POST NO ILLS E-Roundtable: Sucka-Free Democracy--Mark Anthony Neal (2)


SECOND RESPONSE In all of the responses, I am struck by the sense—which I share—that an Obama administration might not have the impact it needs to on the ground. I’m not sure how that message resonates to the rank-and-file, particularly the young folk, who never got to know what an “old” Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X might have fared in the post-Civil Rights era—though Aaron McGruder has given us some inkling. Most folk who celebrate Mandela these days in the States were not really privy to his governing style, and that’s, for me, the real question about the potential of an Obama presidency. Most of the folk we’ve held up as heroes never had to govern in a traditional political sense and you can look to our general dismissal of some recent black mayors—Tom Bradley in LA, David Dinkins in NYC, Wilson “bomb the MOVE headquarters” Goode as a few examples—whose governing styles were not sexy enough for us. On the other end of the spectrum there are those who flat out failed at governing—King Kwame simply being the most recent example. I always think about William Jelani Cobb’s query about what a Farrakhan administration might have looked like on any level—love the man’s fiery oratory and passion for the folk, but that’s not a government that I’m trying to co-exist with. Just ask some black Zimbabweans about Mugabe. The larger point is that I don’t think the hip-hop generation has really thought hard about how we’d like to govern or be governed—and that’s the part about the freedom and liberation question that we’ve yet to get excited about. In that regard an Obama presidency, with his passion for pragmatic politics, might force us to come up to speed quickly. ___As for the Senator’s outreach to hip-hop, it’s been rather tepid I think. Obama’s campaign has exploited the marketing strategies and outreach networks that hip-hop helped establish. All those damn backpackers in Iowa and Wisconsin that we thought were encroaching on the world we called hip-hop in the mid-1990s are now part of the cutting edge of white progressives and mainstream liberals who are all for Obama—in part because they responded well to some grimy rapper fifteen years ago who didn’t mind trudging to the hinterlands to do his or her job. I’m not sure how much Obama even understands this, given that his learning curve involved more Motown and Chi-town steppers, than Schooly D or Raekwon. And perhaps it’s best—all of us on this panel have spent a fair amount of energy representing hip-hop as a fully mature, fully engaged social entity without much lasting success; damn if the senator from Illinois would have the expertise to do us better. OTHER PARTICIPATING RESPONDENTS: Natalie Moore Adam Bradley R. Scott Heath Close Window

SECOND RESPONSE

In all of the responses, I am struck by the sense—which I share—that an Obama administration might not have the impact it needs to on the ground. I’m not sure how that message resonates to the rank-and-file, particularly the young folk, who never got to know what an “old” Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X might have fared in the post-Civil Rights era—though Aaron McGruder has given us some inkling. Most folk who celebrate Mandela these days in the States were not really privy to his governing style, and that’s, for me, the real question about the potential of an Obama presidency. Most of the folk we’ve held up as heroes never had to govern in a traditional political sense and you can look to our general dismissal of some recent black mayors—Tom Bradley in LA, David Dinkins in NYC, Wilson “bomb the MOVE headquarters” Goode as a few examples—whose governing styles were not sexy enough for us. On the other end of the spectrum there are those who flat out failed at governing—King Kwame simply being the most recent example. I always think about William Jelani Cobb’s query about what a Farrakhan administration might have looked like on any level—love the man’s fiery oratory and passion for the folk, but that’s not a government that I’m trying to co-exist with. Just ask some black Zimbabweans about Mugabe. The larger point is that I don’t think the hip-hop generation has really thought hard about how we’d like to govern or be governed—and that’s the part about the freedom and liberation question that we’ve yet to get excited about. In that regard an Obama presidency, with his passion for pragmatic politics, might force us to come up to speed quickly.

___As for the Senator’s outreach to hip-hop, it’s been rather tepid I think. Obama’s campaign has exploited the marketing strategies and outreach networks that hip-hop helped establish. All those damn backpackers in Iowa and Wisconsin that we thought were encroaching on the world we called hip-hop in the mid-1990s are now part of the cutting edge of white progressives and mainstream liberals who are all for Obama—in part because they responded well to some grimy rapper fifteen years ago who didn’t mind trudging to the hinterlands to do his or her job. I’m not sure how much Obama even understands this, given that his learning curve involved more Motown and Chi-town steppers, than Schooly D or Raekwon. And perhaps it’s best—all of us on this panel have spent a fair amount of energy representing hip-hop as a fully mature, fully engaged social entity without much lasting success; damn if the senator from Illinois would have the expertise to do us better.

OTHER PARTICIPATING RESPONDENTS: