1 Alan Light, ed., The Vibe History of Hip Hop (New York: Vibe Ventures, 1999), p. vii.
2 KRS-One, Ruminations (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2003).
3 See “Zulu War Cry,” The Source 185 (March 2005), p. 64.
4 The Vibe History of Hip Hop, p. 98.
5 Young Buck, “Legalize It,” XXL Magazine (October 2004), p. 68.
6 Summa Theologica, I, Q. 25, Art. 3.
7 Props to Bill Irwin for dropping this gem on me.
8 Letter to Mersenne (15th April, 1630), in Descartes: Philosophical Writings, edited by Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 259–260.
9 Letter to Mesland (2nd May, 1644), p. 291.
10 For more on this “bullshit,” see Harry G. Frankfurt, “The Logic of Omnipotence,” The Philosophical Review 73 (1964), pp. 262–63.
11 Much love to my homie, Tommie Shelby, for checking my flow on this track, and to Finnie Coleman. Much love to Professor Richard Gale for cultivating my interest in the philosophy of religion. And much love to my fam, Ahmed Johnson, a.k.a. Ah-Stick, for loving hip hop and Queensbridge from the beginning, and to his mama, my Aunt ’Rain, a.k.a. the unofficial mayor of Da Bridge, for always keeping it real with us ever since we were shorties running the streets of QB.
12 Plato, “Symposium,” in Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 457–505.
13 OutKast, “Spread,” Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (Arista, 2003).
14 Jay-Z, “Big Pimpin’,” Volume 3: Life and Times of S. Carter (Rock-A-Fella/Def Jam 1999).
15 Lil’ Kim, “How Many Licks?” The Notorious KIM (Atlantic, 2000).
16 Lil’ Kim, “Big Momma Thang,” Hard Core (Undeas/Big Beat, 1996).
17 See Snoop Dogg, “For All My Niggaz & Bitches,” Doggystyle (Death Row, 1993); Eminem, “Hailie’s Song,” The Eminem Show (Interscope, 2002); and Nas, “One Love,” Illmatic (Columbia, 1994); and “One Mic,” Stillmatic (Columbia, 2001).
18 Method Man featuring Mary J. Blige, “I’ll Be There For You / You’re All I Need To Get By,” The Hip Hop Box (Hip-O, 2004).
19 Jay-Z, “99 Problems,” The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella, 2003).
20 See Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz featuring Usher and Ludacris, “Lovers and Friends,” Crunk Juice (TVT, 2004).
21 Notorious B.I.G., “Me & My Bitch,” Ready to Die (Bad Boy, 1994).
22 Black Star, “Brown Skin Lady,” Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star (Rawkus, 1998).
23 Lauryn Hill, “Doo Wop (That Thing),” The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Ruffhouse, 1998). 13 Lauryn Hill, “To Zion,” Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
24 For an insightful analysis of Alcibiades’s rap on love, see Martha Nussbaum, “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s ‘Symposium’,” Philosophy and Literature 3 (1979), pp. 131–169.
25 For a rich and original treatment of the drama of love, see Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
26 Spearhead, “Love Is Da Shit,” Home (Capitol, 1994).
27 See Track 6 in this volume, pp. 73–74.
28 Salt-N-Pepa, “Shoop,” Very Necessary (UMG, 1993).
29 For a philosophical discussion of the similarities between pimping and commerce, see my “Parasites, Pimps, and Capitalists: A Naturalistic Conception of Exploitation,” Social Theory and Practice 28 (2002), pp. 381–418.
30 The Roots featuring Erykah Badu, “You Got Me,” Things Fall Apart (MCA, 1999).
31 See Niko Kolodny, “Love as Valuing a Relationship,” Philosophical Review 112 (2003), pp. 135–189.
32 Lauryn Hill, “When It Hurts So Bad,” Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
33 For helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay, I thank Derrick Darby, Bill Irwin, John Pittman, and especially Jessie Scanlon, who has taught me more than a few things about love.
