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Halfway Revolution: From That Gangsta Hobbes to Radical Liberals

LIONEL K. McPHERSON

 

 

 

Rappers and rap commentators have claimed there’s revolution in the music. They suggest not simply that rap is revolutionary in form—lyrics spoken rather than sung, sound driven by distilled beats rather than melody. No, they also suggest that rap is politically revolutionary. Exhibit A is Public Enemy and much of the hype surrounding this greatest of rap groups.¹⁹⁵

Anyone who hasn’t heard Nelly or, back in the day, MC Hammer or the Sugar Hill Gang might assume that rap is by nature music of urban anger and protest. It isn’t, of course. Still, politically-oriented rap—which speaks to black life under conditions of adversity—has been a defining strain of the music. If you doubt there’s room for political themes in this era dominated by pop-rap, listen to Dead Prez or The Coup.¹⁹⁶

Ironically, most political rap has not been politically revolutionary. I say this not as a criticism, only as an observation. While political rap does represent a culture of resistance, it’s not true that such rap “represents a fundamental challenge to liberal political philosophy.”¹⁹⁷ This view gets at least two things wrong: 1) the range of resistance politics expressed in rap, and 2) the progressive potential of political liberalism.

Few rappers have seriously advocated political revolution—a transformation of society that would produce government and social arrangements that are fundamentally different from the established ones. “We are hip hop / Me, you, everybody, we are hip hop / So hip hop is goin where we goin,” Mos Def tells us.¹⁹⁸ And most of us aren’t politically revolutionary. Rap’s political visions have mainly been amoral, Afrocentric, or liberal. They find support in prominent theories in political philosophy.

The Hood and America as a State of Nature

A few hundred years ago, Thomas Hobbes observed that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹⁹⁹ This was supposed to be the typical condition of persons in “a state of nature”—a world where individuals ultimately must fend for themselves in conflict with others. As Nas succinctly updates this theme, “life’s a bitch and then you die.”²⁰⁰ Only the strongest, cleverest, or luckiest could hope to enjoy secure and full lives in a state of nature. Most persons would do better in civilized society.

Hobbes was imagining the situation we’d be in without a government, especially its ability to impose law and order. This represents a version of what philosophers call “social contract theory.” If we’re rational, according to Hobbes, we would consent to be governed in the interest of our mutual benefit. The crucial part of this bargain for Hobbes is our willingness to submit to a government’s coercive authority and power: each of us must agree not to pursue our own desires through force, or else we’ll slide back to a “war of every one against every one.”²⁰¹ In return we’re to get peace and security as members of society.

From the perspective of hardcore rappers, however, the world looks an awful lot like a state of nature. So Mobb Deep’s Prodigy raps in “Survival of the Fittest”:

There’s a war goin’ on outside, no man is safe from
You could run but you can’t hide forever . . .
It’s similar to Vietnam
Now we all grown up and old and beyond the cop’s control . . .
My goal’s to stay alive
Survival of the fit, only the strong survive.²⁰²

Viewing society as a system of mutual benefit is apparently at odds with reality in urban America. The government fails to provide the security necessary for trust and co-operation. In fact, the police are seen as a major part of the problem, hardly less of a danger to life and liberty than rival gangstas—a point N.W.A. bluntly makes on “Fuck tha Police.” Add to this the government’s failure to address overwhelming black poverty and miserable black schools. Such neglect spurs an underground economy of drug dealing, thieving, and pimping.

No surprise, then, that many young black men, concentrated in ghettos across the country, tend to view the hood and American society in general as a state of nature. Hardcore rap lays bare the truth that no social contract has ever existed between blacks and the United States. The mere promise of a social contract extending to blacks was broken long ago, epitomized in the “forty acres and a mule” that freed slaves never got.

The gangsta ethic fits Hobbes’s social contract theory. This might distress critics of the antisocial attitude sometimes voiced in rap. For Hobbes, though, justification for the government rests solely on assumptions about how rational, self-interested individuals would respond to mutual distrust and aggressive competition for resources. Contested beliefs about morality, a god’s commands, or the good life play no role in this justification. When individuals have reason to believe they’re not better off submitting to the authority and power of the government, they would have no reason to comply with its laws.

Hobbes’s morality-free justification for the government is not entirely plausible. In order for a society to be stable, persons need to be committed to social co-operation. Otherwise, allegiance to the society is always provisional, dependent on whether individuals are unable to get away with pursuing their own interests by any means necessary. Desirable stability requires that persons acquire a sense of fairness—that they will co-operate with others because this is the right and reasonable thing to do and not simply because of the threat of punishment. Yet if groups of persons do not see the society as working for them, the society cannot expect their allegiance.

Thus the gangsta ethic not only leads some rappers to chronicle ghetto life but also often to celebrate its amoral dimensions. The message is that only fools, frauds, or cowards—suckas—would comply with the society’s rules when these rules are likely to leave black folks disrespected, broke, in jail, or prematurely dead. An anti-black, market capitalist society that approximates for many a state of nature can expect the credo 50 Cent adopts: “get rich or die tryin’.”

