Welcome To A Hip Hop Understanding
Welcome To A Hip Hop Understanding
Sterling Reputation
Donald Sterling has been in the news over the past few weeks because of racist remarks recorded by his girlfriend/“archivist”. She lead him into a conversation that saw the 80 year old owner of the Los Angeles Clippers spew hateful rhetoric and then try to justify it by saying it’s just how it is.
This tape was eventually leaked, as they all are, and now we have a media storm surrounding him and what the players, coaches and NBA owners think about what should or should not have been done about what he said!
NBA brass stood up and fined him $2.5 million, banned him from having any affiliation with the NBA for life and stated that they would recommend that he be forced to sale the team! Yeah, victory!
Whelp, not so fast, he says he’s not giving up without a fight, but it’s proving hard to find council because his name is so toxic now! Law firms are afraid of being labeled as sympathetic to a racist so most of the big boys are declining what would be millions of dollars in revenues to steer clear of a sensationalized trial that would probably still lead to the inevitable, him being forced to sale the team.
In steps his wife, she claims that she should not be punished because of what Donald said, and that she should be able to purchase the team instead of someone else. What!
So in her mind, her owning the team, in California, a Community Property state, where all assets acquired while married are considered to be 50/50 for spouses, no matter who owns it, means that he doesn’t own the team! Who are you kidding, if you own it, he still owns it, thats simple.
I know that in a capitalistic society, you shouldn’t be forced to sale your company because you’re a racist, lets face it, half of the Fortune 500 owners would be selling but the NBA isn’t the same as a regular ole capitalist offering. They have rules and bylaws that govern the owners behavior as well as the players, and all levels of management.
The truth is, if the GM, CEO or President of any major corporation or any sports franchise, NFL, NHL, or MLB included made blatantly racist statements, they’d be fired also, and never would be able to associate with that sport again! (see Marge Schott)
So the fact that Sterling and his wife think that they shouldn’t be punished speaks volumes to their mentalities!
There is no way that he could think that what he said didn’t come from the mouth of a racist, as he claims that he likes helping Blacks, and Magic Johnson doesn’t, so how could he be racist!
White privilege has afforded him the life of, if I give to Black charities, but I think they stink and don’t want to rent to them, I’m not a racist!
If I objectify them and then brag about their beautiful Black bodies, like slave masters used to do, I’m not a racist!
If they work for me and they help me make $100’s of millions of dollars, and I articulate that as, “I clothe them, feed them, and buy them cars”, as opposed to, I pay them for performing a task, I’m not a racist!
Only a racist can see the comments that he has made since the incident as not racist!
He has a slave masters mentality and the business that he owns “just happens” to be a business that utilizes the athletic prowess and strength of the Black male to make money. As a Black male, knowing that my “owner” thinks of me in a similar fashion that slave owners thought about their slaves, would make me do exactly what they planned on doing. Refuse to play for the team unless something is done, and sorry Mrs Sterling, your reputation is intertwined with his, so that goes for you too! As if you didn’t know that he was a racist even though you were married to him for all those years. There’s no way on this planet that a man that would say the types of things he’s said to a half Black and Mexican to her face hasn’t spewed his vile racist opinions at the dinner table, in bed, or while watching TV, on numerous occasions. And no, the interview with Anderson Cooper didn’t help, unless he’s trying to play the senile old man card, and it still doesn’t absolve him from being a racist, he’s just a racist with dementia!
Jay Z, Solange and Sensationalist “Journalism”!
When the elevator recording was leaked that showed Solange Knowles attacking Jay Z in an elevator the internet went wild!
All kind of speculations hit the fan, no one knows what occurred to provoke her to use physical violence on Hov but whatever it was, she surely was pissed. Pissed to the point of “Im a kick the shit out of you” on more than one occasion, type of pissed!
She was mad about something and thanks to no audio to accompany the video; radio DJ’s, pundits and bloggers alike took to whatever medium that they use, to spew they’re on personal opinions on what had to occur in order for Solange to go there.