34 Gorillaz featuring Del tha Funkee Homosapien, “Clint Eastwood,” Gorillaz (Virgin, 2001).
35 Published in 1641, translated into English by D. Cress and published by Hackett (1993).
37 Ernest Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (London, 1963).
38 “He Got Game,” He Got Game (Def Jam, 1998).
39 Heather Kleider and Stephen Goldinger, “Illusions of face memory: Clarity breeds familiarity,” Journal of Memory and Language 50 (2004), pp. 196–211.
40 See Dolf Zillmann, “Attribution and misattribution of excitatory reaction,” in John Harvey, et al, eds., New Directions in Attribution Research, Volume II (Erlbaum, 1978), pp. 335–368.
41 The fun and informative documentary, The Face: Mask or Mirror? narrated by John Cleese, discusses some of these experimental findings.
42 Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Interscope 2003).
43 John Yinger, Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination (New York: Sage, 1995).
44 Roy Kaplan, Lottery Winners: How They Won and How Winning Changed Their Lives (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
45 Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003).
46 Research for this paper was supported in part by a Summer Grant from the Office of the Provost at the University of Virginia. That support is here gratefully acknowledged.
47 An extended account of this episode, and of other battles as well, can be found in the video documentaries Beef and Beef II (QD3, 2003).
48 Eric B. and Rakim, “I Ain’t No Joke,” Paid in Full (Fourth & Broadway, 1987).
49 Jay-Z, “Takeover,” Blueprint (Roc-a-Fella, 2001).
50 Nas, “Ether,” Stillmatic (Sony, 2001).
51 Black Star, “K.O.S. (Determination),” Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star (Rawkus, 2002).
52 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 113–14.
53 Run-D.M.C., “Sucker MC’s (Krush-Groove 1),” Run-D.M.C. (Arista, 1984).
54 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 114.
55 It’s true that if there are observers or witnesses of the struggle, they can provide recognition of the victor’s achievement even when the other antagonist is slain. But the recognition offered thus is insufficient to the purpose, since in abstaining from the struggle the onlookers have indicated their unworthiness to give recognition.
56 Notice the interesting implication here, that the slave, if he is to provide recognition of the master’s self-consciousness, must be himself recognized as—in some way—the master’s equal. Yet the salient feature of the relation between them is its asymmetry and their inequality.
57 Aquemini (La Face, 1998).
58 2Pac, Me Against the World (Interscope, 1995).
59 Straight Outta Compton (Ruthless, 1988).
60 Ice Cube, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted,” AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority, 1990).
61 The Coup, “Underdogs,” Steal This Double Album (Foad, 1998).
62 See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 190.
63 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), p. 817.
64 Public Enemy, “Prophets of Rage,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam, 1988).
65 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in R. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton), p. 375.
66 Talib Kweli, “Manifesto,” Lyricists Lounge Vol. I (Priority, 1998).
67 Mos Def, “The Rape Over,” The New Danger (Geffen, 2004). Notice, finally, how Mos Def characterizes the “masters” of the rap game in both racial and class terms. The question of the relation of race and class, of which (if either) is most basic, of the dynamic between them—the so-called ‘Race-Class question’—has provoked an extensive discussion and controversy in twentieth-century philosophy and social theory. Du Bois himself, as well as sociologist Oliver C. Cox and revolutionary theorist C.L.R. James, among many others, have written on it.
68 My thinking about hip hop has benefitted from discussions with Luan Demirovic and Francois Restrepo. This track has also been much improved by considerable commentary, as well as help of various kinds, from Tommie Shelby.
69 For an extended discussion of rap in terms of pragmatism, see Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; second edition, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); and Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also my “Rap as Art and Philosophy,” in Tommy Lott and John P. Pittman, eds., A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
70 Though the study of rap constituted only one chapter of my Pragmatist Aesthetics most of the press reviews concentrated on this topic. See for example, C. Delacampagne, “Une Esthétique du Hip-hop,” Le Monde (31st January, 1992); B. Loupias, “Le Champ du Rap,” Le Nouvel Observateur (28th March, 1992); D. Soutif, “L’Or du Rap,” Libération (23rd April, 1992); J. Preston, “The Return of the Repressed,” The Times Higher Education Supplement (9th July, 1993); J. Fruchtl, “Die Hohe Kunst des Raps,” Suddeutsche Zeitung (20th September, 1994); C. Romano, “A Temple Philosophy Professor in Rhythm with Hip-hop Culture,” Philadelphia Inquirer (28th October, 1992). I respond to these discussions and to other critiques of my rap research in “Rap Remix: Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Other Issues in the House,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), pp. 150–59.
