Rebel Desis of the Hip Hop generation by Shemon Salam

We're posting an excerpt of an article this week from an Asian political journal, Jalan, written by activist Shemon Salam.

This is an excellent piece in and of itself and the content that it takes up which is essentially the question of the model minority and the tensions in Asian communities between, on the one hand, acting on their history as a specific working class struggle against white supremacy and capitalism and, on the other, towards "assimilation" into American society and thereby breaking ranks from black folks and other people of color who are not allowed the same freedom of social mobility and becoming agents of white supremacy. Their mission, to borrow from Fanon, is to fulfill their freedom of self-government by linking up with other workers of color or betray it by complying the model minority myth and being "the good Asians." There's so many lessons here for white workers too, but the same dynamic doesn't apply.

What I like about the article is that it uses the term "hip-hop" in a broad and flexible way to talk about a particular working class generation of color. It isn't "hip-hop heads" who are the center-piece, though they are a part, but the aesthetic sensibilities of this whole generation as they manifest in popular, hip-hop culture. That part of Asian folks that tends toward solidarity and collusion with black people is a theme that is expressed sometimes implicitly, other times openly, in hip-hop culture. Salam talks about the contradictions below:

"The tragic events of September 11, 2001 were a horrible, but nonetheless powerful igniter for the debate of what America means for many Muslim South Asians. So far, the broader community has handled it in quiet ways, hoping to be good people of color and assimilate into American society. This strategy is running into problems as South Asians are being harassed by the FBI and Homeland Security, often with the help and collaboration of middle-class Muslim leaders. This is hardly a program that will convince youth that they are equals of this country. It is only a matter of time before the dam breaks and sections of the community are fed up with this accommodationist stance. Will this result in new mass movements? How will this mass movement relate to other social problems facing the nation? In the cultural front we see the slow incorporation of South Asians and hip hop with artists such as DJ Rekha and Malabar to name only a few in this growing genre. These artistes rap about the ways in which Brown people in the US are collectively oppressed, and highlight the solidarity that is necessary between Black and Brown people in the US. How these artists will affect broader American society is unclear. In the South Asian community, they represent a force that will not cower before the US state, finding strength and solidarity instead with other people of color here.

My argument boils down to the following: the South Asians might be Americans in the way we dress, talk, eat, and behave, but we are not Americans in our politics, traditions, and beliefs. I am referring to how we conceptualize ourselves; how we concretely see our interests in relationship to other everyday Americans; how we interact with anti-Black racism, class conflict in this country. Oftentimes, we think ourselves to be outside the racial problems of this country. We think we can exist above them or outside them. We claim not to be Black or White, but too often we also end up siding with white supremacy in our political and cultural behavior. We have failed to come up with a South Asian American racial and class identity that is at the same time independent and confident of its own origins, and related to the racial and class conflicts of this country. Instead, we feel we are a social class destined to be doctors and engineers, and ignore the class differentiated societies we left back home. I am not looking for programmatic answers to these questions but searching for what they look like when people are on the move in the workplace, neighborhood, and their schools. What people do is often more important then what they say. On both counts, the verdict is not good at the present moment; however the future is not doomed either."

We encourage all of you to read it all and to check out Jalan and the other great articles there that are taking up Southeast Asian and Asian-American popular struggles. In the spirit of Selma James, these aren't auxiliary struggles or "identity politics," but this is the class struggle today and we welcome it as such.

"Give Them an Apocalypse": Reading on Hip-Hop and Neoliberalism

There's so much going on in the world that sometimes it's difficult to settle down enough to write something. Props to folks hitting the streets in Greece this week and workers occupying the Republic Windows & Door factory in Chicago. We've been paying a lot of attention to the economic crisis for some time now and recognize that in a lot of ways, hip-hop has been recording the (under)development of the American and global economy since its birth and, what's more, is helpful for understanding this monster called neoliberalism.

Since the 1970s, neoliberal ideology has carried forth a brutal program of devastation in our cities, removing jobs and slashing government spending on education, housing, health care, and infrastructure, meanwhile increasing the militarization and policing of those communities of color left to fend for themselves in urban areas. This program represented an attempt by capital to regain higher levels of profitability while simultaneously demobilizing the social movements that had secured important gains for the American working class in previous decades.