What I noticed is that, whatever “type” of writer/person that they portray themselves to be on the internet, whatever agenda they propagate, was the understanding that that they wrote from. Most would readily say, okay, isn’t that how everyone reacts, from their own personal outlooks on life. Don’t we all react to things based off our own personal experiences?
Yes we do!
So what does that say about the tweets, blog post and status updates that we witnessed after the leak?
Well it’s simple, read what they said and attribute it to that persons life story! How many of these people were really objective? Did they use any logic or reasoning to come to their conclusions or were their words emotionally charged!?
People started to speculate on what he probably said to her, or what he did to Beyonce, so many post on these various forms of social media seemed to welcome the turmoil in their relationship! People seemed to be happy because their relationship wasn’t as perfect as “they” (meaning the bloggers) wanted to believe that it was. People tend to think that if a couple that’s in the spotlight doesn’t air their dirty laundry for the world to see, then they must be “perfect” or at least pretending to be, like I really want you to know whats going on behind closed doors!
Others whooped and hollered about how she kicked and punched him, and painted him out to be a wimp ass dude, that brags about being tough on the streets in his music but wasn’t tough enough to handle what 100 lb Solange was dishing out! Jay Z bitch made, is what a lot of women were broadcasting.
So if he would have beat her down or choked her out, what would he be then?!
A woman beater, once a gain, bitch made, etc. There was literally nothing he could have done in that situation better than what he did, nothing! But the fact that women are painting him as a soft punk speaks volumes about who they are and what they think!
People started speculating on their marriage and talking about he beats her, and that they are about to get divorced. As if just because they are famous and in the spotlight that they shouldn’t ever argue with each other. And if they do, it’s divorce time.
Ask yourself this, how many arguments have you had with your significant other, how frequently? Did you have one and call it quits? But every single time Jay or Beyonce are seen in public with a frown on their faces, the blogosphere goes bananas with the marital problems posts and pray for their separation. Im guessing so that they can say “I told you so”, and have more BS to write about!
At the end of the day, families have problems, brothers and sisters have arguments, sometimes things get out of hand, but that happens to everyone! The only difference is that people that idolize people hate when those that they idolize don’t live up to the expectations that they think that they should live up to!
To put it short, those who’ve been beat up in a relationship attributes it to him beating her, those who’ve been cheated on claims it was over cheating, and so on! And if that doesn’t speak to who you are, nothing does!
Propaganda At Its Be$t!
When Michael Sams stood in wait praying that he received that coveted phone call from a team alerting him that he would become a member of the NFL, something struck me as strange.
His scene looked nothing like the scene I had witnessed on hundreds to thousands of occasions before, being someone who would watch or follow a few rounds of the draft yearly. His actual mention at seventh from the bottom, of the seventh round was historical in itself as, no one besides hardcore scouts and NFL higher ups would even think to talk about a guy who on most occasions, and when I say most, I mean 90% of the time, don’t even make an active NFL roster, and would fade off into obscurity quicker than it took to make the pick on the clock.
15 minutes, nope, not for a guy picked in that spot!
But low and behold we sit here and were talking about this guy and the fact that he kissed his boyfriend on TV!
There’s nothing to see here is always indicative of there’s something here that we don’t want you to see and what they don’t want us to see isn’t the infamous kiss, it’s why the Michael Sams even got airtime!
If he hadn’t come out as gay before the draft, most analyst said that they thought he could go as high as the second or third round. After the announcement, a lot of the execs, under anonymity, stated that he would drop down further in the draft due to the fact that he would be a disruptive force in the locker room, amongst their reasoning! What they were effectively saying was that most of the NFL was homophobic and didn’t want to be put in a situation where they had to “openly” deal with a gay player. Plausible deniability comes into play here, what you don’t know you don’t know!
So the question arises, why did he get so much media attention?
If we’re being serious, we all know why!
It’s because he is gay and pro gay activist we’re going to, and did, shove (no pun intended) Michael Sams down our throats, period! His entire campaign has been orchestrated by the pro gay activist groups to push their agenda, and for ESPN to sell ads!