71 See
www.mtv.com.mews/articles/1490330/20040818/simpson_ashlee.jhtml?headlines=true). For helpful discussions concerning Shyne and the contemporary hip-hop scene, I am grateful to the Brooklyn DJ and hip-hop scholar Mixmaster Josh Karant.
72 One recent expression of rap’s awareness of the complexities of violence is in its 2004 election year “Vote or Die” campaign, where the symbolic violence of the power of voting to legally overthrow an undesirable leader or policy is both contrasted and linked to the real violence of death, frequently suffered because of the undesirable policies of undesirable leaders.
73 “R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.” KRS-ONE (Zomba Recording Corporation, 1995).
74 See Pat Thane, “Social Histories of Old Age and Aging,” Journal of Social History 37, No. 1 (Fall 2003), pp. 93–111.
75 Based on 1998 data generated from U.S. death records and compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the average 15-year-old U.S. male faces a 1-in-185 probability of being murdered before reaching age 45. Nationally, a similarly aged black male faces an average 1-in-45 probability that he will be murdered before reaching age 45; an average white male faces a 1-in-345 probability of murder before age 45. See Gareth G. Davis and David B. Mulhausen, “Young African-American Males: Continuing Victims of High Homicide Rates in Urban Communities,”
Center for Data Analysis Report #00-05 (2nd May, 2000),
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Crime/CDA00-05.cfm (25th August, 2004).
76 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1976), p. 84.
79 Dead Prez, “Police State,” Let’s Get Free (Loud, 2000).
80 In 1999, LAPD Rampart CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) anti-gang officer Rafael Perez plea bargained to charges of theft of drugs from LAPD evidence lockers for his drug sales; and implicated dozens of CRASH officers engaged in systematic violence against residents of Pico-Union, site of the Rampart Division. The investigation into the Rampart Division involved over 3,000 cases and over 100 victims of police brutality and misconduct had their convictions overturned. Several police serving as security for Death Row records at the time of Tupac’s and Biggie Smalls’s murders were also later implicated in the LAPD Rampart scandal. See “LAPD Rampart Scandal,”
Democracy Now! (22nd December, 1999),
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0415205&mode=thread&tid=5 (1st February, 2005).
81 The largest, most organized, and destructive criminal enterprises are corporate and statist. The bulk of revenues from drug sales are not made at production or distribution sites, that is in agricultural fields or street sales; the vast majority of drug revenues comes from money laundering, which is done by banks (such as American Express and Citibank) censored for criminal activities. Likewise the majority of cocaine, both powder and synthetic, according to a Sentencing Project report, is consumed by suburban whites while the vast majority of those incarcerated for street sale or addiction are poor and working-class blacks and latinos. See The Sentencing Project, “Crack Cocaine Sentencing Policy: Unjustified and Unreasonable,”
http://www.sentencingproject .org/pubs_04.cfm (10th October, 2004).
82 The government is not above utilizing rap for its own projects. In his nationalist documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 (and its “bootleg” copies), Michael Moore provides a glimpse of the top 40 playlist purchased by taxpayers for the military (it is unclear if the Pentagon pays royalties to the artists): A young white man interviewed, with shaved pate, grins sheepishly as he tells how the military gives out headsets and then cranks up the music to high volume to heighten “killer instincts” when U.S. troops work with assault weapons and grenade launchers. Conducting (asymmetrical) fire fights, they kill anything that poses a threat, generally anything—that is, any child, woman, or man—that moves; hence the high “collateral damage” of Iraqi civilian casualties amid the dead insurgents. The military blares into the heads of its largely (post) teen killing machine Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn,” whose refrain the youth chants wolfishly: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. / We don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn / Burn, motherfucker, burn.” (Bloodhound Gang, “Fire Water Burn,” One Fierce Beer Coaster [UMG, 1996].)
