Читать книгу A Guest in the House of Hip-Hop - Mickey Hess - Страница 11

Two

WHY WHITE KIDS SHOULD LISTEN TO HIP-HOP

The true power of hip-hop on my individual imagination is that it made me have to think about being white. Born into racial isolation in rural Kentucky, I grew up never having to think about whiteness as anything other than a default position. This luxury is granted to a great deal of white Americans whose ancestors fought to keep black Americans out of their schools, pools, and neighborhoods. I grew up at a distance, culturally and geographically, from the communities where hip-hop was created. My friend, the rapper Traum Diggs, spent his childhood on Brooklyn playgrounds where Kangol Kid from UTFO would come through and toss a football back and forth with the kids; I lip-synched to UTFO at a talent show at my south-central Kentucky elementary school, where I didn’t have a single black classmate.

I grew up among Appalachian poverty, miles and miles from that ever-important “metaphysical root” of hip-hop, the ghetto.¹ I first heard rap music in the woods, on a Cub Scout hike at Kentucky’s Wolf Creek Dam. We stopped to eat lunch—baloney-and-cheese sandwiches and beef stew out of pop-top cans. We ate in the quiet of nature until Scoutmaster Larry tuned in his little portable radio to the country station playing, for what seemed like the thousandth time, “I’m just a common man, drive a common van, my dog ain’t got a pedigree …”² Larry scanned to the next channel: a Van Halen song faded out; a voice emerged from an echo chamber, shouting, “Run … Run … DMC!” I’d never heard anything like it. I heard guitars but it wasn’t rock; they weren’t singing, exactly. Two men shouted the ends of each other’s sentences as they bragged about their success:

You’re the type of guy that girl ignored

I’m drivin Caddy, you’re fixin a Ford

I was the son of an auto-body repairman, but I didn’t quite catch the paradigm shift: we’d changed the channel from a white man boasting about his modest vehicle to a black man celebrating his Cadillac.

My dad played bluegrass guitar. He and his friends preferred country musicians who dressed like they were headed home from a day of hard labor, so they resented these rappers with their fedoras and gold chains. “I reckon they think they’re big stuff, don’t they?” they’d ask, shaking their heads at the TV screen. “I reckon they think they’re something.” I didn’t understand it then, but their resentment smacked of the age-old American stereotypes of the uppity Negro, the Zip Coon, the minstrel-show caricature of the black man who so earnestly aspired to symbols of white success that white people found it funny to watch him fail.

The stereotype solidified in the context of working-class pride, in the racist jokes told by customers and hangers-on in my dad’s shop. “What does Pontiac stand for? Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac.” The resentment of black aspirations compounded among the low-income white Southerners whose ancestors had built their wealth on the backs of slaves and then lost it in the wake of the Civil War. When their great-great-grandparents lost their slaves, they lost the free labor at the foundation of their economy; now, generations into the future, any new gain for black people still came to feel like a new loss for whites. The more they got, went the thinking, the less left for us. So my dad’s friends shook their heads at the rappers on television and climbed back into their dented and rusted pickup trucks, convincing themselves they didn’t need to dream about gold chains and Cadillacs; they had everything a man could ever want, right there in small-town Kentucky.

•

I remember looking forward to leaving.

I grew up on the border between Eubank and Science Hill, Kentucky, with an unwavering certainty that I lived in a place that people on TV did not want to come from. I used to stand in the woods and pretend I was standing in Central Park, out for a quick run before I headed back to my Upper West Side high-rise. In real life I lived between the woods and a pig farm. If my family wanted a pizza delivered, we had to drive one town over and meet the driver at the edge of his territory—the Junior’s Food Mart parking lot. I spent a lot of time reading library books and listening to bootleg rap cassettes bought at the truck stop. I spent a lot of time in the woods. A lot of time bouncing a tennis ball against the side of the house and wishing I were somewhere different.

My childhood home, where my mother still lives, had once been a one-room schoolhouse. Old couples, former students at the school-house, would stop by to marvel at how far they’d gotten from where they began. My father ran an auto-body repair shop from the shack he and his friends built out back; he made the outsides of cars look pretty but could not keep our own car running. At the end of our gravel driveway, the white-and-black metal sign for Mike’s Body Shop; two nights after Daddy bought and installed the sign, some asshole drove past and threw a rock out his car window. The impact left a cracked asterisk, which over the years turned into a softball-sized starburst of rust.