Now, before you go into a tirade and go up in arms about how I used the words “pro gay agenda”, what you need to know is that that statement is not meant to be negative in any way. The only people that would view it as such have an agenda of their own!
There are pro women, Black, Jewish, Arab, Hispanic agendas also, and the only people that think that these agendas are negative are the people that are fighting against them!
To me, there are no such thing as gay, Black, Hispanic or women’s rights, there are only rights, to infringe upon them in any capacity is wrong, not constitutionally wrong, wrong period!
The reason why I say that it’s all propaganda is that in all the draft picks I’ve seen not even 5% (but I’ll just say 5%) have ever been pictured on draft day, kissing their significant others, and those were the ones that were drafted in the first round.
The other 95% that are shown are usually hugging or kissing their mothers or fathers. They are usually in wait with their families and friends, if they’re not going first round, and we never, ever see them get the coverage that Sams did!
Now, the first “openly” gay football player, who went in the 7th round has created a media buzz for months and now has the number two best selling jersey in football, and a reality show!
So you tell me, what do you think the agenda was?!
Why Christianity is Bad for Your Wealth…..Building!
It’s a well known fact that African Americans spend billions of dollars annually on just about every product known to man. A lot of this spending is out of our discretionary income and never sees its way into a bank account, which helps to widen the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in this country. Even with over a trillion dollars in buying power, the actual wealth gap continues to grow because that money is hardly ever saved by us.
Why is that?
Experts have asked this question for the past few decades and no one seems to be able to pinpoint the reason why we spend so much of our income on material things. The reason why no one has been able to accurately pinpoint where the problem starts is because they all use a reductionist method to draw a conclusion, well basically they tackle the situation from the issue and then seek to walk it backwards to the answer.
That method does work, but the problem with it is that in order to do it like that, you have to already have a foregone conclusion at hand. I.E, Blacks don’t save money because they don’t know a lot about financial things. Take that conclusion, break it down and there it is, the answer. We’re not taught about finances at an early enough stage, that’s why we don’t build wealth, case closed right. Wrong! Well that’s at least a portion of the answer, lack of financial knowledge.
This method could be applied to numerous things and low and behold they will all reduce to the answer that the experimenter was looking for in the first place, and if it doesn’t they’ll change variables until the desired result is reached. Yeah, we’ve figured it out!
But at the end of the day, they all fall short of the real culprit!
The real reason that Black people don’t save for the future and build wealth on an overall basis is due to what they have been taught, not what they haven’t been taught!
Let’s break down what we’ve been taught. This begins very early in life and by the time you are a teenager, you have been thoroughly brainwashed to have these thought patterns ingrained in your conscious output.
The very first thing that we are taught starts at church. Yep our good ole Christian upbringings are the very first culprit in why we, Black people don’t seek to save and build wealth.
You are taught that tomorrow isn’t promised to you. With this being ingrained in you as early as the first time that your mother or father takes you to church, you are being bombarded with this message at least once a week until you’re old enough to tell your parents that you don’t want to go anymore. But by that time you have been subconsciously storing that message in your brain for 10 plus years.
The next thing that Christianity is teaching you during this time period is that you should not seek to store up riches on this earth; you should store them in heaven, which is consciously and subconsciously saying that your riches will come at death!
Another thing is that Christianity tells you to give 10% of your income to the church before you give it to yourself. They actually want you to give 10% of your net income per check, not what you have left over after you pay your bills or yourself in a savings account. They seek to shame people into giving by saying that you’re stealing from God if you don’t give off the top of your income, as opposed to the bottom after you pay bills.
Then on top of that, money being called the root of all evil, and the various places in the bible that reference money as a bad thing, you see the type of picture that is being painted. And all this is being done during the early stages of your understanding, which means that it will later be a part of your subconscious thought, without ever knowing it, you are being taught to think a certain way about money.
The next thing that occurs in the Black community is the environmental conditioning of your peers, teachers (at school and on the street) and other stimuli like TV, Radio and Music!
Any Black male that lives in the inner city will recite this saying as fact; “That the life expectancy of a Black male in the inner city is 25 years of age”!
