16

Gettin’ Dis’d and Gettin’ Paid: Rectifying Injustice

RODNEY C. ROBERTS

 

 

 

The slave trade and its progeny of racial injustice are excellent examples of far-reaching, unresolved, and massive injustices. Although the U.S. didn’t, much of the global community acknowledged these injustices in 2001 following the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa. The participants acknowledged that “slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity . . . and are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian descent, and indigenous peoples were victims of these acts and continue to be victims of their consequences.” Moreover, it was strongly reaffirmed that “as a pressing requirement of justice, that victims of human rights violations” such as these, be assured of “the right to seek just and adequate reparation.”²⁴⁴

The importance of these issues to hip hop is reflected in the words of Chuck D. Performing “Down to Now” with The Last Poets (Time Has Come), he describes how we came from Africa in ships, with most of us dying along the way. He asks what the tax would be on the horrors of the Middle Passage, and what this country has really done for us since then. In “Kill Em Live” he raps about just wanting to get paid back for uncompensated slave labor, slavery’s progeny of Jim Crow, and other racial injustices.²⁴⁵

This sentiment is reflected in the art of Hulbert Waldroup, whose mural at 168th Street and Broadway in New York City representing the fight for black reparations was photographed for the New York Amsterdam News in November 2002. Waldroup was not only trying to inform people of the reparations struggle, but also to get them to think about this important issue. The Russell Simmons’ Phat Farm ad that ran in Black Enterprise magazine had an even greater aim. The ad featured Rev. Run of Run-DMC, and proclaimed the power of hip hop to impact society. The point of Simmons’s campaign was to inform, inspire, and ensure support for this serious issue. He went even further and donated a percentage of the money from the sale of his Phat Classic toward getting the word out, and toward more research. Donating some of the cash from the sale of these kicks to inform others and to enhance our understanding of this important issue is consistent with KRS-One’s “Edutainment” music style. He reminds us that hip hop is not rap. Unlike rap, hip hop is not just something that you do; it is something that you live. So if you’re serious about livin’ hip hop, you oughta be thinking seriously about injustice and what should be done about it.

The best way to start thinking seriously about injustice and rectification is to get an understanding of fundamental ideas like compensation, reparation, punishment, and apology, and how they relate to one another. This track will get us started.

Just Us in Western Philosophy

Western philosophy has historically been dominated by white males, and has paid relatively little attention to questions concerning injustice and the need to address it. Although the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle begins the discussion of relevant issues in his Nicomachean Ethics, the amount of scholarship since then pales in comparison to other areas of justice. Most contemporary justice theorists have focused on questions of retribution (punishment), and, to a greater extent recently, on distribution (the distribution of rights and duties in society). In particular, questions concerning private property and individual liberty have been thought to be among the most important. Unfortunately, these questions concerning distribution have been addressed using ideal theory.

In ideal theory it is assumed that everyone acts justly. So ideal theory does not have to consider injustice, or even the possibility that there may be a requirement in justice to rectify it. Moreover, contemporary critics of traditional Western philosophy have shown that ideal theory includes a set of assumptions that reflect the experience of the privileged.²⁴⁶ By clouding social reality, ideal theory serves to enhance the interests of the privileged, and contribute to their continued group advantage. Consequently, the traditional Western approach to justice has favored a privileged perspective on justice, one that limits our reflection on justice, and helps to ensure that the concerns of victims of injustice, including those who are systematically oppressed in democracies like the United States, have almost no place in our deliberations about justice. This is a serious problem. Ideal theory facilitates the marginalization of women and other subordinated groups by excluding their reality from consideration. Chuck D. and Flavor Flav acknowledge this exclusion in their classic call-and-response “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” (Fear of a Black Planet). Chuck is delivering a message to all of the Brothers: there should be no mystery to history, and Black America’s experience is a real part of history. Flav responds: not his story. For Chuck, workin’ this thing out includes gettin’ paid—or as Eric B. and Rakim would say, gettin’ paid in full.