Jeff Chang has gone some lengths to help explain this process, particularly how it affected hip-hop's birthplace in the South Bronx. The following is quoted from his important book, Can't Stop, Won't Stop [1]:

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"In 1953, the future of the Bronx could be seen along the seven-mile man-made trench cutting through it. Once an unbroken continuum of cohesive, diverse communities, the trench was now the clearing for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a modernist catastrophe of massive proportions.

As the gray concrete slab plowed from the east into the South Bronx toward Manhattan, it left behind a wake of environmental violence. ‘(W)here once apartment buildings or private homes had stood were now hills of rubble, decorated with ripped-open bags of rotting garbage that had been flung atop them,’ the historian Robert Caro wrote. ‘Over the rumble of the bulldozers came the staccato, machine-gun-like banging of jackhammers and, occasionally, the dull concussion of an exploding dynamite charge.’ These were the sounds of progress.

Forward in the Expressway’s path, the Irish and Jewish families that had once occupied well-appointed, if not plush, lower-middle-class apartments had been given months to relocate, with a paltry $200-per-room as compensation. In the meantime, as they struggled to find new quarters in a city with few vacancies, they huddled in heatless, condemned buildings. The man responsible for all of this was named Moses. Robert Moses, the most powerful modern urban builder of all time, led the white exodus out of the Bronx.

It began with a master plan designed in 1929 by the New York Regional Plan Association. The business interests behind the master plan wanted to transform Manhattan into a center of wealth, connected directly to the suburbs through an encircling network of highways carved through the heart of neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Buoyed by a post-World War II surge of government investment, Moses rose to unparalleled power. He saw his immortality fixed in the roads; they were monuments to a brutal kind of efficiency. The Cross-Bronx Expressway would allow people to traverse the Bronx from the suburbs of New Jersey through upper Manhattan to the suburbs of Queens in fifteen minutes.

In engineering terms, it was the most difficult road ever built. Caro wrote, ‘The path of the great road lay across 113 streets, avenues, and boulevards; sewers and water and utility mains numbering in the hundreds; one subway and three railroads; five elevated rapid transit lines, and seven other expressways or parkways, some of which were being built by Moses simultaneously.’ More important, 60,000 Bronx residents were caught in the crosshairs of the Expressway. Moses would bulldoze right over them. ‘There are more people in the way—that’s all’, he would say, as if lives were just another mathematical problem to be solved. ‘There’s very little real hardship in the thing.’

In Manhattan’s ghettos, using ‘urban renewal’ rights of clearance to condemn entire neighborhoods, he scared off thriving businesses and uprooted poor African-American, Puerto Rican, and Jewish families. Many had no choice but to come to the places like east Brooklyn and the South Bronx, where public housing was booming but jobs had already fled. Moses’s point, one of his associates said, was that ‘if you cannot do something that is really substantial, it is not worth doing.’

In his grand ambitions, high modernism met maximum density. Vast housing complexes were designed on the idyllic-sounding ‘tower-in-a-park’ model, a concept that had been advanced by the modernist architect Le Corbusier as part of his vision of a ‘Radiant City.’ Bronx River Houses and Millbrook Houses opened with 1,200 units each, Bronxdale Houses with over 1,500 units and Patterson Houses with over 1,700 units.

To Moses, the ‘tower-in-a-park’ model was a blackboard equation that neatly solved thorny problems—open space in the urban grid, housing for the displaced poor—with a tidy cost-efficiency. It also happened to support the goals of ‘slum clearance,’ business redevelopment, and the decimation of the tenants’ union movement.[2] So in the New York area’s construction explosion of the 1950s and ‘60s, middle-class whites got sprawling, prefab, white picket-fence, whites-only Levittown suburbs, while working-class strugglers and strivers got nine or more monotonous slabs of housing rising out of isolating, desolate, soon-to-be crime-ridden ‘parks.’

By the end of the decade, half of the whites were gone from the South Bronx. They moved north to the wide-open spaces of Westchester County or the northeastern reaches of Bronx County. They followed Moses’s Cross-Bronx and Bruckner Expressways to the promise of ownership in one of the 15,000 new apartments in Moses’s Co-op City. They moved out to the cookie-cutter suburbs that sprouted along the highways in New Jersey and Queens and Long Island. Traversing the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Marshall Berman would write, ‘we fight back the tears and step on the gas.’[3]

White elite retrenchment found a violent counterpart in the browning streets. When African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino families moved into formerly Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods, white youth gangs preyed on the new arrivals in schoolyard beatdowns and running street battles.[4] The Black and brown youths formed gangs, first in self-defense, then sometimes for power, sometimes for kicks.

