And I'm done with ASAP Rocky.
Is he an activist or a scholar? Does he have documented and quantitative expertise on the matter? No. But neither do *I* or 99% of people with an opinion about it. Neither did Dr. King or Harry Belafonte or Jim Brown or Muhammad Ali.
I get it. He's a 1% now fukking white women and hanging out at fashion shows. But Blackness is beyond that.
Me? I spent approximately 3 years in the hood before my father enlisted in the Army. My parents are married and have been for 33 years. I grew up middle class, often times in mixed race or majority white neighborhoods. I have a degree (which puts me in the roughly in the 19% of Black males 25 and older who have degrees) and I have never been arrested. I have only one traffic citation.
What I'm getting at is my life to this point has been significantly different from that of Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Trayvon, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, and a plethora of others. The only obvious factor we all had in common is that we were all Black.
And thats enough. Its enough to be killed over. Enslaved over. Treated subhuman over.
Blackness is inescapable. If someone asked me what being Black meant, id define it by saying its both beautiful and tragic. Beautiful because i can't imagine living life without the awareness and pride and "soulfulness" being Black is. Tragic because the remnants of something so ugly, so long ago still reverberate in destructive ways EVEN TODAY.
What really bothers me about what Rocky said is, sure he's not in the hood living under AS brutal of circumstances (because whether he knows it or not he is living under White Supremacy even as a millionaire entertainer)...I know many of his friends and family still are. Is he so out of touch that their suffering, the same suffering he endured for around 20 years, is a distant memory?
What also really bothers me is that Rocky isn't the only who feels like this. Every now and again I've held ALOT of spite for the current crop of rappers who are "my generation" (for ex: drake, Wale, Big Sean, Migos, Young Thug, Lil Wayne, etc.).
How they had the nerve to ONLY make songs about opulence in the midst of the biggest depression the Black Community has seen in modern world is appalling. But thats where we're at huh.