Posted on 10/28/2003 1:41:12 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
I guess I'm obligated to be offended by this new board game. After all, Al Sharpton says I should.
And not just Rev. Al, either. Many other people -- including NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and radio host Tom Joyner -- have pronounced themselves offended by the game. Not that I blame them.
It's called Ghettopoly, a take-off on Parker Bros. venerable Monopoly. Except that this game isn't about moving a car or a top hat around the board, buying properties and landing on Boardwalk after somebody has put up a hotel.
In Ghettopoly, your token might be a crack rock, a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor or a basketball, and your goal is to build crack houses while pimping ''hos'' and getting carjacked. The game reportedly features an image of Martin Luther King scratching the front of his pants and proclaiming, ``I have an itch.''
So, no, you won't find ''Ghettopoly'' under my Christmas tree. Nor does it break my heart that retailers have been pressured into removing it from their shelves or that Hasbro, which owns Parker Bros., last week filed suit against the game's creator, David Chang of St. Marys, Pa.
For all that, though, I am not angry at Chang, who seems more misguided than malicious.
15 YEARS LATE
To the contrary, it's the campaign against him that gets my dander up -- not because it's wrong, but because it's about 15 years late. I keep wondering where all this fury was when rappers like 50 Cent, Nelly, Ja Rule and Snoop Dogg first started pimping, drug-dealing and drive-by shooting all over the video channels.
Where were the boycotters when these people and others were creating the template that Chang drew from? Where was the moral indignation when African-American people were reducing African-American life to caricature?
Or is it just easier to raise rage against Chang because he is not black?
With a few isolated exceptions -- activist C. Delores Tucker, the Rev. Calvin Butts -- African Americans have been conspicuously silent as black music, once the joy and strength of black people, has detoured into an open sewer of so-called ``hard-core rap.''
The vast majority of that genre's practitioners are nothing more and nothing less than modern-day Uncle Toms, selling out African-American dreams by peddling a cartoon of African-American life unencumbered by values. It is a cynical, knowing act, promulgated by young men and women who get rich by selling lies of authenticity to young people, white and black, who are looking for lessons in blackness. They are as much minstrels and peddlers of stereotype as Stepin Fetchit, Bert Williams or any black performer who ever smeared black goop on his face or shuffled onstage beneath a battered top hat.
The only difference -- the only one -- is that Bert Williams and Stepin Fetchit had no other choice.
My personal theory is that black people of my generation -- I'm 46 -- have resisted speaking forcefully against this because, like all baby boomers, we are deathly afraid of appearing less than hip. But as I recall, our parents never worried about that. They understood their role to be not hipness, but guidance.
THE FRUIT OF FAILURE
I am of a generation that has largely failed that role, that turned ''judgment'' into a four-letter word. The fruit of that failure lies before us: an era of a historical young people who traffic in stereotypes that would not be out of place in a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
And I'm supposed to be angry at David Chang? I'm not. He's just a good capitalist, just regurgitating what he has been taught in hopes of turning a buck. My anger is not for the student, but for his teachers. And not just my anger, but my sorrow, too.
I'm not losing sleep worrying about what David Chang thinks of black people. I'm more concerned with what black people think of themselves.
The Loaded Weapon sneaker is among the latest shoes to hit the Converse conveyor belt. And the new game Ghettopoly, a take on the classic board game Monopoly, features "playas" who vie for stolen property and crack.
All three speak to a growing fascination with hip-hop and its portrayal of urban black America. The products have also ignited protests and boycotts nationwide, highlighting a division in the African-American community over what's an appropriate representation of the black experience.
It is part of a larger cultural war among blacks, fought largely along class and generational lines.
"The traditional civil rights model included a kind of politics of respectability, putting the best face of the African-American community forward," says Imani Perry, a law professor at Rutgers University. "There is an absolute refusal in the hip-hop community to adhere to those ideals of respectability, in terms of what the public face of black people should be."***
It is part of a larger cultural war among blacks, fought largely along class and generational lines.
"The traditional civil rights model included a kind of politics of respectability, putting the best face of the African-American community forward," says Imani Perry, a law professor at Rutgers University. "There is an absolute refusal in the hip-hop community to adhere to those ideals of respectability, in terms of what the public face of black people should be."***
We had a motivational speaker here at the University of Memphis who pointed out that statisticly, it's more likely that a Black teenager will be convicted of a felony and sent to prison than to graduate from college.