I swept cigarette butts into a pile on the body-shop floor and watched my father prep cars for paint jobs, protecting headlights and windshields with newspaper and masking tape, with its sweet chemical smell. I used to chew on masking tape rolls, ruin them with my teeth imprints. One of my first words was Bondo, a putty used to fill in dents in the bodies of automobiles. Bondo comes in two little tubes: mix the white chemicals with the red chemicals and it dries Pepto-Bismol pink. Sand it smooth and breathe in the cloud of pale pink dust. Daddy always had a coat of Bondo dust in his hair, which made it look grayer than it already was. And on his clothes, which made them look more worn out and faded than they already were.

I found comfort in the paint fumes and the heat from the wood stove even as the cars my dad painted promised escape: semi-truck cabs with silhouettes of big-breasted women airbrushed onto the back windows, a van with a New York license plate and a thick Brooklyn phone book shoved between the console and the passenger seat. I looked up landmarks mentioned in rap songs—Biz Markie’s Albee Square Mall, MC Lyte’s Empire Rollerdrome. I knew they were real places, of course, but holding that phone book in my hands somehow made them more tangible. I called Albee Square Mall and when somebody answered I hung up, my heart racing like I was calling to ask out a girl.

What began as escapism opened my ears to perspectives some of my classmates rejected. I can’t say that at nine years old I set out to listen to rap music to hear stories of how it felt to be black in America, but those messages did come to resonate with me. Black History Month at my elementary school taught me that Martin Luther King had a dream, but Public Enemy taught me that two decades after his murder they still didn’t celebrate his birthday in Arizona. School showed me the grandfatherly George Washington Carver, but X-Clan name-dropped the militant Nat Turner and Huey Newton. I heard Q-Tip say Soul on Ice and I sought out Eldridge Cleaver’s prison memoir by that name at the public library. I watched Prince Paul introduce a De La Soul video about the power of being an individual by saying, “If you take three glasses of water and put food coloring in them, you have many different colors, but it’s still the same old water,” and I wanted to believe he was not just pointing out the lack of logic to racism, but welcoming a white kid in Kentucky into the hip-hop fold. When I felt ashamed to whisper “free lunch” to the cafeteria workers at school, I thought about the rappers who wrote such compelling songs about growing up in housing projects. It was childish escapism, not much different from watching cowboy movies or mafia flicks, but it developed into a lifelong allegiance to one of hip-hop’s distinct iterations of the American Dream—the idea of making it out of a place by telling its story so vividly.

The place you’re from follows you when you’re dealing with a music genre where the artists still shout out the housing projects they left behind decades ago, and stars from Ali Shaheed Muhammad to J. Cole put their actual childhood street addresses in their music. Their journeys toward fame and fortune had me planning a similar route of my own as I traveled down gravel roads on the school bus, crammed between the window and a man-sized fifth-grader named Jonas, who lived on the pig farm one stop before my house. When we dropped off Jonas, kids would yell, “Soo-ey! Slop them pigs, Jonas!” Our bus driver, Zenith—who was missing fingers from a table-saw accident—would point his index stump at them and tell them to shut up. How did Science Hill get its name? When it came to evolution or climate change, people there were defiantly anti-science. “The community,” the Internet tells me, “was named by geologist William J. Bobbitt, who visited to gather and analyze the local rocks.”³ Makes sense. There was nothing much more exciting to do.

I don’t mean to say it was Mayberry. Our county sheriff: shot in the head by an Oxycontin addict hired for the hit by the other man running for sheriff. My mother’s across-the-street neighbor: shot in the face over cocaine. My wife’s brother, who swears his Bible tells him blacks are “a cursed people”: shot in the stomach by rival meth dealers. Yet we scared ourselves away from big-city crime. They’ll steal the Nikes right off your feet out there. They’ll pull you right out of your car. I listened to rappers sound the alarm about police violence before I ever saw four white cops beat Rodney King on the streets of LA, but my classmates were more moved by the riots that took place after the cops were acquitted. My classmates, with their truck-driver dads, watched four black men pull Reginald Denny from the cab of his semi truck and beat him nearly to death in the street. By God, that could have been me, they thought, but they couldn’t see themselves in King. They justified the cops beating King because of the fact that he was drunk, high, and driving erratically, then they headed home to drink beer, smoke weed, and crash their cars into farmers’ fences. My neighbors watched South Central Los Angeles burn and congratulated themselves on living in South Central Kentucky and passing on to their kids a mentality that didn’t encourage them to expand their horizons so much as ask why would anyone want to.

Here’s the conundrum: I made it out of a place so insular and sure of itself because I was sure I was better than the people who thought that way. I thought I was too good to go to the community college a few miles from the house I grew up in. I wanted to leave Kentucky in my rearview mirror and go to college in New York or Boston, but my mother, who’d told me since preschool that I was going to college, begged me to stay close to home.

When I decided to leave home to attend college two hours away in “the big city” of Louisville, my older cousin, the long-haul trucker, shared a piece of worldly advice: “Just make sure you don’t get caught out in Niggertown.”

“Are you sure you want to live up there in Louisville,” asked a friend’s older sister. I asked what she meant and she huffed and then said, in a tone like she was speaking the name of a disease I might catch, “Niggers.”

Black people had congregated in cities like Louisville, of course, because they’d been run out of rural Kentucky by white people. Once black Kentuckians could no longer be used for free labor on farms, white Kentuckians began to lynch them for offenses as minor as “bad character,” “insulted white woman,” “criticized mob,” and the ever-popular “unknown.”⁴ These lynchings were a campaign of terrorism meant to run the rest of the black people out of town. The rural white Kentuckians had scared themselves to death of the black Kentuckians, so they’d chased them away from the farmland and into the city. But in the process of scaring black people into leaving town, they’d scared themselves into staying put.

I grew up less than two miles away from the farms where my parents grew up, but I broke the cycle by convincing myself I was destined for bigger and better things. I made it out by teaching hip-hop culture and creative writing to young people who will come out of college stuck with nearly one hundred thousand dollars in student loans. I teach the legacy of bootstraps and rags-to-riches, the story of America as a place where we start out one thing and end up another. They are in college to do just that, but so much tells them it is no longer possible. I was told the same thing twenty years earlier: well-meaning uncles told me I would never make money writing books or teaching college, not in this economy; one of my English professors told me I would never have a job like his.

Yet today I am an English professor teaching a class on American success stories, from Ben Franklin to 2 Chainz in sixteen weeks. I don’t teach only the stories, but the ways we use the stories against each other. If you succeed, some say Look what America made possible for you, but if you fail it’s your own fault. Others of us are taught the inverse: to see success as one person’s triumph over a system designed to keep us down, and our individual setbacks as America working the way it was designed to work. Thus, the rap music of my youth showed me the toe-tagged Uncle Sam on the cover of Ice Cube’s Death Certificate and Uncle Sam as the (white) devil in Paris’s “The Devil Made me Do It” video.

It was a short walk from Johnny Paycheck’s “Take this job and shove it” to Ice Cube’s “Take this job and stick it, bigot.” Before I ever heard rap, I saw country music artists sell songs about working hard but not ending up with much. I mulled over this message as I swept cigarette butts from the floor of my dad’s body shop, his radio too high to reach and tuned to the country station. Daddy was determined to be his own boss, so he’d quit school in eighth grade to learn to paint cars. Mom believed college was the key to success: the longer you spent listening and learning, the better you’d do. I watched her re-enroll in college and finish her bachelor’s degree, our car’s floorboards littered with her textbooks and papers. Daddy restored antique cars from the rusted shells he found in the woods, but Mom drove a dirt-brown, dented Corolla. She studied in that car, windows iced over in winter—with three kids in the house, it was the only place she could find any peace. I came to see college as a welcome inevitability; I was going, Mom said, even if she had to scrub floors to pay my tuition. But when it came down to it, I paid with student loans, same as she’d done before me.

•

When the conversation turns to race, white people tend to start talking about money, as if growing up with less wealth makes a person less white. As if growing up with less of an inheritance than the richest white Americans is a sign of solidarity with the black Americans whose ancestors were owned as property. Wealth accrues across generations, so I resent my friends who inherited a family business or whose parents were well-off enough to give them the down payment on their first house; imagine the difference between having a great-grandmother who owned a farm she could pass down to her children and having a great-great-grandmother who was herself passed down to the master’s kids when he died. As of 2018, the US Census Bureau lists the median net worth of white families at $132,000, while Latino families have less than one-tenth of that wealth ($12,000), and the median for black families is a mere $9,000. Slaves owned nothing for their kids to inherit, so after slavery ended, the next generation had to start from square one. Local police departments came up with new schemes to put the freed slaves back into chains, but even the ones who remained free were kept out of the best jobs and schools and terrorized into fleeing the South and then staying in their own neighborhoods in the North lest they give white people the impression that black people might expect them to share.