Blowin’ Up the Spot

Progressive political philosophers began to produce scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s that challenged traditional Western political theory. So while this period never saw black folk take to the streets in a unified revolutionary action, this challenge to philosophy was something of a revolution. For centuries Western philosophy had been virtually oblivious to any political concerns that were not those of privileged white males. Bringing concerns about gender and racial justice into the mix forced a radical change in how philosophy was done. A great deal of the motivation for the emergence of contemporary injustice scholarship came from the Black Civil Rights Movement. Affirmative action in particular became a much-debated topic among philosophers. Maybe more than any other, this topic has helped the rise of injustice theory. Just as Gil Scott-Heron reminded us back-in-the-day that the revolution would be live and not televised, progressive theorists keep political philosophy “live” by forcing it to include the lived reality of those who are not advantaged in society in its analyses of justice.

Gettin’ Dis’d

It should be obvious that the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas are important parts of the lived reality in what is now the United States of America. These crimes against humanity are also paradigm injustices, injustices created by countless rights violations. This is real disrespect, and real disrespect only happens when rights are violated. But what exactly are rights anyway?

When we say that we have a “right,” we are saying that we have a certain kind of justification, a kind of justification that provides good reasons for interfering with someone else’s freedom, and for determining how that person should act.²⁴⁷ Take babies for example. Because we think that they are totally innocent, and that their innocence (among other things) is a good reason for them not to be harmed, we think that everyone’s freedom should be interfered with insofar as harming babies is concerned—you shouldn’t do it. Consequently, when we say that all babies have a right not to be harmed, we are also saying that everyone has a duty to respect that right. So we are limiting freedom, and determining how folks should act.

We typically ascribe the right not be harmed to innocent adults as well. When a twenty-two-year-old Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo was hit nineteen times in a hail of bullets fired into the doorway of his house by New York City cops on the same street in the Bronx where I grew up, it was an obvious violation of his rights. But whether rights are violated in a lethal or non-lethal way, or in a racist or non-racist way, real disrespect is of serious concern to hip hop. In addition to the flowers and signs that adorned the bullet ridden building where Diallo was gunned down, there was a mural commemorating the tragedy painted on the wall of a flower shop just down the block from where he was killed. The mural, another piece of art by Hulbert Waldroup, depicted the four cops who shot Diallo dressed in police uniforms with KKK hoods. Not surprisingly, police brutality was among the issues that inspired the National Hip Hop Political Convention that was recently held in Newark, New Jersey. Student delegates at the convention worked long hours to draft an agenda that, among other things, demanded human rights reform.

We must be careful, however; careful not to confuse morally legitimate cases of being dis’d with those that are not. Recognizing this distinction is particularly important because, although trivial kinds of being dis’d are not injustices, they can sometimes prompt a violent response. Take for example the scene in Boyz n the Hood where Ricky and Tre are kickin’ it up on Crenshaw. When the dude in the Chicago Bulls hat bumps into Ricky, Ricky naturally feels dis’d. This leads to a heated verbal exchange between the two of them. But because Ricky publicly challenged him, the dude felt as if he had been dis’d. This feeling was so strong that he finds Ricky later in the movie and has him blasted with a gauge, ending any future Ricky may have had as a student-athlete at USC. All that really happens in that scene is a very minor accident, or perhaps a minor provocation; but the egos of both characters caused things to get way out of hand. Because the dude was embarrassed, he felt that Ricky had to be paid back for what he had done.

Payback

When injustices do occur, one obvious and natural response is payback—revenge. This is the kind of response the Notorious B.I.G. has in mind after he gets the 411 on his boy C-Rock in “Somebody’s Gotta Die” (Life After Death). When Biggie’s late-night visitor tells him that C-Rock has just been hit, he immediately wonders if his boy is in critical condition. Whether he is or is not, B.I.G. makes it clear that he intends a forceful retaliatory response to the shooting of his friend. But while revenge may be a natural response, the general view in our society is that revenge-killing is a criminal act—at least when we do it ourselves.

