Aunt B. from Tiny Cat Pants breaks it down in a post called When All Else Fails Blame Black People for those who don’t understand the Imus incident.
The gospel according to Aunt B...
The problem is not that black folks are just sitting back quietly accepting whatever vomits forth from the record industry; the problem is that most white people don’t have the thoughts and opinions of their black peers even on their radar. I doubt they even know how to find out what regular black people are thinking and saying about things.
And why would they? Because as much as they grouch about Sharpton and Jackson, Sharpton and Jackson are on their TV screens spouting out opinions. Most white people don’t have to do any work to discover what’s on the minds of Sharpton or Jackson, whereas hearing from actual black people who can’t get on cable takes a little more effort. Far better to triangulate from the appearances of black folks on the news, ESPN, and BET what’s going on in the black community.
Never mind that that’s a little like watching CMT in order to figure out what white Nashvillians think about life.
And this completely dead on accurate comment down thread....
... 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:
- There is still a way that, in our society, something is not really a problem until white people notice it.
- 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.
- 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...
snip
Dear Aunt B. cotinues on to bring the analysis home...
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.
Yeah, it makes me mad too. I listened to Scarborough Country for a few moments after KO ended the other night. (I know. That was a mistake.) I quickly changed the channel when I saw that his first story was going to be a rant against hiphop and a rehash of "But black people say it." I’m still waiting for some white commentator to talk about the seemingly insatiable appetite of many white people for images of degraded black and latino women. I would like to see that acknowledged on the ‘liberal’ blogs.
So when we talk about the evils of rap music, let’s talk for awhile about one of the most popular rappers and producers out there today; Marshall Mathers, or EminEm. He is infamous for his woman hating, momma hating lyrics. And his musical acolytes follow in his footsteps. His is the evil genius behind 50 cent and several other highly popular, yet anti female rap acts. Mathers is white. Visit his website, please. See what I mean. And yet, the misogyny in rap is all coming from black people? Nonsense. This man even has his own channel on Sirius radio.
Any thinking person who listens to hiphop music knows that there is a growing cynism and realization that artists are selling out. And resistance to the destruction of hiphop is growing. But knowing that would mean that you had to listen to hiphop other than the dreck they play on Clear Channel stations.
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