Political organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords competed with these neighborhood gangs for the hearts and minds of those youths for a time, but they soon invited constant, sometimes fatal pressure from the authorities. The optimism of the civil rights movement and the conviction of the Black and Brown Power movements gave way to a defocused rage and a long exhaustion. Militants turned their guns on themselves. Curtis Mayfield, who had once sung ‘Keep on Pushing’ for Martin Luther King Jr. and other freedom archers, now warned of the ‘Pusherman.’ Heroin dealers, junky thieves and contract arsonists filled the streets like vultures. One Bronx cop waxed philosophical: ‘We are creating here what the Romans created in Rome.’[5]

One official told author Jill Jonnes, ‘The idea always was to bypass Manhattan with the ugliness as much as possible. You had public housing and highways in the South Bronx, and then, on top of both of those, which were destabilizing enough, you added a deliberate program of slum clearance to displace the worst. You were then at the point that it all started to go downhill.’[6]

Bad Numbers
Here was the new math: the South Bronx had lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs; 40 percent of the sector disappeared. By the mid-seventies, average per capita income dropped to $2,430, just half of the New York City average and 40 percent of the nationwide average. The official youth unemployment rate hit 60 percent. Youth advocates said that in some neighborhoods the true number was closer to 80 percent.[7] If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

When the sound of automobiles replaced the sound of jackhammers on the length of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the fuel was in place for the Bronx to burn.

Apartment buildings passed into the hands of slumlords, who soon figured out that they could make more money by refusing to provide heat and water to the tenants, withholding property taxes from the city, and finally destroying the buildings for insurance money. As one fireman described the cycle: ‘It starts with fires in the vacant apartments. Before you know it, it’s the whole wing in the building.”

The downward spiral created its own economy. Slumlords hired rent-a-thugs to burn the buildings down for as little as fifty dollars a job, collecting up to $150,000 on insurance policies.[8] Insurance companies profited from the arrangement by selling more policies. Even on vacant buildings, fire paid. Groups of organized thieves, some of them strung out on heroin, plundered the burned buildings for valuable copper pipers, fixtures, and hardware.

A fireman said, ‘Every fire in a vacant building had to be arson. No one lives there, and yet when we pull up, the fire’s out thirty windows.’ He continued, ‘People move out. The landlord starts to cut back on his maintenance. When he stops making the profit, more and more apartments become vacant…and, before you know it, you have a block with no one living there.’[9]

Journalists Joe Conason and Jack Newfield investigated arson patterns in New York City for two-and-a-half years and found that insurance agents made commissions based on the number and dollar amount of policies they sold. ‘There is simply no incentive for banks, insurance companies, or anyone else with money to invest in building or rebuilding dwellings at reasonable rents,’ they wrote. ‘In housing, the final stage of capitalism is arson.’[10]

But some argued that the South Bronx presented indisputable proof that poor Blacks and Latinos were not interested in improving there lives. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York’s Democratic senator, was heard to say, ‘People in the South Bronx don’t want housing or they wouldn’t burn it down.’[11] In 1970, he had written an influential memo to President Richard Nixon, citing Rand Corporation data on fires in the South Bronx and bemoaning the rise of radicals like the Black Panthers. ‘The time may have come,’ he famously wrote, ‘when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.’

Moynihan would later complain that he was misunderstood, that the memo should never have been leaked to the press, that he never meant to suggest services should be withdrawn from Black communities. But whatever his intention, President Nixon had penciled ‘I agree!’ on the memo and forwarded it to his Cabinet.[12] When it became public, ‘benign neglect’ became a rallying cry to justify reductions in social services to the inner cities, further fuel for the backlash against racial justice and social equality.

When ‘benign neglect’ was inflated into pseudo-science, the results were literally explosive. Armed with unsound data and models from the Rand Corporation, city politicians applied a mathematics of destruction to justify the removal of no less than seven fire companies from the Bronx after 1968.[13] During the mid-1970s budget crisis, thousands more firefighters and fire marshals were laid off. As the ecologists Deborah and Rodrick Wallace would put it, the result was a ‘contagion’ of fires.