83 Meshell Ndegeocello, “Dead Nigga Blvd. (Part 1),” Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (Maverick, 2002).
85 Ice-T with Body Count, “Cop Killer,” Body Count (Warner Brothers, 1992).
88 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1994 reprint).
89 Spearhead, Home (Capitol, 1994).
90 Brown Sugar, directed by Rick Famuyiwa (Twentieth Century Fox, 2002).
91 Tiger Woods once said he was ‘Cablinasian’—white, or ‘Caucasian’, black, Indian and Asian—in response to a question about his mixed racial background.
92 My thanks to Tommie Shelby for encouraging me to make this point.
93 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989).
94 See Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
95 Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), Chapter 2.
96 The argument of this section tracks the view that I develop in Paul C. Taylor, Race (New York: Blackwell-Polity, 2003).
97 Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
98 See K. Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
99 In any case, the kind of cultural attachment that comes with race membership will dwindle in significance next to the more local and robust forms of attachment that define ethnic communities. People often conflate race and ethnicity , but it is useful to reserve the terms for separate uses. Asians are a race, we think, but Asians don’t share a common culture.
100 One might think that black people are more likely to take black culture seriously—that we’re less likely to treat it as a way of being cool or subversive, or less likely to drop it when it’s no longer trendy. But it isn’t at all obvious that this is right. Who takes jazz and blues most seriously?
101 New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).
102 I see rap as a sub category of hip-hop music and hip-hop music as a sub category of hip-hop culture. And I recognize that much of my analysis in this track doesn’t apply to all of hip-hop culture, in which music is only a part, or even all of hip-hop music, some of which attempts to portray Black male and female sexuality in a positive light.
103 I must emphasize that it is not my intention to “preach” or make a moral commentary against hip-hop artists or hip-hop culture. Rather, it is my aim to use examples from hip hop to introduce philosophical concepts while also encouraging critical reflection on the images that we consume from the idiot box.
104 Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 123, 126.
105 Black Sexual Politics, p. 127.
106 In fairness to Tupac, he also has other hits like “Keep Your Head Up” that uplift and encourage Black women.
107 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 76.
108 Black Sexual Politics, p. 132.
109 Black Sexual Politics, p. 128.
110 Black Sexual Politics, p. 129.
111 Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1943).
112 Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Sckocken, 1948).
113 Nelly, “E.I. (Tipdrill Remix),” Da Derrty Versions: The Reinvention (Universal, 2003).
114 Tip drill also symbolizes not only the penis (the “tip” doing the “drilling”), but also the man doing the “drilling” and the woman being “drilled.” Tip Drill does not have to be full intercourse but might also include, for example, inserting only the tip of the penis into the vagina, oral sex, or a lap dance.
115 Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 52.
117 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
118 Black Sexual Politics, p. 122.
119 Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 90.
120 Alain Locke, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, edited by Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
121 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
122 This passage appears in the English translation as “The Fact of Blackness,” but the French refers to L’expérience vécu du Noir, which is more aptly translated as “The Lived Experience of the Black.”
123 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
124 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,” in Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
125 See my Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neo-Colonial Age (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 240–44.
126 A piece of trivia might be informative here: Queen Latifah was originally cast with leading man Robert De Niro to play the role that Halle Barry played with Billy Bob Thornton in
Monster’s Ball (2001). See the website:
www.contactmu-sic.com/new/xmlfeed.nsf/mndwebpages/latifah%20almost%20landed%20monster.s%20ball%20role. On the question of drama, the 1997 movie
Love Jones might qualify as a hip-hop movie given the place of spoken-word poetry as the context for the film and the place of hip hop in its soundtrack.
127 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1999).
128 This question and description haunt hip-hop and pop culture, for example, in the third season (2004) of VH1’s The Surreal Life, which featured Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav as the only black member of the cast.