That’s it, 25 years old, and if you make it pass that, you’re lucky. This is the all done through the news, what they see in their communities and the fact that the music that they listen too continues to warn them that they can be killed at any given moment. Not only by Black gang members, but by police officers and any scared white man now. What do you think that does to their psyche?
This is why you’ll hear so many young Black kids say that they are “just trying to survive”, “it’s the survival of the fittest”, or taking Malcolm X’s “By Any Means Necessary” quote out of context. Another popular saying is “I ain’t never seen a Brinks truck following a hearse”, meaning you can’t take all that money you saved with you when you die.
Couple this understanding with the Christian thought pattern about tomorrow isn’t promised to you and you quickly can see why we act and behave the way we do about saving money or building wealth.
So what do you do with all the money you make, spend it before you die? And what do you subconsciously think about how long you will live, 25 years!
Then the final conditioning method is the constant barrage of stuff that you should buy, being crammed into your brain via advertising. They quickly and constantly let you know that you should have this or that if you consider yourself this or that. From huge billboards, to ads in papers and magazines, to radio and TV, to the internet and on a subliminal level, through the music.
At the end of the day, in the mind of a young Black person you start to think that you should have this, or you should have that, because your favorite entertainer said you should. But how do you get that? By Any Means Necessary is usually the answer, this is also the methodology used to create the prison pipeline system, but that’s another post.
So by the age of 10 you’ve been conditioned to believe you can die any day, because God reserves the right to snatch your life away at any moment. You’re now going into some of your most formative years of your life, the tween and teenager years, you now start seeing friends die from gang violence, and you are being told that you might not live to 25 years old. So the ominous 25 years stat, and tomorrow isn’t promised to you become fact.
It’s now a fact of life that you might not see 25, but guess what, during these same years, you have been constantly inundated with message after message about material things, and understandings like “survival of the fittest”, “on the strong survive”, and “by any means necessary” have become part of your everyday thought pattern also. So the logical steps taken after growing up with these type of thought patterns as the basis of your understandings leads you to this.
Why am I trying to save the money I make if I could die at any given moment?
And not only is it a subconscious understanding, I’m seeing it play out daily right in front of me on a conscious level. Young people are dying, the “coolest” people, having the most “fun” are the ones spending their money on the new Jordan’s, Louis Vuitton, Yeezy’s, True Religion, and turning up every day. So guess what I’m going to do, the same damn thing, because I could die at any minute and when I die I can’t take it with me!
I’m Just Trying to Survive
Chapter from Philosophical Street Chronic (I’m Just Trying to Survive!)
The number one driving force behind a man’s actions is survival. When faced with situations that can lead to life or death we will fight to the death to stay alive no matter what is trying to kill us. Happiness comes in second and love/acceptance is third. The reason for this ordering is because you don’t really understand what acceptance/love is as a child because your parents are the only people that you really know, and they love/accept you unconditionally, notwithstanding those that are abusive, but you know what feeling happy is, so you search for that throughout your life. Then later in life you realize that being happy is tied to being loved and accepted by others.
So in the inner city survival within your environment is learned at a very early age in life and it stems from the activities that happen on your block and then later what happens on the blocks surrounding yours. This is one of the major reasons Black youth join gangs, which will be discussed further in a later chapter.
One of the other reasons that this thought pattern is adopted by Black boys living in the ghetto early in life is because of an ominous warning by some adult, on TV, or the radio, erroneously stating that the life expectancy of a young Black male is 21 – 25. Add to that, the fact that most Black boys attended church on the regular as children, and one of the major things preached about in church is getting right with God, because tomorrow isn’t promised to you. So we tend to develop a subconscious thought pattern that says we need to get rich early in life so that we can be happy and experience the finer things in life before we die.