Less than a decade later, the South Bronx had lost 43,000 housing units, the equivalent of four square blocks a week. Thousands of vacant lots and abandoned buildings littered the borough. Between 1973 and 1977, 30,000 fires were set in the South Bronx alone. In 1975, on one long hot day in June, forty fires were set in a three-hour period. These were not the fires of purifying rage that had ignited Watts or a half dozen other cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These were the fires of abandonment.

1977
Not just another summer. The bottom point of the loop between Malcolm X’s assassination and Public Enemy’s call to arms. The year of the snake. A time of intrigue and uprisings, coups and riots.

After dark on July 13, as if an invisible hand was snuffing them, the streetlights blew out. The city had plunged into a blackout. Looters took to the streets in the ghettos of Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Harlem and the Bronx. At Ace Pontiac on Jerome Avenue, fifty brand new cars were driven out of the showroom. On the Grand Concourse, shopkeepers armed themselves with guns and rifles, but for the next thirty-six hours most would be helpless against the rushing tide of retribution and redistribution.

‘That particular night, one thing I noticed,’ a resident would later say, ‘they were not hurting each other. They weren’t fighting with each other. They weren’t killing each other.’[14]

‘It was an opportunity for us to rid our community of all the people who were exploiting us,’ graffiti writer James TOP told historian Ivor Miller. ‘The things that were done that day and a half were telling the government that you have a real problem with the people in the inner cities.’[15]

A thousand fires were set. Prisoners at the Bronx House of Detention blazed up three dormitories. Hundreds of stores were cleaned out….

The Wasteland
Here was the unreconstructed South—the South Bronx, a spectacular set of ruins, a mythical wasteland, an infectious disease, and, as Robert Jensen observed, ‘a condition of poverty and social collapse, more than a geographical place.’ Through the 1960s, the Bronx’s prefix was merely descriptive of the borough’s southernmost neighborhoods, like Mott Haven and Longwood. But now most of New York City north of 110th Street was reimagined as a new kind of ‘South,’ a global south just a subway ride away. Even Mother Teresa, patron saint of the world’s poor, made an unannounced pilgrimage.

The mayor’s office rushed out a report entitled The South Bronx: A Plan for Revitalization. ‘The most damaging indicators cannot be measured in numbers,’ the report concluded. ‘They include the feat that prevails among many business people in the South Bronx over the future of the neighborhood, concern over the security and safety of investments; the waning faith and sense of hopelessness that induces many of them to give up and flee to other areas.’[16]

Edward Logue, an urban renewal official recruited to work in New York City after leveling some of Boston’s historic neighborhoods, spun it differently for a reporter: ‘In a marvelous, sad way, the South Bronx is an enormous success story. Over 750,000 people have left in the past twenty years for middle-class success in the suburbs.’[17]

But other wonks were less disingenuous. Professor George Sternlieb, the director of the Center of Urban Policy at Rutgers University, said, ‘The world can operate very well without the South Bronx. There’s very little in it that anyone cares for, that can’t be replicated elsewhere. I have a science-fiction vision of coming into the central city in an armored car.’[18]

One Mayoral official, Roger Starr, following the Rand Corporate and Senator Moynihan, articulated an end-game policy of ‘planned shrinkage’ in which health, fire, police, sanitation, and transit services would be removed form the inner-cities until all the people that remained had to leave, too—or be left behind.[19] Already, schools had been closed and abandoned, after first being starved of arts and music programs, then of basic educational necessities…

It was 1977. A new arrow of history was taking flight…in their own way, the new generation—to whom so much had been given, from whom so much was being stolen, for whom so little would be promised—would not settle for the things previous generations had been willing to settle for. Concede them a demand and they would demand more. Give them an apocalypse, and they would dance."