129 See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956); and Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (Seacaucus: Citadel Press, 1948).
130 There is not enough space to develop this thesis here, but I encourage the reader to consult my discussion of the aesthetics of mundane life in revolutionary practice in my Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), Chapters 3–4.
131 Thanks to Jane Anna Gordon and Doug Ficek for reading early drafts of this chapter, and to Mathieu Gordon for whom hip hop continues to offer so much.
132 The philosopher David Lewis develops a similar idea for general communication in his classic 1968 paper “Languages and Language,” reprinted in his Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 163–188.
133 Compare their tracks “Sabotage,” “Root Down,” and “Get It Together,” for instance, to see how their musical styles vary on a single disc. Ill Communication (Capitol, 1994).
134 Vanessa Satten, “Diamond in the Back,” XXL Magazine (August 2004), pp. 117–18.
135 A similar kind of point appears in philosophical discussions of meaning in art. See, for instance, Monroe C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), p. 238; Beardsley, Aesthetics, second edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 238–242. Judith Grant extends this sort of analysis in her paper “Bring the Noise: Hypermasculinity in Heavy Metal and Rap,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (1996), pp. 5–30.
136 Richard Shusterman helps sort out this kind of concern in his discussion “Rap as Art and Philosophy,” in Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman, eds., A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 419–428.
137 See Jerrold Levinson, “Messages in Art,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), pp. 184–198.
138 Jay-Z and Linkin Park, Collision Course (Warner, 2004).
139 See, for instance, Track 13 in this volume.
140 Tupac: Resurrection (New York: MTV Films, 2003).
141 The idea has a thick philosophical history. See Paul Grice, “Meaning,” in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 213–223. First published in The Philosophical Review 66 (1957), pp. 377–388.
142 “Messages in Art,” p. 188.
145 “Messages in Art,” p. 196n.
148 Mario Winans, interview by Letisha Marrero, Vibe (August 2004), p. 117.
149 Lil’ Flip, “Realest Rhyming,” The Leprechaun (Sony, 2002).
150 Quoted in Benjamin Meadows-Ingram, “Tongue-Tied,” Vibe (August 2004), pp. 118–121.
151 I thank Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby for helpful comments and supportive suggestions on early drafts of this track.
152 2Pac, “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” 2Pacalypse Now (Interscope, 1991).
153 Missy Elliott, Miss E . . . So Addictive (Goldmind/Elektra, 2001).
154 Ms. Dynamite, A Little Deeper (Polydor, 2002).
155 Queen Latifah, All Hail the Queen (Tommy Boy, 1989).
156 N.W.A., Niggaz4life (Ruthless, 1991).
157 N.W.A., “Niggaz4life,” Niggaz4life (Ruthless, 1991).
158 Foxy Brown, Broken Silence (Uptown/Universal, 2001).
159 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 9.
160 For a concise and insightful discussion of the 1990 prosecution of 2 Live Crew on charges of obscenity, see Kimbarlé Crenshaw, “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew,” Boston Review 16 (1991).
161 Ultramagnetic MC’s, “Give the Drummer Some,” Critical Beatdown (Next Plateau, 1988).
162 Snoop Dogg, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece (Geffen, 2004).
163 Lisa Mendez-Berry, “Love Hurts: Rap’s Black Eye,” Vibe (February 2005).
164 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical
Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Section VII, Part II.
165 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962).
166 Rae Langton, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993), pp. 305–330.
168 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, reprinted in The Philosophy of Human Rights (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2001).
169 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Shady/Aftermath, 2003).
170 Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” Crunk Juice (TVT, 2004).
171 Thanks to Alex Byrne, Jeff King, and Tommie Shelby for helpful comments and suggestions.
172 For the seminal philosophical analysis on the nature of harms and how they differ from offences, see Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, four volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984–88).
173 The following point about racist versus racial language is found in J. Angelo Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
174 A similar objection to the use of such language can be posed in terms of significant offence rather than harm but it will not be pursued here.
175 For a philosophical discussion of the nature of racist hate speech and whether or not it ought to be prohibited in light of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, see J. Angelo Corlett, Ethical Dimensions of Law, forthcoming.