I don't know that it's so, and haven't yet tried to track verification down, but if true, it wouldn't surprise me a bit.
-archy-/-
You probably have not heard of the proposed "Save the Black Man Project." I became aware of the proposal just a few days ago. It is the brainchild of Keith A. Clayborne, owner and publisher of the Broward Times, a weekly black newspaper in my hometown of Fort Lauderdale.
In his column, "Off the Vine," which appears on the front page, Clayborne has taken on the journalism fight of his life:
"Young black men have . . . bought into what apparently is a universal "dumbing down' syndrome where it's in style to be stupid -- with rap lyrics like "Where are my niggas at?' more memorable than their ABCs. Now, give or take a few token whites, our prison system is filled to capacity with young black men -- young men who will leave behind a trail of fatherless babies, single mothers and the untold carnage from the crimes they've committed.***Source
Aiding and abetting this situation are the guilt-ridden white liberal media elite who have elevated this aural graffiti to the status of "art".
The perils of designer tribalism [Except] ……….What Sandall describes as "the culture cult" dreams of a new simplicity: a mode of existence that is somehow less encumbered, less rent by conflicting obligations than life in a modern industrialized democracy. It is a vain endeavor. The romanticization of the primitive only emphasizes one's distance from its simplicities. Romanticism in all its forms is an autumnal, retrospective phenomenon: the more fervent it is, the more it underscores the loss it laments. "It is time," Sandall writes, "to stop dreaming about going back to the land or revisiting the social arrangements of the past." Miss Hutton's happy ejaculations were prompted by such dreams. What she heard among those Masai savages as they danced about and drank blood was Pascal Bruckner's "enchanting music of departure." But it is, alas, a departure to nowhere. As Sandall observes, life is about "ever-extending complexity." To deny that is to neglect the "Big Ditch" (Ernest Gellner's term) that separates the modern world from its primitive sources. On one side of the ditch is the rule of law, near universal literacy, modern technology, and the whole panoply of liberal democratic largess. On the other side is- what? "Most traditional cultures," Sandall writes, "feature domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints. If you want to live a full life and die in your bed, then civilization-not romantic ethnicity-deserves your thoughtful vote."
The Culture Cult is partly a brief for the Enlightenment values of universal culture and scientific rationality, partly an attack of the various atavisms that Sandall sees impeding the growth of those values. Its method is not systematic but exemplary. Sandall proceeds through a number of illustrative case studies. There are not many heroes in this book. One finds kind words for Ernest Gellner and for Karl Popper's book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the 1940s when Popper was in New Zealand. For the most part, however, The Culture Cult is a tour through an intellectual and moral rogues' gallery. There are suitably wry bits about anthropological fantasists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, anti-industrialist utopians like Robert Owen (founder of the New Harmony commune), and randy utopians like John Humphrey Noyes (founder of the Oneida Community). Sandall also devotes whole chapters to Isaiah Berlin and to the bizarre anti-free-market rantings of Karl Polanyi. It is useful to be reminded that Polanyi, writing in 1960, believed that "West Africa would lead the world" and that record-keeping with pebbles and rafia bags in eighteenth-century Dahomey rivaled the achievements of IBM.
Most of the figures Sandall deals with are familiar. Like Bruckner and many others before him, he singles out Rousseau and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder as the spiritual grandparents of romantic primitivism. Rousseau contributed the hothouse emotional sentimentality, Herder the völkisch celebration of cultural identity at the expense of assimilation and a recognition of universal humanity. (As the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observed, "from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire, human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity.")
Sandall's real target is the assumption-common coin among anthropologists-that "culture" is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In his book The Savage Mind-which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind-Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the "so-called primitive." (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: "our master and our brother," "of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.") One of Sandall's main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as "so-called" is really "well-called." Sandall does not mention William Henry's In Defense of Elitism (1994)-another unfairly neglected book-but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry's accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others-smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henry's quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive's compassion, "respect," and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: "The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job."
