MSNBC’s Morning Joe hopped on to the radar of black folks and Hip Hop fans everywhere when the crew — Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski — as well as Bill Kristol got down to blaming Waka Flocka’s lyrics and his use of the n-word for the OU racism scandal that’s been sweeping the country. Bill went straight into doublespeak when he blamed the “cesspool” of popular culture that these poor, impressionable young white men and women ingested for their shockingly racist chant caught on tape, which got two of the men expelled. This came at the behest of Mika Brzezinski, who insisted that Waka Flocka himself should be taken to task for the nature of his lyrics and the fact that he’s already performed for these students, obviously poisoning their minds in the process.
The lone voice of reason was Willie Geist, deemed their resident expert on gangsta’ rap, who rightly drew the conclusion that the n-word has nothing to do with a bunch of elated SAE frat folks chanting that they’d rather lynch someone that let them join SAE. Here, we cut through the nonsensical opinions of these talking heads to get to the matter of why people of their ilk continue to blame Hip Hop for just about everything, especially racism.
Correction: The piece originally referred to the SAE chapter of OSU, when it should have referred to the SAE chapter of OU.
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Victim Blaming
There’s almost nothing that America does better than blaming the victim. Systematic genocide of Native Americans? They were savages anyway. Black folks routinely getting killed by those paid and promised to protect them? They’re thugs. So it came as a droll, to-be-expected surprise when the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe decided to blame Waka Flocka and rap music instead of the kids who got caught red handed in their racism for SAE’s disgusting chant about lynching people. Mika looked practically forlorn as she described the plight of the two young men, now expelled. And casually dropped the red herring of Waka’s use of the n-word in order to justify the behavior of those young Frat guys. Clever. Bill Kristol then added these pearls of wisdom, “Popular culture becomes a cesspool. A lot of corporations profit off of it. And then people are surprised when some drunk 19 year old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing.” Sigh.
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Hip Hop Is Popular Culture
Right now at this point in time Hip Hop is popular culture. It is ubiquitous and bleeding through the margins of almost every other genre, activity and subculture. So it’s an easy culprit to blame when you see kids who look like you making a terrible mistake on camera instead of the kids themselves. Their mistake and the backlash it caused was the logical reaction of a society dealing with the still festering, open wounds of what Barack Obama called America’s “original sin.” The reaction of the members of Morning Joe ran the gamut between absurd and appalling. Though, there was one bright spot. Willie Geist sought to bring the panel back to logic by stating the obvious differences between the two arguments. Unfortunately the damage had already been done.
Gangsta’ Rap
This chronically misunderstood genre of rap that spits the realities of politics and survival in the communities America would love to forget is almost always blamed for anything and everything. N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” led to the FBI jumping in and trying to put the squeeze on the group. Ice T & Body Count’s “Cop Killer” led to commentary by then VP Dan Quayle, who was quoted in the Baltimore Sun quipping, “Here is a very influential corporation, supporting and making money off a record that suggests it’s OK to kill cops. I find that outrageous.” Of course his critique included the Time Warner corporation and corporations in general, whom politicians and talking heads pretend they have a problem with whenever it is convenient for them, instead of attacking Ice-T directly. In that way I suppose the direct attacking of Hip Hop by Joe Scarborough and his panelists is a step in the right direction, if only for the sake of brevity.
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Racism
Why would you blame the very thing itself that caused those kids to chant that song in 2015 on behalf of SAE if you could just blame everything but that instead. The idea that racism itself is better off simply not spoken about or acknowledged, that it will just go away if gone unrecognized like an apparition who’ll finally cross over if you just pretend they aren’t there. The fact that the attitudes, mindset and worldview that caused them to be racist in the first place was not even addressed by the panelists is indicative of a privileged few run amok. Nor was it even acknowledged how those attitudes fit into the larger context of the social ills people have been protesting for a good year and a half now. And not just in Ferguson or in New York, but all over the country and the world, shows that those panelists would rather bury their head in the sand than face up to reality.
Waka Flocka
Waka Flocka’s topsy turvy career has spanned trap classics, strip club anthems and EDM mosh pits, but he became somewhat of a morally upstanding gentleman when he refused OU his services after that tape surfaced of all those kids chanting about lynching people. Good for him. He’s also an easy target for conservatives who view his music as morally repugnant. But how can you take seriously the morality of people who opine that it’s racist for people to say the n-word in sons and therefore it’s perfectly hypocritical when we get mad at SAE for their rousing rendition of an old company hate song. For our money, those two things don’t equal each other. Though, the Morning Joe crew clearly feels differently.
