Essay – Drawing the Line: Victims, Violence and Hip-Hop

Hey, I just wrote the first version of this essay, I guess for my weekly reflection on Hip-Hop, it deals pretty seriously with race relations and contains some swearing; if you don’t want to read that, don’t read this essay.

Drawing the Line: Victims, Violence and Hip-Hop

I am white. I would like to say that when I got mugged, it was an exception to stereotypes. I wish I could say that people’s prejudice couldn’t walk all over me, that I didn’t have to rethink my beliefs. Sadly, it wasn’t and I can’t. The only thing that was “exceptional” about me being mugged is that it happened at three in the afternoon, broad daylight, on a Sunday on a street that was populated with passers-by and shoulder-to-shoulder apartments.

I was walking down the street, alone, talking on my cell phone, as I was about to enter a community center I am involved with. Two African-American boys were walking my way—about 14 years old, dressed in billowing baggy clothing with the clumsy strut of the inner city and a fad pop culture that has been overblown. One of the boys was carrying a one-by-two piece of wood that was about four feet long. “That’s weird,” I thought to myself, smiling and talking to my friend who was in town from New Orleans. Raised on the discourse of liberal egalitarianism and the ideals of acting against prejudice, I decided, as I have so many times, that I was not going to cross the street. I would not submit to those “subtle forms of oppression”—the pervasive racism that creeps along the skin of America, like hives, or maybe a rash. As we were passing each other, in an instant the first boy (and I do emphasize, this was a little boy) turned and demanded I give them my money, and the second hit me across the temple with the piece of wood. My cell phone plummeted from my hand, breaking on the ground, and I swooned, catching my balance. “Hey, hey, hey!” Yeah, I quoted Fat Albert—it wasn’t intentional. The boy with the piece of wood hit me again, I blocked it with my hand; he hit me again, breaking the wood on my head. “Give us your money,” he repeated. Spiteful and angry, I was finally able to say, “I don’t have any money!” I lied—I found out later I had one dollar and eighty rupees left over from a trip to India (about two USD).

A man had pulled up in a car, honking. I don’t know what he said, but the kids stopped hitting me, pulling away to think for half a moment. The man started to pull away, and I hollered, “No, wait!” I saw the boys turned and kept walking down the street. “Thank you!” I added, wondering what I could say to the man who was driving off. I picked myself up—“Fuck… Jesus fuck.” I grabbed my cell phone off the ground, glad that I had worn my contacts that day, or I’d be picking up broken glasses, too. As I stepped away, I glanced at my phone, the back of the phone and the battery had fallen out. I turned around, hesitating. The kids were walking on, in that stupid strut. I cautiously and quickly doubled back, grabbed the battery and its cover, and hurried back towards the community center, the kids and I both headed in the direction we had been two minutes earlier.

Walking into the center, I found my friend who was in from volunteering with Katrina-affected areas. Both of us volunteer with the Art of Living Foundation, we work a lot towards teaching inner city youths several self development programs including stress management techniques and supporting them in finding direction in life. My friend had been working in trauma relief and youth program in New Orleans, and she was in Washington for a couple weeks helping to renovate the community center that the Foundation had recently purchased. Some callous DC paramedics came to the center, probably called by that passer-by who had really saved me. One paramedic seemed to not believe me; infuriated, I sent them away. My friend and I went for coffee.

“These poor kids, they feel like they have no options in life. It’s so stupid and ironic, I would love to sit with these kids on a course, learning meditation and yoga.”

“You know, it’s bullshit, because these kids only attack me for a little money or what they think I represent.”

“I guess it’s good it was me and not someone else—I can experience that without hating the kids, without really holding on to that experience, without letting it make me racist or paranoid or something.” I said a thousand things, just talking, trying to think about the event.

“Wow, you really got me thinking about all this, Sean.” My friend said. I wasn’t sure if she was humoring me. She talked about some people who had gotten mugged at gunpoint while working in New Orleans. She talked about one of our friends who was really active in the black communities in Washington.

“It’s funny because I’m not really the victim, here… you know? These kids have life so hard, and I’m… you know, it’s all relative… but really, I mean all of us… we’re all so privileged… I mean…” Across the street from Starbucks, as cars quickly passed by, I was at a loss.

“Yeah, we are all really privileged…” She couldn’t complete the thought either.