Notes
[1] Jeff Chang, Can't Stop, Won't Stop (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), 10-19.
[2] Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 257, 267-273.
[3] Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 291.
[4] Paul Cowan, "On a Very Tense Frontier: Street-Fighting in the Bronx," Village Voice (June 22, 1972), 1, 16, 18, 20, 22.
[5] Policeman Anthony Bouza, "The Fire Next Door," CBS Reports, broadcast March 22, 1977.
[6] Jill Jonnes, "We're Still Here": The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of the South Bronx (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 125-126.
[7] Amalia Batanzos, Youth Services Agency Commissioners, said, "In the South Bronx, the young male Puerto Rican unemployment rate is 80 percent. He sees that there's no way out and if there's no way out, it really does not matter if you're violent." New York Illustrated: The Savage Skulls with Piri Thomas," produced and directed by Abigail Child, WNBC Community Affairs Program (New York), aired November 18, 1973.
[8] Joseph B. Treaster, "20% Rise in Fires Is Adding to Decline of South Bronx," New York Times (May 18, 1975), 1, 50.
[9] CBS Reports, "The Fire Next Door."
[10] Joe Conason and Jack Newfield, "The Men Who Are Burning New York," Village Voice (June 2, 1980), 1, 15-19. Jack Newfield, "A Budget for Bankers and Arsonists," Village Voice (June 2, 1980), 13.
[11] H. Rainie, "U.S. Housing Program in South Bronx Called a Waste by Moynihan," New York Daily News (December 20, 1978), 3.
[12] Geoffrey Hodgson, The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 157-158.
[13] Deborah and Rodrick Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses (New York: Verso Books, 1998), 22-77.
[14] Lessie Sanders, quoted in Devastation/Resurrection; The South Bronx (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1980), 64. Robert Jensen, project curator.
[15] Ivor L. Miller, Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 187-188.
[16] The South Bronx: A Plan for Revitalization (December 1977), 8. Report prepared by the Office of the Mayor, Office of the Bronx Borough President, Department of City Planning, Office of Economic Development, Office of Management and Budget, Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
[17] "The Ups and Downs of the South Bronx," National Journal (October 6, 1979), 1648.
[18] Martin Tolchin, "Future Looks Bleak for South Bronx," New York Times (January 18,1973), sec. A1, A50.
[19] Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London: Verso, 1993), vii-viii. Wallace and Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses, 24-26. A decade later, Starr would apply the same logic to welfare and lead the neoconservative push toward "welfare reform" in the 90s.

When even economists can't figure it out, hip-hop execs and artists think they can.

I just read this piece from the L.A. Times and I couldn't help but write a response.

Earlier this Fall, the Hip-Hop Summit featured the likes of Russell Simmons, Ludacris, and Yung Joc, among others, who "gave advice" to nearly 2,000 people who gathered to hear about home buying "opportunities." I guess this shouldn't be too surprising since the so-called experts can't understand the reasons for the current economic recession.

After reading the article, I don't know if I'm more pissed about these cats telling us to "get our money right," like this is a question of intelligence, or by the fact that they are actively encouraging people to buy homes now, completely ignorant of the larger picture.

All this does for me is throw light on the antagonistic divide between these folks and us. And even though, in the grand scheme, they are small potatoes when it comes to the real financial elite, their place indicates their divorce from the actual conditions of life as workers face it. They have no appreciation for the fact that working folks and people of color have been getting their asses kicked by the State and ruling elite (and without much of a fight) for the past 35 years in terms of declining wages, rising unemployment, outsourcing, militarization of cities, decay of public infrastructure from schools to hospitals to public transit, and the intensification and standardization of labor, etc.

Now y'all wanna sit there and tell us to get our money right? What the fuck?! We have been buying homes, but with the variable interests rates (which we're damn near forced to accept if we want a home) and with no increase in the value of our labor-power, we wind up foreclosing after the first couple of years! AND, you got speculators who are actually making money off of working people foreclosing on their homes through the collapse of certain lending institutions which precipitated the current crisis to begin with. Once this began to implicate the financial elite in general, the State steps in to save them by nationalizing key institutions. This wasn't enough though, so congress quickly writes up a bill where the working class will pick up the tab by nearly a trillion dollars that could be used to build homes and infrastructure, but is instead handed over to the same motherfuckers that got us here.

Instead of acting oblivious to this reality and giving, at best, irrelevant advice, why aren't they encouraging working people, like David Banner has been doing, to form mass organizations to fight for power? At times like these, such organizations are critically needed. But some of these people aren't able to see past their own fortune and into the struggles of common people. It doesn't matter where the fuck they are from. Like Rakim said, it's where you at.