176 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, People’s Edition (London: Longman’s, 1865); Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Feinberg copiously qualifies this general formulation of the Harm Principle in Moral Limits.
177 What distinguishes my view from a traditionally politically liberal one on this issue is that, whereas liberalism grants prima facie moral weight to freedom (of expression, in this case), my view does not. Competing interests are to be weighed against one another, all things considered.
178 No doubt a stronger case can be made for the moral unjustifiedness of severely offensive language. But that is not a problem I can take up here.
179 See, for example, Paris, Sonic Jihad (Guerrilla Funk Recordings, 2003).
180 Many thanks to Derrick Darby, Robert Francescotti, Bill E. Lawson, Rodney C. Roberts and Tommie Shelby for incisive comments on an earlier draft of this track. Thanks also to Darby and Shelby for suggesting that I turn to Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle (Death Row, 1993) for the track’s provocative title.
181 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Houston A. Baker Jr., Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); William Eric Perkins, ed., Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Theresa A. Martinez, “Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap As Resistance,” Sociological Perspectives 40 (1997), pp. 269–291; Alan Light, ed., The Vibe History of Hip Hop (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999); and Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
182 Tommy Lott, 1992. “Marooned in America: Black Urban Youth Culture and Social Pathology,” in Bill E. Lawson, ed., The Underclass Question (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 71–89.
183 See Bill E. Lawson, “Crime, Minorities, and the Social Contract,” Criminal Justice Ethics 9 (1990).
184 Puff Daddy, No Way Out (Bad Boy, 1997) 5 Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 22–23.
185 David Carroll Cochran, The Color of Freedom: Race and Contemporary American Liberalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 6.
186 Dead Prez, “I’m A African,” Let’s Get Free (Loud, 2000).
187 Naughty By Nature, “Everything Is Gonna Be All-Right,” Naughty by Nature (Tommy Boy, 1991).
188 Jadakiss, “Why?” Kiss Of Death (Ruff Ryder/Interscope, 2004).
189 Dead Prez, “They Schools,” Let’s Get Free.
190 “Farrakhan’s Mission,” Newsweek (19th March, 1990), p. 25.
191 Lawson, “Crime,” p. 16
192 Ice Cube, “I Wanna Kill Sam,” Death Certificate (Priority, 1991).
193 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); also see Bill Lawson, “Locke and the Legal Obligations of Black Americans,” Public Affairs Quarterly 49 (1989).
195 See, for example, Public Enemy, “Revolutionary Generation,”
Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam, 1990). Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes that PE “pioneered a variation of hardcore rap that was musically and politically revolutionary.” Biography of Public Enemy,
AMG Allmusic,
http://www.allmusic.com (5th February, 2005).
196 See, for example, Dead Prez, RBG: Revolutionary But Gangsta (Columbia, 2004); and The Coup, Steal This Double Album (Foad, 1998).
197 Track 13 in this volume, p. 161.
198 “Fear Not of Man,” Black on Both Sides (Rawkus Entertainment, 1999).
199 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1651]), Chapter 13.
200 “Life’s a Bitch,” Illmatic (Columbia, 1994).
201 Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13.
202 The Infamous (RCA, 1995).
203 See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
204 “I’m a African,” Let’s Get Free (Loud, 2000).
205 “Award Tour,” Midnight Marauders (Zomba, 1993).
206 See Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 220. For an account of African American solidarity in particular, see Lionel K. McPherson and Tommie Shelby, “Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (2004), pp. 171–-192.
207 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 133.
208 “Ebony,” The Devil Made Me Do It (Tommy Boy, 1990).
209 “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Black (Def Jam, 1991).
210 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Erin Kelly, ed., Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Massachusett.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
211 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 42–43.
212 Public Enemy, “Fight the Power,” Fear of a Black Planet.
213 See Tommie Shelby, “Race and Social Justice: Rawlsian Considerations,” Fordham Law Review 72 (2004), pp. 1706–08.
214 Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam, 1988).
215 “By the Time I Get to Arizona.”