The black boy working the bar at Starbucks gave me some attitude when I asked for whipped cream on my gingerbread latté, the way that I’m sure it is supposed to be made; I worked at Starbucks for two years. Because he had also added foam, when he put the lid on the drink, it spurted out and covered the cup in overflowing sugary-sweet latté; he handed me the dripping drink. “Umm, can I have a second cup for this?”

After ten or twenty minutes, we walked back to the center. We meditated and sang some prayers. I had been very afraid of falling asleep—the paramedics had warned me of the symptoms of head trauma, so I didn’t completely relax, though I was so tired. I let my friend know that I had to go—I had to study for a final exam that was the next day. After a few offers to drive me back to the suburbs in Virginia, (and my stubborn insistence to go alone) I was off. On the road I called the advice nurse at George Mason University before heading into the study group. When asked about the appearance of my bruises, I looked for the first time at both sides of my index finger. “Oh it looks like shit, it’s black, I didn’t see that before.” What kind of pain is it? “Unpleasant!” The nurse and I both laughed. “Umm, my finger is throbbing. My head just hurts pretty bad, but my finger is throbbing.”

Instead of studying, I spent about two and a half hours in Kaiser Permanente’s emergency clinic. My sister and brother-in-law came to wait with me after I called them. As we talked in one of the waiting rooms that we were sent to, a young black man waited with his mother for her x-rays, he was obviously over-hearing our conversation as his head turned back and forth, glancing over his shoulder. I told them the story in the radiology waiting room. “These kids obviously aren’t good at it, they picked a college student—like I have money?” “Yeah, I guess they need to aim a little older!”

While I waited for the doctor, I called my mother. I found out that she would have to wake me every four hours that night, so I figured I would let her know what happened. “Did you file a police report?” “No.” Suppose that even if the kids had been caught, juvenile detention would only make matters worse for them—it would be more apathy and violence in their life, and maybe they would pick up more skills in crime. “Are you going to?” “No.” “Yes you are.” “No I’m not.” There was no point in explaining my feelings about the justice system in America. My Mom and I have very different viewpoints on a lot of social and political issues, and it’s not very productive to try and reconcile them. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” she concluded. We better not, I hoped.

After about a dozen x-rays of my head and both hands, the doctor said that I had a broken finger. She gave me a splint and a printout about head trauma and what was symptomatic of an emergency. “Yeah, so when I can’t read the paper, I need to come back in?” The doctor laughed, I smiled; I had to pee. I got home at about eleven in the night, it had been eight hours since the mugging.

Coming home, I went over the story with my parents. “That’s not the best part of DC, you know?” My stepfather has lived in the area for twenty years; he knows it better than I could ever hope to. “Yeah, it’s not a bad part of the city, either.” I pushed off to bed pretty quickly. Restless and unable to sleep well after midnight, I started reading through different books, looking for a quote by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on karma that my friend had cited that morning, before the mugging. I found one quote I liked a lot:

“An ignorant person’s compassion is toward the fruit of an action – the sickness or suffering that he witnesses. But a wise person’s compassion is toward the lack of knowledge – the underlying reason for sickness or suffering. Compassion for suffering shows ignorance. Suffering comes because of karma, and if you believe in karma, where is compassion? One reaps the fruit of one’s actions.”

I slept at two or so, and was only interrupted by headaches or pain in my finger, and one check-in at five in the morning by my Mother, making sure my pupils weren’t dilated and that I could speak fluently.

So, where does this experience leave me? Cornel West and bell hooks are among my favorite authors. I love to hear Michael Eric Dyson speak. One of the things I love about being American is our ideal of equality in treatment and opportunity across communities, no matter how far-off that ideal is. I aspire to be a fierce liberal, a revolutionary, and someone who holds all people dear to heart, but what can any of that be worth if I don’t feel secure among a couple of black youths?

Of course I know that not every black man in the world is “out to get me.” I know that it is a minority of black people who resort to violence and crime, just like it’s a minority of any other racial group. I know that there is a lot of classism at hand also, or, as my sister challenged me in the waiting room, I assume there is classism at play—“These could have been kids who took the metro in, just looking to kill time,” she insisted.

Did I too readily give these children the benefit of doubt? Did I too readily ascribe to them a life filled with challenge and danger, a life without role models and a life with few opportunities? In an argument, my brother-in-law described me as “sorry for existing,” and that I felt guilty for the impact I make on the planet, “Why else would you be forgiving these kids who just attacked you? Why else would you talk about how hard they have it in life?”