This is a truth that was broadly recognized at least through the 1950s. With the failure of colonialism, however, came a gigantic failure of nerve. (It might be said, in fact, that the failure of colonialism was a gigantic failure of nerve.) More and more, confusion replaced confidence, and with confusion came the pathologies of guilt.
Since the folly of locking up native peoples in their old-time cultures is obvious, but it is tactless to say so, governments have everywhere resorted to the rhetoric of "reconciliation." This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding.
But this assumption, Sandall emphasizes, "is false." And it was recognized as false by governments everywhere until quite recently. Around 1970, the big change set in. Then, instead of attempting to help primitives enter the modern world, we were enjoined to admire them and their (suitably idealized) way of life. As Sandall observes, "the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating."
If your traditonal way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is "rich," "complex," and "sophisticated," how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a "Gone Fishing" sign and head for the beach? I might do that myself. In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.
The statistics are grim. Between 1965 and 1975, Sandall reports, Aborigines arrived at one college with sixth-grade reading levels; in 1990, after primary education had been handed over to local Aboriginal communities, that had fallen to third grade. Today most Aborigines arrive at the college in question almost completely illiterate.
This social disaster was the result of specific political policies. But the policies themselves were the result of a moral attitude, one that many anthropologists have actively nurtured. In part, the attitude is a reflection of the Lévi-Straussian "non-hierarchical" view of culture: the view which denies that there are important distinctions to be made between la pensée sauvage and the mind, for example, of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In part, what we might call the "anthropological attitude" is a coefficient of the idea-also fostered by Lévi-Strauss, among many others-that culture is at bottom a "narrative," a product of "social construction." And the results of that development-corrosive skepticism, blasé nihilism, irresponsible relativism-have helped to place anthropology in the intellectual slum wherein it now molders. "For more than twenty years," Sandall writes, "anthropologists have written about constructing reality as if the world and everything in it were mere artifact, about building identity as if any old self-glamourizing fiction will do, about creating the past as an enterprise more exciting than history, about inventing tradition as if traditions were as changeable as store windows." "As if," indeed. Sandall is very good on all this, and I only wish that he had devoted more space to discussing the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is mentioned only in passing. He is one of the most influential and oleaginous proponents of the all-is-narrative, all-cultures-are-equal position now writing. He is a real postmodern culture-cultist who would have benefited-well, we would have benefited-from a closer look.
It is part of the ethos of designer tribalism to foist all of one's own attitudes and longings onto the apparently blank canvas of whatever primitive populace happens to be in vogue at the moment. To some extent, this is simply a matter of ignorance, as illustrated, for example, by Christopher Columbus's report that the people he discovered "are very gentle, and know nothing of evil." But the culture cultist supplements ignorance with heavy helpings of ideology and idealization. He looks at an exotic culture and, lo and behold, he finds himself looking into a flattering mirror. This is one reason that natives always seem to be non-smoking, vegetarian, sex-worshipping, drug-taking, eco-conscious, progressive-thinking pacifists-according, anyway, to the press releases distributed by the culture cultists. [End Excerpt]
A month and a half ago, I talked about PimpJuice. Some folks figure it's OK - since it's a black person exploiting other blacks.Par for the course for the Jackson-Sharpton cabal.
The double-standard continues.
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So much for a color blind society :)
Anyone hear of the book "Scam"? The author was on Hannity's radio program yesterday and I can not remember his name. That would be the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. His organization, BOND, can be found at http://www.bondinfo.org/. He's also a fellow member of Project 21.
Not to mention the lilly-white suburban teens who wanna be "down wit it."
As for the hip-hop, I like some of that stuff - including the hard-core stuff from NWA and Body Count (got a first edition of the "Body Count" CD). There are, IMHO, far worse problems than hi-hop music and Ghettopoly.A lot of the criticism of hip-hop sounds eerily like the stuff enshrined in the Rock Hall's "tribute" to rock and roll critics of the 1950s. They are just cashing in on an inherent desire among teens and some adults to annoy the "prudes".
It's working.
The "War on (some) Drugs" and the attempts by the welfare state promoters and associated demagogues to demonize achievement do far more damage to the black community than the "culture du jour" ever could.
-Eric
This will go well on the shelf with Colt .45 and Schlitz Malt Liquor as well as Olde English 800. It's funny that I never found these brands in the liquor stores in the suburbs.
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