The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (58 page)

In a conversation with cultural critic Vijay Prashad, I learned a great deal more about the complex roots of thug. “It’s very clear that the word ‘thuggee’ is a north Indian word,” Prashad tells me. “Probably from Murati, from western India, but
it’s not clear.” A British man by the name of General Sleeman made it his mission to eradicate thugs in India. During the early years of the British Empire, there was an increase in the trade of bullion, and brigands roamed the countryside robbing merchants and stealing revenue transactions. Sleeman claimed these thugs were the disciples of the goddess Kali. The thugs used to attach themselves to merchant caravans, claiming to have some talent, like cooking or preparing drinks. They would often drug the merchants and then strangle them with a handkerchief called a
rumal
, leaving a mark on the necks of the victims. Prashad conjectures that there are three possible ways the word entered the United States. “The easiest way is that Sleeman’s work was well-known in the U.S.,” Prashad says. Sleeman authored a popular nonfiction account of India. But this was mainly to the white mainstream. Prashad thinks the word may have reached black audiences through excerpts in the
Colored American
and other newspapers that were tied in some way to the black church, as the black religious press was deeply interested in India. The third way is through the Caribbean, since there was a large transit of people from eastern India coming into the Caribbean after the 1840s. Given the strong link between black and eastern Indian religions—between Rastafarianism and Shavism, the worship of Shaiva—there were also cultural exchanges, with “thug” passing into the Caribbean lexicon.
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In light of the heavy Caribbean influence on the development of rap—its founding light, D. J. Kool Herc, emigrated from the Caribbean to the Bronx, where he transplanted West Indian outdoors parties to the backyards of his American neighborhood—the word “thug” has a specific resonance in black popular culture. “It sounds perfect, in musical terms,” Prashad says. “It is better than gangster, which puts you too much in the lineage of the Mafia. This is an alternative kind of thug; it’s ‘our’ kind of thug. It’s a unique word; it is known and not known at the same time. It has a flavor to it.” When I tell Prashad that Tupac had actually made an acronym of “thug life” (“the hate you gave little infants fucks everyone”), he is in full agreement with the rapper’s forcefully subjective interpretation. “It is beautiful, because the word, even though it is an indigenous word to these fellows who were out there to begin with, means the ‘hate you gave.’ After all, it’s the currency transactions that begin because of the empire’s influence that will bring the brigands. There is truth there.” Prashad ends our conversation by telling me of his experience with some African-Caribbean and African-American youth. They were sitting on his porch when one of them said, “I’m thugged out.” It caught Prashad’s attention. “I remember having a chat with them, saying, ‘Do you know this word? It’s familiar to me.”’ The youth were making fun of Prashad’s eastern Indian accent, and as a result Prashad and the students began “playing around with words and language.” Prashad gave them a brief history of the word they were using, the word that bound at least three cultures together. “They found it fascinating, the story I told them, and we had this interchange, and I said, ‘We are inside each other.’”
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Toni Morrison, too, has “respect for the genre, because of what it does with language.” Morrison is not oblivious to the “bad influence” of “people who are driving [rap] to make it sensational,” but she understands the crucial role to youth of an art form that transmits important information. “It is a conversation among and between black youth from one part of the country to another: ‘What is it like in Detroit, as opposed to L.A., as opposed to New York?”’ Morrison’s view of hip-hop is admirably international, giving her an appreciation of the genre’s inspiring, and subversive, global reach. “Just seeing what happened to it in Europe is astonishing,” Morrison told me. “When I was in Frankfurt—the center of rap music in Germany—I got some unbelievable rap discs from a Turkish girl who was singing in German.” Morrison argues that what unifies hip-hop throughout the world is its emergence from “the ‘others’ within the empire”—for instance, the Turks in Germany and the Algerians and North Africans in France—who ring profound changes in the nation’s discourse. “First of all, they’re changing the language, although nobody admits it,” she says. “But that’s where the energy comes from . . . . It is the necessity for young people to talk to one another in language that is not the fake language of the press. That sort of conversation curtails thought altogether. So it is a dialogue.” But Morrison does not neglect the essential
musical
element that frames the use of language. “The fact that it also is the music you can’t sit down to—you really do
get up
—is what has made it so fetching.” Morrison is, of course, completely aware of the controversial subject matters broached in hip-hop. “It is always up for grabs about sexuality and violence,” she says. Morrison argues that the establishment accepts such discourse only when “it’s separate, like when Shakespeare does it, or Chaucer, or Boccaccio—those are the most outrageously provocative stories and language in the
Decameron.