In spite of claiming that he wrote the Declaration of Independence without any reference to other authors, Thomas Jefferson suggested the same sense of political society, and the same sense of our having certain natural, inalienable rights, that British philosopher John Locke had written about in the seventeenth century.²⁴⁸ Locke saw society primarily as a mechanism to preserve private property, or as custodian of everyone’s natural right to punish anyone who violates the rights of someone else and does them harm. The justification for the interference with one’s freedom is now legal, and the state documents the duties that accompany this right by establishing laws. In this case, laws against killing which sometimes include a penalty of death for failing to obey them.

So what makes revenge by Biggie “criminal” is the violation of the law against killing in this situation. It is up to society to provide punishment for gross violations of rights such as homicide. When people are dis’d in this way, it is up to the government to punish the perpetrator of the injustice. One good reason for thinking that such perpetrators should be punished is that they deserve it. Wrongdoers deserve to be punished for what they have done. Part of what we may need to do in order to rectify an injustice, to set it right, is to punish the wrongdoer.

Gettin’ Paid

But in order to rectify an injustice we have to consider more than just the perpetrator, we also have to consider the victim. So rectification provides for compensation, or a counterbalancing of the unjust loss or harm with something else of value (this is generally what is meant by reparation). In contrast to punishment, where the concern is what the perpetrator may deserve, compensation is concerned with what the victim of the injustice may deserve as part of an attempt to set the situation right. Justice may require that the victim get paid.

As noted by the participants of the WCAR, compensation for unjust losses or harms is not only relevant to injustices in the distant past, but also to contemporary injustices. This statement suggests some linkage between the injustices of the past and those of the present. KRS-One makes this connection by way of the overseers on America’s slave plantations, and the police officers on America’s streets. In “Sound of Da Police” he argues for an analogy between the way overseers dis’d slaves and the way blacks continue to be dis’d by Five-O.²⁴⁹ Like the overseers on the plantation, the police ride around and can stop black folk seemingly at will (obviously Walking While Black was a concern long before Driving While Black was even thought of). Like the overseer’s right to get ill with the slaves under his control, and if necessary, kill them if they fought back, the cops have a right to arrest, and if you fight back they can wet you up without fear of reprisal (like the cops who killed Diallo, and then got off). Of course, black men don’t have to be fighting back to get shot by the cops. Speaking the truth about this kind of injustice is exactly what Ice Cube has in mind on the Straight Outta Compton track “F*** Tha Police.” Cube rejects the unjust racist treatment by police in South Central Los Angeles. He cites his skin color as sufficient to give police the idea that they are authorized to kill him. But Cube ain’t down for that, nor is he down for being beaten and thrown in jail. Rather, he is ready to go to blows with any cop who would dis him like that.

It should be clear that the kind of gettin’ paid we are concerned with here is not the kind of gettin’ paid that happens as the result of a J-O-B. In the Spike Lee Joint, Do The Right Thing, Mookie (played by Spike) tells Sal, the owner of the pizzeria where he works, “Sal, start countin’ my money tonight, ’cause I gots ta get paid.” True, this is an example of compensation. The money is something of value that is meant to counterbalance the labor Mookie has provided to Sal. Also, expending labor seems like a loss, since we give something up in at least two ways while working: the labor itself, and the freedom to do something else during working hours. But even if this is a loss that deserves compensation, since the loss is incurred voluntarily, as part of an agreement to exchange labor for money, it can’t be an unjust loss. So the compensation in this kind of case is not rectificatory compensation.

