Curtis Jackson, otherwise known as 50 Cent, dropped to a New York sidewalk some years ago after being shot some eight or nine or ten times. Now, back in the day in the beginnings of what we now call gangsta rap, he would have been seen as the “bitch.” However, with his uncanny whit and pseudo bravado he flipped the coin of what is traditionally gangsta and made being the bitch the top dog in an otherwise compromising situation.
His ultimate strategy? To make it more about his strength to overcome the shooting than being a shooter who bragged about shooting someone else. What’s important about 50 Cent’s story? This story still illuminates the hyper masculine ideal of what it is to be a black man in America, but with a twist that confused Hip-Hop fans about what is gangsta, as our Nation equates what it is to be gangsta to what it is to be a black man.
That last statement seems a little obsolete because we would like to think with a black man who is president and who is “eloquent in his speech” as a white Northerner referred to his “proper English” skills, but in reality, our young men are still confused about what it is to be black in America, and even worse, what it is to be a black man in America.
I believe this is the reason why Byron Hurt, a filmmaker, philanthropist, community activist, and Hip-Hop genius, created the documentary my young men watched today entitled, “Barack and Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect.” This documentary details, through dialogue with various culture critics, how black manhood became synonymous with gangsterism and why black men who do not project themselves as gangstas are seen as “less than” in comparison to their “gangsta” counterparts.
Last session the students also watched the first part of a series entitled, “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” where we had an open dialogue about why Hip-Hop has embraced misogyny, violence, trapping, and prison sentences as a means of proving one’s manhood.
The two documentaries together have spawned some really good conversations about their own experiences as growing black men who not only want to embrace Hip-Hop culture and all it has to offer, including the negative stereotypes aforementioned, as well as having hopes of being future professionals who want to enter the working world.
The dichotomy is as simple as the young minister says in the film and it was one of the most important pieces of conversation in either documentary, “every black man who goes into a studio has got two people, him, in terms of who he really is and the thug he feels he has to be, it is a prison for us.”
And, the warden is commercialism. As discussed in “Barack and Curtis,” with young men coming through the ranks without solid, positive black role models the only example they have of what it is to be a man is mainstream media, i.e., music, movies, television. With networks and labels who deliberately push these images, which are reminiscent of such stereotypes as the ‘buck,’ and ‘the stud,’ they grow up believing that they cannot be the respectable black men some of their mommas are raising them to be, but in order to survive in a world where the white supremacist patriarchal ideal is alive and well, they have to be thug they are expected to be.
In my classroom I have to make these young black men understand the difference between what it is to be a black man in America versus what it is to be a thug in a society who expects nothing less than deviant behavior, the same behaviors taught to them during the colonial eras.
I will say, these students are beginning to realize this double consciousness within themselves and they are taking a step back to think about the things they are doing to not only keep themselves imprisoned in this train of thought, but how they treat other black men that influence this captive attitude.
“When is the last time you called another young black man a bitch, “ I ask? Responses ranged from today to last week. The same applied…”when is the last time you called another young black man a punk, a pussy, a stan…” These are the types of questions I ask in order to make them check their own self-identities and how they promote the very negative stereotypes that were made to defeat their future success.
It is with humility that I say, I think this exercise will be a major catalyst in their lives because for some reason, the district isn’t trying to teach these concepts to our youth. With a higher concern in how they test as a justification for firing teachers to save districts money across the Nation, issues such as this never even make it to the back burner.
However, that is another discussion within itself. I look forward to reporting a Part 3.
J. Prince, Princepality 11
Princepality 