Damon Dash And John McWherter

[Blackwatch]

For those of you with HBO, Bob Costas has a talk show called "Off the Record" where he interviews various celebrities. He has interviewed Ice Cube and Ashanti earlier this season. About a week ago, he interviewed John McWherter, an African American professor of Linguistics at Cal-Berkeley (& author of Loosing the Race a book where he claims that African Americans are not acheiving academically because of a culture of anti-intellectualism in our homes) and Damon Dash (President of Roc-a-fella Records). During the interview, McWherter was critical of some of the images of hip-hop, saying that they were not representative of progresive humanity. Dash questioned McWherter's Blackness by stating that he (Dash) couldn't understand how a true black man could say something like that about hip-hop, unless he didn't understand hip-hop. Dash went on to say that hip-hop was the authentic voice of black america (He actually said that hip-hop was the true voice of Black America) and for a Black person to not "feel" hip-hop was showing that they were not in tune with black America.


Question, Why is it that we live in a culture where people are affraid to think critically? Instead of responding to Dr. McWherter's statements, he attacks him personally, a big flaw in any logical debate. Though I disagree with a great deal of Dr. McWherter's views, I think he has a point about anti-intellectualism. I think that when ever you hear some rapper talk about "hatin' " what they are really talking about is the fact that they do not want to defend their actions to a community of people that they are responsible to to nurture the art of hip-hop. They don't want the black community to become critcal about the images because the truth hurts. Someone in another thread talked about how we as black people are good at putting on a front for the outside, while still decaying on the inside. I think this is the case here. Also, I think that Dash didn't really have a plausible argument for questioning the blackness of Dr. McWherter. Maybe because we have ceased to train our young people in the art and science of debate and critical conversation. But, until we produce a generation of critical thinkers, critical of post-modern definitions of identity and meaning, critical of capitalistic norms and religious hegemony becoming synonymous (think about prosperity preaching and "Bling-Bling" materialism and note the similarities), and critical of the social order in general and white supremacy in particular, we will continue to see representations of blackness as synonymous with ignorance, hedonism, and nihilism.


What do you think?
Blackwatch!!!!!!