So at an early age you learn what it takes to survive in the environment that you live in, and if the things that you see are gang banging, drug dealing, and killing, you start to believe that this is how to survive. If you grow up in an affluent neighborhood and you see none of this, then you formulate survival in a different manner. read more…
Objective All True-ISM (Altruism)
Back in the days white Americas vitriol and hate was reserved for Blacks strictly because we were seen to be less than 100% man, as it was stated that we were 3/5th’s of a man. This racist mentality was the basis of laws like the Black Codes that made up Jim Crow America during the late 19th to the middle 20th century. Civil Rights initiatives beat down most of those laws and gave us better ground to stand on and since then we have been building upon a better foundation to reach our lofty goals.
But while we were building and fighting for every inch of ground that we got, a new animus was being nurtured by the “elitist” of our society. These people were the white people who were so blinded by their privilege that they lived in an impregnable bubble. This bubble would continue to grow and grow as more and more white Americans became wealthy enough to partake in the “finer things” in life and separate themselves from the other 99% percent of society in which we live in.
This 1% of society follows Ayn Rand and practices the Randian philosophy that she developed from Existentialism; a philosophy developed during the late 19th and early 20th century, that she called Objectivism! This philosophy emerged around the world after the Civil War, when Black men and women in America were finally afforded the same rights as white people.
Objectivism is, as stated here, “Objectivism’s central tenets are that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (or rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform humans’ metaphysical ideas by selective reproduction of reality into a physical form”. read more…
$59.624 Trillion (What Black People are Owed for Reparations for $5 Billion, Alex)
A few days ago I ran across an article online where a teacher (http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2013/01/calculated-minimum-reparation-due-to.html?m=1) decided to do the math behind what black people would be owed if we got reparations adjusted for todays minimum wage values. He did his numbers based solely on a minimal economic value of free slave labor adjusted at the lowest reasonable rate of interest.
The number he came up with was $1.5 million dollars for every Black person in this country that descended from a enslaved ancestor, which is roughly, wait for it…………… $59.2 trillion dollars. Yep approximately $60 trillion in reparations is owed to blacks in America and this is based off minimum values. This is why Congress will never seriously talk about reparations in a meaningful way.
Crazy isn’t it!
So after reading the article it got me thinking. If the newly freed slaves had gotten the 40 acres and a mule promised to them by Lincoln during the Civil War, how much land would we own?
After doing the math it was simple to realize why they went back on that plan almost immediately after the war was over, so here it is! read more…
A Letter to White America
Dear White America, close your eyes and imagine for a minute that this is how the Trayvon Martin incident!
On February 26th 2011, a young white boy was walking to his father’s house after coming from the store. He was wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag of skittles and ice tea, he was minding his own business.
Out of nowhere a grown Black man drove by and assessed that this white teenager was up to no good so he started following him. The teenager recognized that he was being followed so he ran, not knowing why this grown man was following him, he just knew that a creepy dude in a car was following him for no reason. Is it a crime for a white kid to go to the store to get some snacks? I think not! He was within his rights to be where he was and was doing nothing wrong, yet because he was he was immediately vilified by the Black guy in the car. This is evident in the fact that he decided to follow the kid because “he looked like he was up to no good”.
The black guy then proceeds to call 911 to report this “suspicious looking” white kid that was wearing a hoodie. He then told the 911 operator that he was following the suspect, and the operator immediately told him to stand down, do not follow him, the police are on their way. This grown Black dude then proceeds to get out of his car and follow the white teenager anyway, even though he was told not to. As he is following the teenager he can be heard mumbling about how they always get away with stuff. The call ends and he continues to pursue the white teenager.
By this time the white teenager has called his friend and is telling her that a creepy looking nigger is following him. He looks up and there he is, the Black man is standing there, and before he hangs up the phone with his friend, he is overheard saying “why are you following me”?
What happens next more than likely went like this! read more…
Why Gun Buyback Progams Should Be Stopped, Now!
After reading an article on RT.com about a gun buyback program in New Jersey that netted 2600 guns, of which 700 were illegal, I decided to write a little something about this progam.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that these gun buyback programs a bad policy?
I get it, to an extent, but the problem with the program is that when they buy these guns back, they are doing it with an anonymous tag attached, and most of the police departments donn’t even check the ballistics to see if they have been used in a crime before they melt them down. All these programs allow gun owners to hand over weapons and they don’t even ask who these people are, they just give them a check for the gun, and they go on their merry way.
