“For the 40th Time, We’re Babying Black People in This Country and it’s Not Good for Them or Anyone Else”


Oh, Christ. Somewhere in my history there’s probably a white smirk that set this all in motion. Sometime, in time immemorial, I looked away from another person based on the color of his skin, looked at the ground and relished the fact that I had the same skin and hair color as Jesus, or something like that.

But there are other things in my history too. There’s running by my high school football team when I was 27 and yelling “Go Eagles,” only to get zero response from them, despite that I knew they’d heard me. There’s prejudices, all over the place. There’s my professor alerting a black student in the class when I skipped the day on Frederick Douglass, afraid that I’d had racist motives. There’s racial slurs in downtown Chicago, there’s a group of black dudes in Terre Haute stopping me and asking if I’m Aryan Nation, fully ready to jump me if I mouth off. I have a shaved head but it’s from obvious baldness, for the record. 

But I am the victim of prejudices. That’s what I’m saying. It’s not like it doesn’t happen. It probably even happens way more frequently than victimization of blacks, for that matter. 

Now, I heard this song in the bar last night that really sickened me — it was like the ultimate nadir of disrespect against women and objectives of empty, vapid sexual conquest. And it was by a black dude. I would look it up but it doesn’t really matter what song it was. And I was going to steer this post in the direction of, like, there’s no backlash against this artist by the general public or the FCC because he’s black. And to be honest, it’s true. But maybe white men are given preferential treatment too for heinous lyrical baseness and the problem is sexism. Actually, sexism absolutely is a problem in music, outlined in part by Billie Eilish’s recent complaints about the lack of female performers at major music festivals, as well as lurid tales by Grimes of producers offering production time for sex, and things along those lines. To be honest, sexism in the American music industry is so bad that I, as an ostensible full-time music blogger, don’t even feel like I KNOW what the he** American music is. The whole endeavor is so occluded by these sociological maladies. The case in point would be those atrocious slime bags at Burger Records, who actually I once called out on this site, sort of half-joking, as selling record deals for sexual favors, but who have now indeed been uncovered and neutralized. 

But I mean come on, think of how psycho people go over “Cherry Pie” by Warrant. This dude in this other song was saying things like “All I need is another skank”. I mean at least Warrant was being complimentary of the chosen starlet, not calling her derogatory terms like this. 

I mean, what is the reason for this disrespect? What? There are so many calamities going on in the world today that command our attention, to have our scopes shifted to something this gratuitous and adolescent. And if sh** is really so bad for black people, why aren’t they still rapping about that, like Public Enemy was in the late-’80s? 

It’s not. That’s the answer. Immortal Technique went on a great rant about this topic that went viral on Facebook, about how inner city black kids in New York don’t face the same dangers and trials as they did in 1988. It’s just this cultural double standard that says whatever a black person spits out on a microphone is “art,” propelling this young man to stoop to this appalling level of disrespect and prurient interest. And it’s no better for him than it is for anyone else — resting on a paradigm of belittlement and objectification of women is not “art” and will certainly not do anybody any good, least of all some poor woman who has to encounter dudes who hear this song and abide by it, in all their looks, and hopefully not any of their actual advances, aggressive or not. We have to make moral criticism of black males in this country something that isn’t taboo anymore, without a question, or we’re not going to reach true sociological equality. 

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