Forty Acres and a Mule

One form of compensation that is not monetary, and which has come to be symbolic of the movement for the rectification of the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America, is the idea of “forty acres and a mule.” This idea prompted Representative John Conyers of Michigan to designate as H.R. 40 his Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. The act would “acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865” and “establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.”²⁵⁰ Unfortunately, any value that might be attached to this form of compensation relies on the assumption that the aim of forty acres and a mule was to aid blacks in their transition from slavery and to compensate them for slavery. But the aim of forty acres and a mule was not to provide rectificatory compensation for the injustices of slavery. In any event, the bill that would have provided forty acres to each family of newly freed slaves never made it into law—it was vetoed by President Andrew Jackson.²⁵¹

Chuck D. tells of how blacks were fooled by the forty acres and a mule proposal. In “Who Stole the Soul?” he notes that there has been no repentance for the injustice of slavery and its progeny that killed his ancestors, and that, because of the forced separation of family members that was an essential part of “assimilating” Africans in America, he’ll never know exactly who all of his relatives are. Playing on the classic nursery rhyme, he asks:

Jack was nimble, Jack was quick.
Forty acres and a mule Jack.
Where is it why’d you try to fool the Black

Then, almost as if anticipating one of the standard objections to rectifying the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America (“I never owned any slaves”), he notes:

It wasn’t you, but you pledge allegiance
To the red, white and blue
Sucker that stole the soul!²⁵²

Chuck D. understands that more is at issue here than merely compensation. He recognizes that in addition to the harm to families over many generations, there is also the failure to repent or apologize for slavery and its progeny of racial injustice. Even if forty acres and a mule had been provided, since there is no sense of acknowledgment or remembrance of the injustice, nor any show of respect for the newly-emancipated Americans of African decent, it fails even as an earnest symbolic gesture of rectification. Rectification calls for an apology because this coupled with some substantive degree of compensation serves to acknowledge an injustice and to reaffirm the moral standing of those who have been dis’d.

Even if Ya’ll Got Paid, Ya’ll Wouldn’t Know What to Do With It

Some people might object to attempting to rectify the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America, because they object to the idea of providing compensation. They think ’cause we’re waitin’ for that big payback, that we won’t know how to act. No doubt many people envision the kind of result portrayed by comedian Dave Chappelle in a skit he called “Reparations 2003.” On Chappelle’s Show, all the black folks in America got paid. Everybody had mad loot, and went crazy spendin’ it on all kinds of bling-bling. Folks was drivin’ around in new custom Escalades, sportin’ big diamond rings, you name it, we bought it. But this objection is wack for at least two reasons. First, for those at the vanguard of the legal battle for compensation, it isn’t even about individual checks. Rather, as the Reparations Coordinating Committee tells us, the point would be to relieve the condition of African Americans who continue to suffer the most from the history of racial injustice in America.²⁵³ Second, even if it was about individual checks, providing compensation in this, or any other way, is irrelevant to the justification for the compensation itself. The reasons for thinking that rectifying the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America is justified don’t have anything to do with the way in which recipients get paid, or what each person will do with that compensation once it is paid. Nor does the likelihood or unlikelihood of actually getting paid necessarily weigh against arguments claiming that compensation ought to be paid.

Not Just a Black Thing

Some people might think that since I have focused mostly on bringing the philosophical enterprise to bear on the black experience, injustice theory is a black thing. But remember that those who participated in the Durban conference were concerned not only with Africans and the African Diaspora, but Asians, people of Asian descent, and indigenous peoples as well. Contemporary injustice theory naturally includes a concern for justice and all people. This seems to be the case in hip hop as well. Take Native Americans, for example. In “Straight Up Nigga” (O. G. Original Gangster), Ice-T characterizes himself as a nigga in America’cause when he sees what he wants, he just takes it. Similarly, the “settlers” who came to this continent saw what they wanted and just took it from the Indians. That was a straight-up nigga move according to Ice-T. Another example that ought to be of concern to American citizens is the perpetuation of injustice against the Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands. Although America formally apologized for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, without any restoration of lands, compensation, or even any serious discussion about sovereignty, these injustices are a long way from being rectified.²⁵⁴ Certainly in cases where indigenous peoples are concerned, and where no real attempt at rectification is made, KRS-One is right: we can never really have justice on stolen land.