It’s all done under the guise of getting as many guns off the streets to help keep communities safe. Kudos to law enforcement, kudos to those who want to keep their neighborhood safe, yeah thanks for helping people.
But in reality all that is happening is that people are turning in old broken guns and guns that have crimes attached to them. Criminals can take a gun with murders and temp murders on it and turn it in for cash without ever telling the police who they are and where they got the gun from. Now ask yourself, how in the hell can law enforcement catch criminals that have committed homicide without the evidence and forensic examination of the guns that are turned in? Isn’t that law 101?
A murder is committed with a gun and there are no witnesses; the only thing the police have to go on is spent shell casings with forensic evidence etched into the bullets that can identify what type of gun was used and the exact gun that was used by the markings on the bullet. You catch a bad guy with a gun on him; you take it to the lab, shoot a couple rounds off and match the markings on the bullet to the markings from the bad guy’s gun, now you know that the gun he was carrying was used in a murder! Now you can charge him with that murder, or get him to tell you who committed the murder if it wasn’t him, because the average bad guy, I don’t care how bad he is, doesn’t want to go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. I know y’all seen The First 48, those dudes tell on each other so fast when the heat is on its mind boggling.
So with that being said, the more gun buyback programs implemented in Black neighborhoods means less homicides being solved. Who wants that, especially with what’s going on in Chicago right now? Do we really want to make it easier for villains to get away with murder when so many of our youth are being slaughtered in the streets?
I say we need to stop the gun buyback programs now if we really want to stop the criminals that are killing our children! Or at least make anyone turning in a gun accountable for that gun, no more anonymous turn ins, and I gaurantee none of these police departments will see a third of the guns that they see coming in now in the future.
What do you think?
You can read more about it here!
Django 2 “Re-Chained & Back to Slavery”
Finally saw Django, and I must say, ……………………………………. It was some Bullshit!!!!!!!!! Did Trinidad James write that shit! Seriously! I’ve been reading all these reviews in my stream and nothing but praises for it, WTF! Don’t get me wrong the actors did a superb job, but Quentin, that dude on some BS!
Are we that easily fooled because a Black man got to kill some white people in a fucking movie and ride off in the sunset, nah, not even a sunset like how traditional westerns did it for the good guy, DJamie had to sneak off into the night. Then before he rode off he had to make the horse do the cupid shuffle, WTH! This dude has been rehashing a genre of movies that every self respecting Black person will say was one of the most racist eras in Hollywood.
Let me see, I’m going to employ Black actors to say Nigger 1000 times a frame, when it’s not even needed, so I can get my insatiable lust of saying the N-word out there and not look like the closet racist I am, perfection. Sorry RZA, your boy thinks you’re his boy. Take a look at his movies people; he uses the word in just about every movie he makes, when it’s not even needed. Then he claims this is how we talk, you ain’t us dude, and how in the hell do you know that every other word out of white people’s mouths during the slavery times was Nigger.
Y’all need to understand, he writes all his movies, so this Nigger this Nigger that crap doesn’t need to be in there unless you want it to be. I say the same stuff about rappers that use Nigga excessively, so why would I give Quentin a pass. I feel you Spike Lee, except for the fact that you didn’t see the movie before you shot it to shit, but I feel you on this dude thinking it’s art so he can use Nigger with reckless abandon.
What if Spike Lee did a Blaxploitation-like parody of Shindler’s List where every other word was anti Semitic, and made light of the holocaust, let’s see who would green light that shit. Then make about 4 more movies like that and see where his career goes. But you think it’s OK to remake Blaxploitation movies for the enjoyment of Niggers I see. A word to the wise, use your talents for other purposes and stop calling us Niggers to our face.
And to really let us know how you feel, along with your colleagues, y’all allow a company to make Django slave dolls so little white kids can practice owning slaves. You might as well break out the whip and chains, I see through your BS and this is your last time, period. You’re not putting another movie out like this without some major boycott action coming your way. Make Kill Bill Volume 16 or something, but keep Nigger out of your mouth!