To me, and I have said this to the folks at Afronerd, it is about appeasing to traditional notions of white beauty and dress. Of course, as Nanette states above, the conventional standards of beauty, fashion, and ultimately, racial indentity are being challenged by the younger generation today via hip-hop. Because of this, more and more young Americans are finding that they are more alike, and consciously struggling to be more alike with one another than different.

But for Afronerd, despite their contesting, hip-hop is the vehicle by which black folks keep themselves hamstrung economically, politically, culturally, etc. Instead, they propose that black folks need to stop dressing “black”, to stop making themselves look bad (to white people), to relinquish their so-called victimology (meanwhile ignoring the historical implications for it) and pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps.

The same argument that Afronerd levels against black people is the same argument that white nationalists have been espousing since segregation and prior; black folks are universally responsible for their condition in society; as if they are a homogenous gene pool independent from American social relations.

In a country where we have a history of being torn apart by our racial differences isn’t anything that points to breaking down those differences, even if it is only fashion, a good thing?

I don’t know it seems as if the folks over at afronerd and black conservatives in general are playing a dangerous card in bemoaning issues like this so much.

Among folks who do heavy research on white nationalists there is a lot going around right now about how the nationalists are looking towards the year 2050 as the projected date when there will be no clear majority, i.e. white people won’t be able to control things based on a simple voting majority anymore. This creates two distinct possibilities:

1) white folks repudiate their whiteness and join the rest of humanity (which I think hip hop dress and culture point to a willingness and even a proactive desire to do this)

or 2) all the “races” retreat into their own blocs and we have some kind of Yugoslavia type of stuff going down.

I’ll let you decide which option the white nationalists are attempting to lay the groundwork for, they welcome a race war a la The Turner Diaries. And I think that by so vehemently opposing this development within “their people” afronerd and black conservatives are unconsciously playing right into this hand. Again a dangerous game.

That one is so not an excuse for anything. Not that any of them are, although it is interesting to watch Black Conservatives tie themselves in knots attempting to justify this police action.

Still, just recently I lived along the route kids walked to get to the neighborhood high school. The area was very multicultural, and some mornings I would just watch the kids go by. Black, White, Chinese, Hmong, Latino, etc… and in that way that kids have of establishing their uniqueness, their own identity, their own sense of “cool” (or whatever it is called today), they all (or many, anyway) dressed alike. Gangstas, wankstas, whateverstas, the hip hop “thug” imagery abounded.

Not only is it truly insane to suggest that shooting people because of their clothing choices (no matter how much you may deplore their fashion sense) is somehow acceptable, but singling out only Black or Brown youths as those for whom it might actually be justifiable is just – well…

Not that I want White or Asian youths to be shot either, of course. Just for Black or Brown ones to be given the same benefit of the doubt as they are, under similar circumstances. We are very far from that point, though.