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Black culture beyond hip-hop

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Black culture beyond hip-hop By Thomas Chatterton Williams - Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, May 30, 2007
 
Over the past three decades black culture has grown so conflated with hip-hop culture that for most Americans under the age of 45, hip-hop culture is black culture. Except that it's not.
 
During the controversy over Don Imus' comments this spring, the radio host was pilloried for using the same sexist language that is condoned, if not celebrated, in hip-hop music and culture. As the scandal evolved, some critics, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the NAACP, shifted their attention to the rap industry. Indeed, every couple of years, it seems, we ask ourselves: Is hip-hop poisonous? Is it misogynistic, violent and nihilistic? What kind of message is it sending? But what critics consistently fail to emphasize in these sporadic storms of opprobrium, as most did during the Imus affair, is that the stakes transcend hip-hop: Black culture itself is in trouble.
 
Born in the projects of the South Bronx, tweaked to its gangsta form in the 'hoods of South Central Los Angeles and dumbed down unconscionably in the ghettos of the "Dirty South" (the original Confederate states, minus Missouri and Kentucky), there are no two ways about it -- hip-hop culture is not black culture, it's black street culture. Despite 40 years of progress since the civil rights movement, in the hip-hop era -- from the late 1970s onward -- black America, uniquely, began receiving its values, aesthetic sensibility and self-image almost entirely from the street up.
 
This is a major departure for blacks, who traditionally saw cultivation as a key to equality. Think of the days when W.E.B. Du Bois "(sat) with Shakespeare" and moved "arm in arm with Balzac"; or when Ralph Ellison waxed universal and spoke of the need "to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life."
 
The historian Paul Fussell notes that for most Americans, it is difficult to "class sink." Try to imagine the Chinese-American son of oncologists -- living in, say, a New York suburb such as Westchester, attending private school -- who feels subconsciously compelled to model his life, even if only superficially, on that of a Chinese mafioso dealing heroin on the Lower East Side. The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.
 
But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention. Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with "keeping it real" are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.
 
Sociologists have a term for this pathological facet of black life.
 
It's called "cool-pose culture." Whatever the nomenclature, "cool pose" or keeping it real or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience -- the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era -- has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.
 
As John H. McWhorter emphasizes in his book "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," "forty years after the Civil Rights Act, African-American students on the average are the weakest in the United States, at all ages, in all subjects, and regardless of class level." Reading and math proficiency test results consistently show this. Clearly, this Inostalgie de la boue/I , this longing for the mud, exacts a hefty price.
 
A 2005 study by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard University crystallizes the point: While there is scarce dissimilarity in popularity levels among low-achieving students, black or white, Fryer finds that "when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA, clear differences start to emerge." At 3.5 and above, black students "tend to have fewer and fewer friends," even as their high-achieving white peers "are at the top of the popularity pyramid." With such pressure to be real, to not "act white," is it any wonder that the African-American high school graduation rate has stagnated at 70 percent for the past three decades? Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.
 
** Thomas Chatterton Williams is a graduate student in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He also works for n+1 magazine, a semiannual journal of literature. He wrote this article for the Washington Post.
 

From: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2620

Seattle VA-hospital critized (Sac Bee)

Seattle-area VA hospital criticized

By GENE JOHNSON - Associated Press Writer
Published 10:33 pm PDT Friday, June 15, 2007

The Department of Veterans Affairs knew for months that shower heads, handrails and other fixtures posed serious suicide risks to Seattle-area psychiatric patients, but refused to fix the problems, inspectors said in a report released Friday.

The VA said it scrambled to remedy problems in Seattle after a medical standards group threatened to pull its endorsement of two area hospitals last month. Health care for the nation's veterans has been rocked in recent months by accounts of shoddy treatment at the Department of Defense's Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., inspected the Seattle VA hospital's progress Friday and said the hospital is correcting problems identified by inspectors. She spent nearly two hours touring the hospital's two psychiatric wards and repeatedly asked VA officials to let her know if they need more money.

But Murray also criticized how the problems were handled.

"What happened in those four months?" Murray, D-Wash., asked her tour guides. "Can I be absolutely blunt? I heard it wasn't a resources issue. ... It was a lack of leadership issue."

The Chicago-based Joint Commission, a nonprofit hospital standards group, said psychiatric ward conditions posed an "immediate threat to life" after it inspected the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in May.

Commission inspectors found picture frames with sharp metal corners hung on the walls and fire extinguishers sitting behind breakable glass panes. The furniture in the common areas was neither terribly heavy nor bolted down.

VA officials initially refused to release details of the inspection, which was first reported by The News Tribune of Tacoma. Murray, a senior member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, released it Friday after obtaining a copy.

The document said VA officials knew in February that suicidal patients could use several room fixtures to hang themselves, but "rejected that these were viable risks and elected not to correct." An internal report was issued that month after a patient at the Seattle VA hospital was found hanging from a support rail in November.

Dennis Lewis, director of the VA Northwest Health Network, and Stan Johnson, who moved to Seattle two weeks ago to become the hospital's director, acknowledged that administrators didn't properly respond to the staff's recommendations following the suicide. They said the VA is responding to all the commission's findings.

The VA has removed rails from the beds and ordered 70 new beds and extra-heavy furniture for the psych wards at the Puget Sound hospitals. It has also removed pictures from the walls except in public areas, and is taking other steps such as covering pipes under bathroom sinks to prevent patients from hanging themselves.

The improvements cost $450,000, and administrators said they expected other VA hospitals around the country to reevaluate their psychiatric facilities. Health care for veterans has been a top concern in recent months following accounts of shoddy treatment at the Defense Department's Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The joint commission, which sends inspectors for unannounced visits every three years, had never complained about the support rails, picture frames or other items it cited in a preliminary report last month, administrators said.

On Thursday, officials told The Associated Press that the Army is planning to hire at least 25 percent more psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers to help a growing number of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health needs.

Walter Reed's new commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, said the Army medical system has lost the trust of soldiers, their relatives and the American people but is working hard to fix its problems and provide quality care to troops.

About the writer:

  • Associated Press writer Ron Word, in Jacksonville, Fla., contributed to this report.





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