An Afrocentric Community

Social contract theories focus on the basic interests of individuals. By contrast, communitarian theories emphasize the ideal of community, which can involve shared nationality, culture, language, or religion. Contemporary communitarian philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer argue that persons can’t have an adequate conception of themselves—let alone adequate conceptions of morality, justice, and the good life—independently of their community.²⁰³ On this view, the value of community is at least as important as liberty and equality for individuals.

The ideal of community is familiar in rap that espouses Afrocentrism. We can roughly distinguish two types of Afrocentrism in rap: nationalist and Native Tongues. Nationalist Afrocentrism has its roots in the “Back to Africa” movement of Marcus Garvey and in the Nation of Islam. It advocates separa-tion from whites as a defense against persistent white supremacy and urges social and economic empowerment through group self-help. Afrocentric rappers of the late Eighties and early Nineties—for example, Brand Nubian, Paris, X-Clan—mainly were nationalist. This trend has been revived by Dead Prez, who proclaim: “I’m an African, never was an African American / Blacker than black, I take it back to my origin.”²⁰⁴

Presumably, few white communitarian philosophers would be comfortable with this kind of pro-black stance, though they’d have to admit that the ideal of community is evident in such lyrics. Communitarians believe that personal identity, moral life, and political rights should be determined within a community. They object to forms of individualism that ignore history. Nationalist Afrocentric rappers might well agree.

Native Tongues Afrocentrism takes a different pro-black line. The “Native Tongues” designation comes from the New York-based collective that included the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Mos Def. The Afrocentrism of this rap isn’t dedicated to racial separation or a reconstructed African identity. Its attention is on promoting black self- and group-esteem and on raising consciousness of issues—especially violence, drug abuse, and sexism—afflicting “the black community.” Native Tongues Afrocentrism tends to be more cosmopolitan, drawing on influences that aren’t typically identified with black youth culture. Musically, this has meant incorporating pop, rock, and jazz elements into the mix, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) being a classic case. Lyrically, this has meant lauding rap’s potential for universal appeal, in the manner of A Tribe Called Quest: “We on award tour with Muhammad my man / Goin’ each and every place with the mic in their hand / Chinatown, Spokane, London, Tokyo.”²⁰⁵

A cosmopolitan, Native Tongues-type Afrocentrism is better able to respond to objections to communitarianism. Many African Americans recognize that “race” is the most significant feature of their social identity in the U.S. Yet they recognize that gender, class, and sexual orientation also constitute who they are. Like members of other groups, African Americans have complex social identities, and the strength of their identification with the black community can depend on political contingencies and their own personal concerns.

Communitarianism obscures this fact by implying a proper, unified self shaped by the community. Similarly, nationalist Afrocentrism suggests that African Americans are essentially black or African, in biological or spiritual terms, and calls out as Uncle Toms those brothers and sisters perceived not to be down with the cause. However, we can acknowledge the importance of solidarity in a community without accepting a “politics of the common good” that would impose on individuals the dominant conception of a community’s “way of life.”²⁰⁶

A communitarian approach to minority groups is also troubling. Minorities often practice ways of life—through culture, language, or religion—that diverge from mainstream norms. Official policies designed to advance the majority community’s values risk licensing or encouraging hostility toward minority groups. Some U.S. public schools, for instance, have prohibited students from wearing baggy pants or religious headdress. Generally, communitarianism might not express enough tolerance for the ways of life of marginalized groups and individuals, be they African Americans, women, Muslims, homosexuals, and so forth.

This has practical implications for rap. According to historian Tricia Rose, laws that restricted where and how jazz could be played “were attached to moral anxieties regarding black cultural effects and were in part intended to protect white patrons from jazz’s ‘immoral influences’.”²⁰⁷ She connects those laws to the attitudes of arena owners and insurance companies, whose exaggerated fears about black violence fuel resistance to booking rap shows. The bottom line is that communitarian politics—even in the form of nationalist Afrocentrism—are risky for African Americans, given their minority status and relatively weak economic and political power in the U.S.

The rapper Paris, overtly nationalist though he is, seems to get this: “Not idiot crossover songs / That appeal to all and make you sing along, no / This one is for the chosen few / Who want to build and upflift my people too.”²⁰⁸ His reference to “the chosen few” is ambiguous, open to involving whites and anyone else who cares about the progress of “my people,” black people. A community bound by such a commitment need be neither racially or culturally exclusionary nor skeptical of individualism.

Radical Liberals

Political philosophers distinguish between ideal and non-ideal theory. Ideal theory looks for principles that any just society must embody and assumes that everyone would follow these principles. Non-ideal theory looks for principles that can handle injustice in a society. For example, non-ideal theory might allow race-based affirmative action given a history of racial injustice. If a society were racially just, taking race into account in hiring or school admissions would be unnecessary and unfair, since there would be no racial injustice to correct.

The most influential and criticized contemporary political philosopher has been John Rawls. His ideal theory of justice doesn’t say much about racism. So when Chuck D. of Public Enemy asks, “What’s a smilin’ face / When the whole state’s racist?”, Rawls might seem to have no answer, like much of the social contract tradition.²⁰⁹ Yet Rawls’s vision of political liberalism is more down with PE’s agenda than we might think.

