Vick Woes Highlight Hip Hop's Effect On Culture

"I believe Vick had a passion for dogfighting. I know many athletes who share his passion. The allure is the intensity and the challenge of a dogfighting to the death. It's like ultimate fighting, but the dog doesn't tap out when he knows he can't win."

 
-- Deion Sanders, in a column for the Fort Myers News-Press.

"Now, granted he might have been to a dogfight a time or two, maybe five times, maybe 20 times, may have bet some money, but he's not the one you're after. He's not the one you're after, he's just the one whose going to take the fall -- publicly."

50 percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them (clapping). All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child….and the child couldn’t care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents (clapping and laughter). And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers, for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.

Basketball players, multimillionaires can’t write a paragraph. Football players, multimillionaires, can’t read. Yes. Multimillionaires. Well, Brown V Board of Education, where are we today? It’s there. They paved the way. What did we do with it. The white man, he’s laughing, got to be laughing. 50 percent drop out, rest of them in prison.

he dominant social, moral, and cultural values among Southern rednecks that Sowell highlights, and that have been explained in works such as Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, include aversion to work, proclivity for violence, contentment with little to no education, sexual promiscuity, short-term thinking, drunkenness, an anti-entrepreneurial spirit, reckless pursuit of excitement, and wild music and dance. Rednecks had touchy pride, what you might call today a “bling-bling” vanity, a boastfully dramatized sense of self, and little self-control.

 
This “cracker” ethos of the past has been baptized into the hip-hop world with reckless abandon. When black kids call studious blacks “white,” or when black kids scold other black kids for sounding “white,” they have adopted a ghetto cracker mentality. Only a ghetto cracker would ridicule the pursuit of education, the speaking of correct English, and working hard. They boast of violent activities, sexual promiscuity, and “gettin’ high and drunk,” “acting a fool up in da’ club,” or bumping and grinding on the dance floor. The ghetto cracker celebrates being out of control and spending money instead of saving and investing.

 
Being a ghetto cracker, regardless of race, is the pursuit of a lifestyle of self-sabotage that undermines human dignity and despises the morality that undergirds civil society. Selling out one’s dignity and future to regressive moral standards is the way of the ghetto cracker.

 
Hip hop magazines like Vibe, The Source, and XXL celebrate the ghetto cracker. In the July issue of Vibe, we find celebration of the strip-club lifestyle of rappers the Ying Yang Twins, affirmation of fighting to display toughness, and a picture of rapper Pitbul holding his toddler son while standing in front of two naked women painted red, not to mention a repugnant set of advertisements that would make all of our grandmothers gasp.

here is, however, an alternative vision of black American culture that recognizes the dual values of moral and economic responsibility. The July issue of Black Enterprise magazine does not promote misleading racial dichotomies but celebrates living wisely. The pages are filled with articles about investment strategies, starting businesses, homeownership, and a profile of black astrophysicist Neil Tyson, who received a PhD from Columbia University in 1991. There are ads featuring the Harlem Book Fair, the American Black Film Festival, and Morehouse College. Hard work, pursuing education, the virtues of prudence, integrity, self-discipline, humility, and the advantages of marriage and family are all part of the fabric that supports the activities celebrated in this alternative expression of the black community.

 
This is not “selling out”; it is “buying in.” Buying in to the fact that authentic blackness is not being a ghetto cracker. Buying in embraces a worldview that understands our common human nature and what it means to live in a way that is truly fulfilling—a worldview that promotes dignity, work, marriage, family, and healthy community. The real sell-out is the one who urbanizes counterproductive moral values and behaviors. They are people like Russell Simons, Puff Daddy, 50 Cent, the Ying Yang Twins, and others who encourage minorities to adopt the attitudes of the Southern, redneck cracker culture of the past while claiming authentic blackness. Being a chocolate covered antebellum redneck of the past is not being “black”; it is simply “selling out” disguised as hip hop.

But followers of hip hop and dance music were more likely to have had multiple sex partners over the last five years and were among the biggest drug-takers surveyed.

 
"It comes out in the study that, in these types of music, fans score worse in various behaviours, such as criminality, sexual promiscuity and drug use," said Dr Adrian North, who led the research.

 
"It was shown that this had nothing to do with their ethnic backgrounds," he added. "The behaviour was linked purely to musical taste in its own right."