All Day Like Harry Belafonte?

The world would be a lot simpler if people would focus on their specialties. Actor Harry Belafonte has a laudable history of civil rights activism. At the BET Awards he attempted to preserve this legacy by delivering a politically inflected speech amidst a celebration of achievement. Unfortunately, aside from being cloaked in the rhetoric of victimhood, this anachronistic call to action did little more than ruin the mood of the evening.

After watching the BET Awards, I smiled and took solace in the fact that regardless of how anyone feels about the state of hip hop (including me), it's not going anywhere. For all my personal frustrations with today's wack artists, aside from welfare reform, hip hop may be the best thing to happen to Americans of color since the Civil Rights Act. Obviously the industry's growth and transformation hasn't come without its costs, the most significant of which is the immeasurable cost of dignity. Let's hope that as the industry continues to evolve it can regain the cross-cultural respect both hip hop and black entertainment overall, once commanded.

Stallworths like Belafonte are testaments to the eloquence and excellence that black entertainment once embodied. However, in spite of the tremendous respect and admiration we all should have for the entertainer-activist, the political stagnation, redunancy, and lack of clarity implicit in his speech has me wondering if it might be time for him to pass the torch. Am I the only person who wonders what he means by statements like "the enemy is still out there"? Obviously he's not talking about Al Queda. Then there was the reminder that we are victims of the system. Who the heck in that audience can still be considered a victim? Jay Z grew up in the hood but he's a millionaire now. Beyonce was solidly middle class, although her affinity for thugs might lead you to believe otherwise. And the way Chris Brown smiles leads me to think he might be a victim of lockjaw, but nothing else. I think you see my point. You can't be blinging yet be considered a victim of the system by any stretch of the imagination. Taking Belafonte's statement at face value would imply that victimization is a permanent facet of black existence. Thanks to the determination of earlier generations of blacks, we have it better than ever before. To argue otherwise would be silly, and a form of historical dementia.

Obviously I'm not suggesting we live in the Promised Land. But Belafonte's speech was characteristic of the "race is destiny" mindset, which places whites as eternally depraved oppressors and blacks as perennial victims. This arouses the historical imagery of the pain and suffering our ancestors endured, which often causes us to replace rational thought with emotionally-driven reactions. The minute Belafonte said "we are the victims", it was as if a switch went on that produced a robotic applause among us. This emotionally induced reaction is part of the reason Hillary Clinton can walk into Harlem thinking she can ensnare the black vote by saying "the Republicans are running Congress like a Plantation!" (I didn't realize Hillary knew anything about plantation life) But when roughly 90% of black people vote Democrat there's no need to offer any meaningful solutions to the problems the black poor and working classes face.

A friend once told me that racism will never die because there are too many people who profit off of its existence. Well, that's capitalism for you. Some sociologists may not have a job if racism wasn't around. Much of what they conclude after tons of research is common sense. (Such as the fact that people are less likely to be racist if they are exposed to people of different races...DUH! Did you really need to produce a 300-page book to substantiate this?) While it's obvious that racism is far from dead, I have trouble believing that because some Whites suffer from subconscious racism, this has the same socially repressive effect as KKK cross-burning and lynching.

People on the lookout for racism will act as if it's 1910 when they hear ignorant comments. This is called confirmation bias. I prefer to laugh them off, unless they have the ability to do serious harm. An in-depth reading of black history reveals that few TRUE leaders were ever concerned with whether whites thought they were competent. They just wanted the opportunity to prove their competence. Even Aaron McGruder- the spokesman for Angry Black Men From the Suburbs Inc.- once said "we care too much about what white people think of us." If it so happens that a few whites resent black success, and this includes the success of black entertainment and hip hop, that probably means black people are advancing. Racism and resentment are not one in the same.

Belafonte' speech represents a mindset that was appropriate 40 years ago, but is out of touch with present-day reality. It's a shame so much race scholarship is politically motivated. It's also a shame that many members of the civil rights establishment can't see beyond race, when Dr. King's agenda after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was focused on poverty and war. Holding on to victimhood status does little aside from reinforcing the artificially imposed psychological stumbling block of racial stigma. So when Belafonte implicitly defines black as victim, he may think he's helping us but he's not.

http://cantbeboxedin.blogspot.com/

Hip Hop Iconoclast is a 23-year-old male, American-born son of Black Jamaican parents, raised in an urban, residential, predominantly 1st generation, working-middle class neighborhood of Queens, NYC