Prometheus 6

Aunt B at Tiny Cat Pants is brilliant. Not only does When All Else Fails, Blame Black People hit many nails squarely and sequentially on the head, she does in the comments what we've needed white folks to do for a loooooong time: understand, and explain it to other white folks.

1. Indeed…but I’m not saying that it’s right that black women are only now, because of this event, being heard.

   Not what I’m saying at all.

   I’m saying there should have been an outcry all along. One that is getting this much media attention.

   Aren’t we on the same page?

   Comment by Ginger — April 11, 2007 @ 10:10 am

2. Ginger, no, that’s okay. Sometimes when points (like this one) seem completely obvious to the pointer-outer (me, in this case), the pointer-outer can skip over a few steps, assuming everyone else also sees those steps. And, if you don’t, it can make it very confusing to see how I ended up here.

   So, here are the givens that I didn’t articulate:

   1. There is still a way that, in our society, something is not really a problem until white people notice it.

   2. Because we don’t consider problems really real or really well-dealt with until white people notice them, we often overlook the hard work that black people do to fix their own problems.

   3. This really sucks for black people because it means that huge corporations can afford to ignore their concerns, because those concerns don’t matter until white people notice. (Take rap, for instance. If the numbers we saw tossed around yesterday are true, 80% of the audience for rap is white. That means that every single African American person could stop buying rap music tomorrow in protest of the treatment of black women and it wouldn’t matter that much. The vast majority of the rap audience would still be there.)

   Which leads me aside to 3a. just for a second, because what’s being overlooked here in all these arguments about how “well, black men call black women hos in rap music” is that black men call black women bitches and hos in order to sell music to white folks. Do you see what I’m getting at? Rap music, as it is now, is controlled by enormous record companies and is shaped to present a message that sells to its audience–the message its audience, who are primarily white folks, want to hear, the message they’re buying is about how much black women suck. For white folks to act as if they’ve had no role in shaping the message of popular rap music–as if the problem is just how black men disrespect black women–and then act as if it’s those black men’s fault for saying those words…

   Well, it’s not so easy. Black men are saying things that they know white people are the audience for and the fact that those things are vile tells us something about the kinds of messages white audiences will accept about black women.

   So, in summary, it seems to me that a lot of white people want to blame all black people for what’s in rap music, as if black people haven’t been doing anything to try to clean up rap. When, really, black people have been doing a lot to try to solve this problem, but they’ve been met with limited success because they a.) don’t have access to the mainstream media and cannot access the general public consciousness the way that some black “leaders” can and 2.) they aren’t the primary audience for rap music and so record conglomerates have little incentive to appease them.

   Again, popular rap music is deliberately targeted to a white audience, presenting a version of black life that white people are apparently eager to hear songs about (and it’s important to note that an important facet is that the artist can never reveal that he knows his audience is white. White people want to feel like they’re getting some unmitigated view of black life and so the artist, in order to further that illusion, must act like he believes his audience is entirely black).

   So, obviously, I’m not black, so I can’t speak for black folks, but it seems to me that why black people are so irritated about this is that they have been complaining all along–they just can’t get heard–and that, in order to get heard, they have to get white people to take up their cause, when it’s white people in the first place who are creating a demand for this kind of music and yet white people don’t want to take responsibility for creating that demand.

   That’s what makes me so mad about the whole “well, black people use that kind of language in their music” argument, because it leaves off the important second part “so that their largely white audience will continue to buy their records.” And I think it looks like we want to help solve a problem in the black community (rap music), when, really, it’s a problem the white community has–that we love it when black people degrade themselves for our entertainment.

   That’s why, I think, our outrage over rap music is always going to seem disingenuous. The problem wasn’t really what Imus said so much as that he accidentally let on that those kinds of ideas about black women are not just a problem in the black community, but in the American community in general.

   We could “fix” rap music, but that’s really not a solution. Somehow you have to change the minds of rap’s audience, 80% of whom are white, about what’s an acceptable message about black women to put in your mind. “Fixing” rap music would just change the message (briefly, I imagine); it wouldn’t change the audience for that message.

   Comment by Aunt B. — April 11, 2007 @ 10:33 am