Even My Conditioning Has Been Conditioned

I know we are talking about sexual gender relations in the church, this week, but bare with me for a moment, there is a method to my madness. This week I was confronted by a tremendously astute, articulate, serious Kanye West. His interview with Jimmy Kimmel has been circulating the internet this week and I, ever the sucker for an opportunity to watch the performance of hip hop culture off stage, consumed these newest images ravenously.

Like the anger I felt from James Baldwin’s words in Notes of a Native Son, West’s words made the ever-present rage of the black man oppressed by his skin and his culture palpable. But more than that in a rare moment of intimacy, Kanye connected with Kimmel’s audience and dare I say the millions of viewers who caught it later via the web. For the fist time, Kanye made some highly cogent assertions about being the black man from hip hop culture in a world of old money. Despite the maybachs purchased, the fashion or the millions of records sold, Kanye could not get an audience for his more grown up aspirations of having a high end fashion label. Instead he is getting his dose of the “We don’t serve blacks here” refrain that littered the pages of Notes of a Native Son. None of the many designers he served as a walking billboard for, for all of these years consider him equipped to have a seat at the business table. Yet perhaps the most striking comments he made were about self-love. He essentially expressed that he is considered crazy because black people are taught not to love ourselves, and that to do so is to be considered crazy and even in some ways dangerous. Bell hooks herself couldn’t’ have picked a more appropriate contemporary example to illustrate her essay, “Loving Blackness as Resistance. Indeed Black people are taught to view ourselves through the white normative gaze, a lens of hate. This is perhaps the most dehumanizing aspect of racial oppression and according to Marcia Riggs it affects our relationships with one another, especially relationships between black men and women. 

Though Riggs focused more on the church, considering more people know the words to Lil’ Wayne’s “Rich as F*-$” than the stories of 10 classic bible figures or the old church songs in the new African American hymnal, it seems more relevant to consider the state of sexual gender ethics in hip hop, black men’s newest holy institution, where they can experience respect, authority and control. Bell hooks makes specific inferences to hip hop in her essay eating the other, where she speaks of hip hop as one of the newest ways black men and women achieve cultural and spiritual transcendence. Yet when I investigate the catalogue of self-loving Kanye, I find the same dynamic of domination, exploitation and commodification of women. In one of his more recent songs, he tells a woman she has to “crawl before she balls” (translated beg before he spends money on her.)

Despite his supposed love of self, Kanye like so many other black men are caught in a faulty understanding of themselves, masculinity and power imposed upon them through socialization into our racist patriarchal society. As Kanye laments, he cannot seem to achieve the respect he desires in the white world. Industry owners are willing to commodify his blackness, but they are unwilling to engage it as equal or worthy of esteem.

The church has historically been the place where Black men can experience respect and control they do not experience in the world, more recently, Hip hop has become the new space of black male respect and domination. Consequently, this has become the black community’s sacred space. Oppression has caused use to believe that hallowed spaces are spaces in which we experience power, but power at the expense of our neighbor, at the expense of ones brother or sister is never benevolent and therefore from a Christian perspective corrupt. Consequently, sins the black community has endured have become the same behavior it emulates, because not only has self hatred been impressed upon us, but an ethic of domination has been so inscribed in our psyches that we don’t know how to operate on any other paradigm.

Accordingly you see the same disrespect, and stifling of women in hip-hop as you do in the church. And like the women of the church the women of hip hop acquiesce to their position because they cannot see anything more in themselves or pander to the mythology of mainstream society as a means of survival. In this society, you are no one until you have the ability to dominate another; and those who experience oppression want so very badly to improve their social standing, is it any wonder sexual gender domination is the order of the day in hip hop? Furthermore, why are we surprised when hip-hop artists, like the black church, are deemed less credible because of their problematic sexual gender ethics? I wonder if other alternate understandings of black identity exists in the world and how their sexual gender dynamics are different as a result? Surely one has to love themselves before they can love anyone else, particularly those who are bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.

Here is an article written about Kanye, on the politics of black self love.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/in-defense-of-kanyes-vanity-the-politics-of-black-self-love