Hip-hop and Black Cynicism
Over the past three weeks I’ve been in schools in the Detroit area and in Saint Louis. Hopefully schools in Baltimore are soon to follow. Although being away has meant that I haven’t been able to write, the time away has given me more time to think about the story I’m trying to tell.The more I think about it, the more I think this is at least a partial discussion about the role of pop culture in provoking political cynicism in general and among black folk. Corporate rap music, and perhaps rap in general promotes political cynicism. The more kids listen to it, the more cynical they will tend to be, about government, about politics, about black leadership, about black life chances. Even as I’m writing it, it sounds like the black nihilist argument made by Cornel West in Race Matters, an argument that I didn’t think I was trying to make (as I don’t agree with it). What I have to do with the experimental manipulation is change the survey more to reflect my interest in cynicism–an area understudied in black politics. I’ll likely have to create my own battery of questions, because the current cynicism questions used for non-black populations don’t really fit my needs. So before I was thinking about this work as being about the evasion of black politics. It is about that, but it is also about the growing cynicism of black politics.
It also dawned on me that I’m going to have to deal more explicitly with both the hip-hop political convention, and the Vote or Die/HSAN approach taken by Sean Combs and Russell Simmons respectively. There is at least one empirical claim made by both of these attempts–that their moves led to an increase in the youth vote–that my book should grapple with. And there is another empirical claim (that youth who consume hip-hop have the same interests) that I can choose to engage in or leave alone (because my direct work deals with black kids I’m not sure whether I want to fit a discussion about non-black youth preferences in here).