There is no logic to racism, but there certainly is a design. No matter how hard the freed slaves and their children worked, they still didn’t end up with much to leave to the next generation, so their descendants ended up going to the same failing and underfunded schools their parents had attended, and working the same kinds of jobs. America shrugged off the idea of reparations and instead, gradually, grudgingly, told schools they had to start letting in students of all colors; the country encouraged employers, in situations where all qualifications were equal, to hire the minority candidate first. When white Americans came to realize they were doing worse than their parents (the antithesis of the American Dream), they didn’t blame the billionaires whose share of the wealth was increasing to a percentage never before seen in history; they blamed desegregation and Affirmative Action. White politicians ran for office on a platform of reclaiming a gone and lost greatness from an earlier era. What white Americans may have missed most was their claim to the bootstraps stories this country was founded upon. There was the lingering resentment that white people were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to American Dream stories: no matter how poor a white man was, he would never be black.

In a country obsessed with the dream of the individual clawing his way to the top, white Americans began to resent that the humblest beginnings went to black Americans. Being born with white skin gave them an undeniable head start they sought to reject. Jerry Heller, the white, Jewish manager of Niggaz With Attitudes, prefaced his memoir with the bold statement, “I wanted to call this book Nigga 4 Life, but the fucking corporate gangstas who’ve taken over the bookselling dodge in this country wouldn’t support it if I did.”⁵ N.W.A. were early icons in the fight for the right for rappers to say whatever the fuck they wanted, and decades later—after the group split up and accused Heller of stealing their money and Ice Cube shouted, “Fuck Jerry Heller and the white superpowers”⁶—Heller railed against the timidity of corporate publishing. No one, he argued, should be able to stop a white man from calling himself black:

“I was a nigga on the streets of Cleveland when I was growing up, only they pronounced it ‘kike’ back then. I was a nigga in the late fifties at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, when my first college roommate asked me if Jews were allowed to vote. After that I was a nigga on the campus of the University of Southern California, when WASP bullyboys spray-painted anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of ZBT—the Jewish frat house where I roomed.”⁷

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.

White politicians gave a perfunctory nod to the stories of black Americans; this, they believed, made them look compassionate and worthy of voting for. But theirs was a self-congratulatory form of white enlightenment; it didn’t fool the black voters, and it frustrated those white voters who remained convinced that the better black people did in this country the worse the white people would do. Watching the perfunctory nods of compassion, my Kentucky neighbors came to see a conspiracy in which one class of white people (wealthy, educated in college rather than church) turned on the other white people for speaking in racist terms. They came to see a white liberal urban coastal elite bent on controlling the very language working-class white people can use. We made it, they might have heard the white elites saying, so something must be wrong with the people we left behind. We left home and got smarter and richer, so we can look back and shake our heads at the people still stuck in Kentucky, even as we pride ourselves on our ostensible dedication to the plight of the black people they look down on. People in my part of Kentucky saw the whites who had everything using perceived prejudices as a reason to look down on the whites who had nothing. They were certain the problems of this country were rooted in skin color, and they were tired of being told they were the wrong kind of white.

The white elites who gave so much lip service to racial justice were the ones who had benefitted the most from our country’s racism. They got the best pools, schools, and neighborhoods—and did little to nothing to invite in more black people—while poor whites in rural Kentucky resorted to baseless grudges and racist jokes. I wouldn’t say all, or even most, rural whites or Southern whites or even small-town Science Hill, Kentucky whites thought this way, but it was a mentality I saw and one that undoubtedly influenced my own. I certainly don’t speak for the state I left a decade ago, or the small town I left two decades ago, but I can’t escape the fact that growing up there shaped my outlook as a young man. In telling my Kentucky stories, I don’t mean to advertise my humble origins so much as show how the place I came from shaped the way I approach hip-hop and the way I think about my own role in relation to it. Some whites growing up in the Eighties and Nineties were taught that overt racism would no longer benefit them; I was shown that it would. I didn’t just hear racist jokes; I repeated them. I invented my own. In a place where these jokes served as social currency, I couldn’t help seeing In Living Color and my bootleg Eddie Murphy cassettes as an extension of the same brand of humor. I counterbalanced my love for what some of my neighbors called “nigger music” with a healthy dose of laughing along with those neighbors at our ignorant notions of what it meant to black.

I wish I could forget that part of my past, but to do so seems dangerous. Americans are fascinated with stories of overcoming poverty, but the more important success story is overcoming the mentality of the place in which we were born. I was taught racist thinking from such a young age that I could have easily fallen into a lifetime of casual racism. I was born in a Kentucky town so insular and sure of itself, but thanks to the dual influences of hip-hop and higher education, I ended up in a job that gives me the luxury of time to think, read, and write about the ways I relate to black culture. I look back at the mentality of my Kentucky upbringing as something I’ve studied enough history to overcome; I make a living teaching this history to college students, even as this history very likely gave me my job—a job that a more just society would have given a black person.