They say they want safe language, but that’s just the way the establishment is: It [rap discourse] wouldn’t be outlawed or policed unless it had that quality.” As a parting thought, Morrison raises an intriguing question—humorously, to be sure, as she chuckles all the way through it, but, as is evident, it seizes me by the pen. “Are there any other groups of gangsters or robbers or whatever you want to call them who made music? The whole notion of making an art form while you’re doing it is . . .” Before she can finish, we’re both cracking up at her brilliant thought, her deliriously righteous question, which she caps with a nod to the genius of the folk. “I mean only black people could figure that out. I don’t know how far you can go with that! There are sagas about medieval thugs and Robin Hood, but [it’s fascinating] to actually invent your own art form while you’re in the life, so to speak.”
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Tupac, Syke, Prashad, and Morrison bring to light the complex fashion—one full of signification and play—in which the thug, the outlaw, the pimp, and the like are evoked in hip-hop. It is true that Tupac tried to make the world believe he really was who he announced on his albums. But at some levels—it is important to stress
some
levels—even that was an act, in the best sense of that word, an
ingenious artistic strategy to create a persona. Persona making, after all, is the province of art—and of politics, preaching, and every realm where performance is crucial to self-definition and the transmission of ideas. Too often, however, we deny the artistic milieu in which rappers operate and descend instead into a thudding literalism. The historian Robin Kelley makes this point when discussing Miles Davis and the necessity of a more complex vision of art and persona, even those involving controversial figures like the pimp. “Why is it that we still love Miles despite the fact that he’s such an evil figure?” Kelley asks. “It’s because the stuff that’s so romantic, and evil, can be reconciled in the pimp. And so my thing is, turn the mirror around and look at yourself when you look at the music. And it’s deeply romantic, because that’s what the pimps are, the great ones.” Kelley is not offering an apology for pimping. Instead, he is suggesting that cultural creations have multiple meanings, none of which can be exhausted or suspended by appeals to the responsible behavior of the artist. (Indeed, many of art’s meanings exist beyond the intent or desire of its creators.) “I guess I’m tired of this question of what’s redeeming or problematic,” Kelley says. “We don’t have to go to hip-hop to find it. We can actually invent something.” Kelley contends that an artistic representation “does both of those things simultaneously” and that a more important question is “Why are we still drawn to it?” As Kelley says, “moralizing [and] saying there’s nothing redemptive about this, so therefore we should just critique it, doesn’t really tell us anything about how people are thinking.”
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Taking the time to learn what our youth are thinking and why they create the art they do demands a capacity for deferred justification that most adults lack. They seek to ensure the legitimacy of their moral critique by rendering quick and easy judgments about the art form. Many critics of hip-hop do not have the ethical patience to empathize with the formidable array of choices, conflicts, and dilemmas that many poor black youth confront. Tupac is deeply attractive to millions of young people because he articulates the contradictory poses of maturing black identity with galvanizing exuberance and savage honesty. “Most of my music [tells the truth],” Tupac says in the interview he did in prison. “I’m just trying to speak about things that affect me and about things that affect our community. . . . Sometimes I’m the watcher, and sometimes I’m the participant, and sometimes it’s just allegories or fables that have an underlying theme.” Tupac’s allegories and fables largely estranged his elders, underscoring how the generation gap has grown more menacing.

