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MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A GUEST IN THE HOUSE OF HIP HOP
“… an entertaining and richly informative instruction manual for both seasoned and budding allies.”—Kirkus Reviews
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Jews certainly heard their share of slurs. Thirty years after Heller saw that anti-Semitic graffiti, such hateful notions persisted. In 1989, Heller was making money managing Niggaz With Attitudes when Public Enemy’s Professor Griff proclaimed, “The Jews are wicked. And we can prove this.”8 But Heller suggested that being Jewish entitled him to claim a slur that had been designed to hurt black people, so that having been called a “kike” entitled him to call himself a “nigga,” even though he was a white record executive working in an industry built on the exploitation of black musicians, and even though his own black musicians accused him of keeping more than his share of their money.
America made being born powerless, hated, and poor such a compelling start to our stories that everyone wanted in, regardless of skin color. America was born out of rebellion, so my white Kentucky classmates felt like rebels listening to Public Enemy’s great call to action “Fight the Power” just one year after we felt like rebels listening to Hank Williams Jr’s revisionist daydream “If the South Woulda Won.” As much as Hank had preached self-reliance and living off the land in his earlier anthem “A Country Boy Can Survive,” he still pined for the good old days when slaves would have cooked him his pancakes. Two decades later, in 201l, the South still hadn’t risen again. Hank didn’t like our black president one bit and he wasn’t shy about sharing his views. ESPN parted ways with Hank after he compared President Obama to Hitler; America had become so oppositional, said Hank, that the Republican speaker of the house playing golf with the Democrat president was like Israel’s prime minister playing golf with Hitler. “Working-class people are hurting,” said Hank, who was worth $45 million, “and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job—it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change.”9 We were a country born of rebellion. We just couldn’t agree on which powers to fight.
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