Maybe he’s right. As the last few days have passed, and I’ve experienced a bit of sleeplessness here and a bit of nausea there, as I was ready to attack a person who startled me from behind, “Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to Dupont Circle?”, as I’ve paid out $40 or so in medical expenses for this experience and rearranged my life around lost study time and moments where I just needed some “time out,” in short, as I come to realize the extent that those ninety seconds effect my life in so many ways, I’ve also experienced a lot of anger about the incident. Anger is simply more pleasant than fear. I relive those moments on a Sunday afternoon, and I think, “What if I could have grabbed that stick from him?” I picture meeting up with the kids, only now I have a baseball bat. The reversal of tragic moments cascade in my mind. The violent aspirations of a helpless victim haunt me, in so many ways. My own violence and victimization unite me to my assailants—violent reactors that are victims of society, to pop culture, to ignorance. I am their victim, and maybe they think I am their victimizer, but regardless, they are victims, of so many things. Paul Farmer calls it structural violence in his book Pathologies of Power. Most of us just say it sucks.

So, I don’t walk on water—it poured rain today, I checked. There is an interplay between my ideals of forgiving saint and exacting vigilante. Maybe I couldn’t fulfill either role completely, and maybe neither role is safe on urban streets today. Maybe neither role is condoned by society—maybe society doesn’t want me to forgive, maybe I am supposed to become a crotchety conservative white boy or succumb to white liberal guilt. Maybe those roles better fulfill society’s vision for me—it’s dangerous to be open-minded and condemning, there is so little precedence!

Taking Hip-Hop Literacies this semester, we’ve talked a lot about understanding the origins of hip-hop, we’ve talked about the value of gangsta rap as communicating realities of life, and we’ve talked about the persistence of hard social conditions and the skepticism of politics and legit opportunities (what Cornel West describes as “nihilism”.) In response to some of that, let me try to draw the line here, to be that “open-minded and condemning” person, to seek to understand and not hesitate to interject moral and practical boundaries. This is my manifesto:

Wherein a social movement condones violent reactions and easy escapes, it is bullshit. Crimes against property and social class may be aimed against injustice, but they seek to fight injustice with unjust means of redistribution. If a people subscribing to the belief that the social class system in a society is unjust seek to sabotage that system and gain recognized symbols of power, status, and success, then they are immediately participating in the perpetuation of that system—they are, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, trying to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.

Wherein the propagation of violence, classism, racism, sexism and heterosexism is defended by the pundits of a culture in attempt to allow the recirculation of these ideas to an increasingly large audience, it is bullshit. Hating others and condoning attacks on others can not be justified by any experience of social conditions that an artistic movement claims to arise from. In hip-hop, the angst of millions of children across the world is fueled by a few stale emcees talking about the life they participated in creating in Compton or the South Bronx. The refusal of any artistic movement to account for its own impact cancels any claim that its artists make to “represent reality.” They are not representing reality; they are creating their own vision of reality. If artists are creating a hard reality by means of claiming to represent a hard reality, then that artist is a perpetrator of violence on all the consumers that are victimized by their vision.

Hip-hop is dead. Any movement that claims roots in activism and “knowledge” that accepts guidance from prophets of violence, materialism and chauvinism is contradictory. Any contradiction that is grown to the scale of hip-hop can not survive, it must implode like any empire that has spread its possessive grasp too far. The sources of positive social change and artistic expression will automatically disassociate themselves from the victim-consciousness and powerlessness that pervade the nihilistic minds of pop culture. Two decades of emcees declaring that others are “fakin’ the funk” or, more simply, “frontin’” has left us ripe for a change. Like any other social and artistic movement, hip-hop has claimed its generation or two, and now the minds of the world are hungry. The consumers of creativity and culture must ask, what is the revolution that we will stage against hip-hop? That revolution will be my revenge; that revolution will be my offering of redemption.

Epilogue:

Somewhere in DC, maybe ten or fifteen miles from where I write this paper, those two boys are doing something. I don’t really know what, I can’t project that on them, but they are existing. We exist in separate worlds, but they collide so poetically, like a Hollywood movie (or a short essay.) I do wish these boys well. I know that at twenty-five years of age, odds are that black young men in the inner city will have been killed or imprisoned by the time they reach my age, and that they won’t be attending college. However, in the States, it is so often young black men in the inner city that start cultural revolutions, so I can close with this—I hope my two kids turn out to be the revolutionary type.