By almost any measure, the gaps between older and younger blacks are flagrant, even frightening. To be sure, there have always been skirmishes between the generations. Many older blacks have often found the dress, language, and hair of younger blacks offensive. In turn, many younger blacks have often soured on the conservative values and accommodating styles of social existence favored by a majority of their elders. These tiffs have certainly not disappeared.
Indeed, every era seems obligated to draw from local circumstance and color in painting a fresh picture of generational malaise. Where the Afro hairstyle raised dander in the ’70s, the ’90s outbreak of hair twists and braids provoked dread in corporate and conservative colored circles alike. And as if the boom in ’70s clothing had not already offended by dredging up bell-bottom pants and platform shoes, the baggy fashions sported by youth—oversized shirts, unlaced shoes, beltless pants sagging to the upper gluteus for maximum exposure—have riled their seniors, especially since such styles are purportedly inspired by prison gear. Although the specific circumstances of black life in the new millennium—unprecedented growth of the black middle class, devastating expansion of the ghetto poor, restructuring of industries that employ large numbers of blacks, sustained drug and criminal activity, capital flight, increased technologization of the workforce—shape our understanding of these conflicts, they appear, in one form or another, in each generation.
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What
is
new and particularly troublesome is the sheer hostility that bruises relations between older and younger blacks. For perhaps the first time in our history, blacks over thirty have fear and disdain for black youth. Such a perception turns graver when we consider that
half
of black America, some 17 million citizens, is below the age of thirty. That means, too, that half of black America has come to maturity in an age of bewildering black “posts”: post–civil rights, postmodern, postindustrial, and post–baby boom. A great deal of the age chasm in black communities can be explained by the chaos that blacks over forty confronted in seeking racial equity, personal status, and social justice. Blacks who cut their teeth on the sinewy fibers of violent racial oppression have little tolerance for cries of injustice from quarters of relative privilege: young black urban professionals who can’t hail a cab or coddled college students who seethe at the racist slights encountered on elite campuses. Neither do older blacks, whether strong integrationists or radical nationalists, cotton easily to “the devil made me do it” theory of criminal behavior and social disintegration that plagues many black communities. The purpose of the civil rights and black liberation movements, after all, was to foster healthy black communities unfettered by white supremacy. Such struggles were not meant to justify thugs who hurt other blacks. Neither did those struggles intend to ignore the moral deficiency of persons who use racism to deflect attention from their own failings.
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For many blacks over the age of forty, Tupac represents the repudiation of ancient black values of hope and positive uplift that tied together black folk across geography and generation. His studied hopelessness—and he affirmed his depressive status by repeatedly declaring “I’m hopeless”—and his downward-looking social glance only aggravated the generational warfare that looms large in black America. As “a brother from another generation, I can’t help but hear Tupac, if not totally objectively, at least from a broader perspective—the bird’s-eye view of the forest as opposed to being in the trees, so to speak,” says Khephra Burns.
“And what I hear generally are words that rip through our communities, our families, and our lives like automatic weapon fire.” Burns says that Tupac is full of “discord, death, and revenge.” Bishop T D. Jakes sees Tupac as an emblem of fin de siècle black social disintegration, a state of affairs markedly different from what previous generations bequeathed to their offspring. Jakes says that the twentieth century “ended with the sound of gunshots reverberating in the streets of the American black culture.” Speaking of Tupac, Jakes laments how the “hearse wheels rolled away the remains of a young man who our children watched, admired, and perhaps emulated to some degree.” Jakes argues that the “gunshots should have been a wake-up call to us that somehow our cultural pace and our agenda was now being set by young men whose rhythm is at best unsteady.” Jakes contrasts such a scenario with an earlier epoch of black achievement and struggle. He says that our present predicament is “a far cry from the previous decades, when the role models that we were awed by were world shakers like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, and many others”: Unfortunately, these “giants of black faith have in their latter years been replaced by young men whose talent has lifted them to a height whereby they gained the ear of America prematurely, having more talent than statement.”