216 Public Enemy, “Who Stole the Soul?”, Fear of a Black Planet.
217 “Party for Your Right to Fight,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
218 “By the Time I Get to Arizona.”
219 Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. xiii, 155.
220 The hip-hop generation is said to cover African Americans born between 1965 and 1984. See Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), p. xiii.
221 In transcribing many of the lyrics quoted, I have consulted
The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive,
http://www.ohhla.com.
222 50 Cent, “Rotten Apple,” Guess Who’s Back (Full Clip, 2002).
223 Nas, “Every Ghetto,” Stillmatic (Sony, 2001).
224 Dr. Dre, “Nigga Witta Gun,” The Chronic (Priority, 1992).
225 OutKast, “Return of the ‘G,’” Aquemini (La Face, 1998).
226 Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam, 1988).
227 Mos Def, “Mr. Nigga,” Black on Both Sides (Rawkus, 1999).
228 See Amnesty International’s report, Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2004).
229 Peter French, The Virtues of Vengeance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), p. 227.
230 Unless otherwise specified, the statistics in this essay come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Government.
231 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message,” The Message (Sugarhill, 1982).
232 Dead Prez, “Behind Enemy Lines,” Let’s Get Free (Loud, 2000).
233 Big Punisher, “Capital Punishment,” Capital Punishment (Loud, 1998).
234 U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2000 Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics.
235 Human Rights Watch Presentation to the United States Sentencing Commission (25th February, 2002).
236 Ice Cube, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted,” AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority, 1990).
237 Goodie Mob, “Cell Therapy,” Soul Food (La Face, 1995).
238 See Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” New Left Review 13 (2002), pp. 49–54.
239 Kim Curtis and Bob Porterfield, “California Inmates’ Calls Home Prove Costly to Families, Friends.” The Boston Globe (6th September, 2004).
240 Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” p. 52.
241 Nas, “My Country,” Stillmatic (Sony, 2001).
242 See KRS-One, “Sound of Da Police,” Return of the Boom Bap (Jive, 1993).
243 Dead Prez, “We Want Freedom,” Let’s Get Free (Loud, 2000).
244 Report of the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa (31st August–8th September, 2001), U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 189/12 (2002),
http://www.unhchrch/html/racism/index.htm, pp. 11, 24.
245 Public Enemy, Bulworth: The Soundtrack (Interscope, 1998).
246 See Charles W. Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” in Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker, eds., Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
247 H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64 (1955), pp. 175–191.
248 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
249 KRS-ONE, A Retrospective (Zomba, 2000).
250 Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, U.S. Congress, 107th Congress, 1st Session, January 3, 2001, H.R. 40 IH.
251 For a more detailed discussion of forty acres and a mule, see Rodney C. Roberts, “Rectificatory Justice and the Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in Mary Keller et al., eds., Recognizing W.E.B. Du Bois in the Twenty-First Century (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2006).
252 Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam, 1990).
253 Charles J. Ogletree, “Reparations for the Children of Slaves: Litigating the Issues,” University of Memphis Law Review 33 (2003), pp. 245–264.
254 107 Stat. 1510 Public Law 103-150—Nov. 23, 1993, on the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
255 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds., Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 277–282.
256 Wu-Tang Clan “A Better Tomorrow,” Wu-Tang Forever (Loud, 1997).
257 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969). See also discussions of liminality in Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
258 The Bronx Historical Society online lists this description in their timeline: “1977—President Jimmy Carter visits The Bronx, followed by television and newspaper cameramen recording widespread devastation and destruction of the urban surroundings. This projects a powerful negative image of The Bronx across the nation and around the world.” See
www.bronxhistoricalsociety.org.
259 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964); and Darko Suvin, “The Mirror and the Dynamo: On Brecht’s Aesthetic Point of View,” The Drama Review 12 (1967), pp. 56–67.
260 See Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview, 1995).
261 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975); and Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1991).
262 Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in J. Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 98–119; and Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University of Press, 1997).
263 Turner, The Ritual Process.
264 Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 27.
265 Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); and Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998).
266 Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books. 1999). p. 53.