It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Read Online Free PDF Page A

inferiority, justify racist state oppression in the minds of the rulers and the ruled.
    Before, during, and after slavery, the white corporate and political structure recognized that control over the Black image is not simply important to enslaving and oppressing Blacks, but absolutely central. Central to both the masses of whites who needed to believe, as “Christians,” that Blacks were not human beings in order to oppress them, or at least not oppose their oppression. And central for Blacks, on the other hand, because these images not only imposed an inferiority complex but also validated their oppression. After all, “It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality,” Baldwin added. It should be noted that even before European enslavers hit the West African shores of Elmina or Gorée Island, they’d produced and disseminated images of Blackness that supported the notion of white supremacy and justified the institution of slavery. Those that profited from slavery realized early on that their domination was contingent upon their control over how Blackness was portrayed. This notion of image control has been an important one for America not just in its subjugation of Africans, but in various other ideological conflicts. Italians, for instance, have long acknowledged that during World War II, the real victory for America came not from landing in Anzio or Salerno, but rather from Hollywood films that sold Italians on the idea of an American consumer society. The physical battle, in that regard, was a mere technicality.
    In her essay “Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation,” filmmaker Pratibha Parmar writes that “Images play a crucial role indefining and controlling the political and social power to which both individuals and marginalized groups have access.” She concludes by reminding us that “the nature of imagery determines not only how other people think about us but how we think about ourselves.” Without media education and literacy, “we just slot in, we buy into it and accept their depiction of us,” a young woman explains at a media awareness conference in Newark.
    Dominant images teach us, as a young girl once confided in me, “to hate myself. My hair. My skin. The way I talk. Everything.” They tell Black women that their natural state is not beautiful; that they are mere sex objects and “nappy-headed hoes” and push Black men “toward a fantasy of Black hypermasculinity” where “Blackness means a primal connection to sex and violence, a big penis and relief from the onus of upward mobility,” as John Leland puts it in
Hip: The History
.
    This means that the images produced by and for whites to justify Blacks’ oppression, images of savages, of laziness, of pimpism and gangsterism, have been embraced by Blacks. It means that the images that taught white people to hate Blacks, to oppress them, have ultimately resulted in
Blacks
hating
Blacks
. And it is this reality that is most tragic. Tragic, not simply because these images are produced, but because they have been accepted and internalized and even reproduced. Baldwin writes in “My Dungeon Shook” that his grandfather “was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” I knew, as I looked at my brother, that he, we, made the same mistake.
    “His shadow , so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality,” is the way Harlem Renaissance scholar Alain Locke, discussing the challenges of the New Negro, put it in his 1925 article “Enter the New Negro.” Locke was attempting, by collecting andpublishing the writings of Blacks during his time, to redefine Blackness in the popular imagination. He recognized that the New Negro had to defy the dominant stereotypes not just in art, but in