rouse primal fears of dangerous “others”: articulate black women and men joining with independent white women and “culturally elite” (read, effete) men.

V. LEUTERIO RAFAEL

San Diego