Rawls proposes the idea of “the original position,” which represents a hypothetical situation where persons agree on fair terms of social co-operation.²¹⁰ These persons are free, equal, and reasonable citizens in a democratic society. Despite their diverse moral outlooks, they seek principles of justice that regulate society’s basic structure and that serve their mutual advantage. Rawls wants to figure out what principles such persons would agree to, even if actual agreement in a society never happens.

In the real world we’re at different levels of wealth and privilege; we’re born men or women; we belong to different racial and ethnic groups; we don’t share all the same values; and we have different natural abilities. For agreement on the principles of justice to be fair, Rawls argues, such contingent facts about persons shouldn’t be allowed to bias their choice of the principles. We should imagine deliberating behind a “veil of ignorance” that limits knowledge of our own bargaining advantages. Although we’d discover our circumstances in society once the veil is lifted, we would have committed to following the principles we agreed to behind the veil.

Rawls believes that persons in the original position would choose two principles of justice. The first principle, which has priority, holds that everyone must have equal basic liberties—for example, freedom of thought, the right to vote, and equality under the law. The second principle holds that social and economic inequalities must be consistent with fair equality of opportunity and of greatest benefit to the disadvantaged.²¹¹ Some persons could make more money than others not because they deserve to but only as an incentive to do work that above all would improve the lives of society’s least well-off members. Playing the system for maximum, personal advantage is disallowed. This idea seems radical in these times of growing inequality.

Critics of Rawls have questioned how we could respond strongly to racism if we’re thinking about justice from behind a veil of ignorance. After all, race is supposed to be out of the picture in the original position. The liberal ideal of equal moral status threatens to leave African Americans without a platform for combating racial injustice. Chuck D. essentially makes this point when he declares: “People, people we are the same / No we’re not the same / ’Cause we don’t know the game / What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless.”²¹² The mere rhetoric of equality won’t do much to change the realities of race and racism.

But Rawls’s theory isn’t done once there’s agreement on the principles of justice. We’re to apply the principles using our general knowledge about the society, including the prevalence and effects of racism in it.²¹³ Rawls doesn’t put up practical barriers to remedying racial injustice by insisting on absolute “colorblindness”—that is, treating everyone without considering race, even when racism helps to explain inequality. Further, since African Americans as a group don’t enjoy equal opportunity and are disproportionately poor or struggling, the second principle of justice—which requires a roughly equal distribution of resources—would in effect greatly benefit them.

Chuck D. provocatively calls out the U.S. government as “an anti-nigger machine” organized by “a swarm of devils,” who run the criminal justice system as “a form of slavery.”²¹⁴ Yet beneath PE’s lyrically and sonically confrontational approach is a commitment to setting the historical record straight and to demanding justice and respect for African Americans as equal members of society. If PE had truly given up on white America, Chuck D. wouldn’t have bothered “waitin’ for the date” for politicians to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. with a national holiday.²¹⁵ Nor would Chuck D. express disappointment with whites “who never repented / For the sins within that killed my kin.”²¹⁶

Thus Public Enemy’s “pro-Black radical mix” seems fundamentally liberal in its opposition to white supremacy.²¹⁷ Not much of substance separates PE and Rawls regarding a political response to racial injustice. Of course, they have very different styles. PE gives shout outs to the Nation of Islam—without advocating nationalist separatism or a literal view of whites as morally hopeless evildoers. Rawls philosophizes at an abstract level and never deploys figurative violence—though he’s undeniably motivated by awareness of how race affects opportunities and outcomes in American life. So Chuck D. needn’t target him in rapping: “Yeah, he appear to be fair / The cracker over there / He try to keep it yesteryear / The good ol’ days / The same ol’ ways.”²¹⁸ Rawls’s ideal theory of justice—unlike fake colorblind ideology—supports taking reasonable means necessary to bringing about justice, including racial justice, in a non-ideal world.

Reality versus Revolution

I’ve argued that political rap hasn’t been politically revolutionary. The amoral gangsta ethic favors individual self-interest or the collective interest of gang or crew. Afrocentric rap focuses on black group- and self-empowerment, not on a broader transformation of society. The few references to socialism Dead Prez drops are more about show than content. Radically liberal rap endorses the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation but hardly questions whether this is ultimately compatible with capitalism. Accepting a kinder, gentler market-driven economy isn’t the stuff of political revolution.

I’m not saying that “niggers are scared of revolution,” as The Last Poets charged back in 1970. My point is that black politics, like hip hop, is going where we’re going. As the music writer Nelson George observes, hip hop’s central values—its materialism, anti-intellectualism, aggression, and spirit of rebellion—“are very much by-products of the larger American culture.”²¹⁹ The revolution will not be televised for the simple reason that there’s no real desire among African Americans for political revolution. Black folk do have a real desire, however, for racial progress.

Political rap is the soundtrack to the hip-hop generation’s disaffection over being left out of the American dream.²²⁰ Not all African Americans dig the soundtrack. Still, most would look forward to the day they had a truly equal opportunity for the kinder, gentler, and fairer version of the dream to pay off.²²¹