It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation by M.K. Asante Jr Read Free Book Online Page A

way.
    Do you see yourself as being related to those Jewish ghettos of Europe?
    Of course. Take the Warsaw ghetto, as an example of institutional overcrowding, where Jews, who were 30 percent of the population, were forced to live in 2.4 percent of the city’s area—about ten people per room. Most apartments had no sanitation, piped water, or sewers. Starvation was rife.
    So, similarly, during my birth in America, Urban Renewal (which, behind closed doors, was called “nigger removal”) was all about systematically uprooting Blacks from sections of the city deemed “valuable,” then forcing them into projects. For every ten homes that they destroyed, they only built one new unit in the projects—institutional overcrowding.
    Many things are the same: the social isolation; the normalized terror by authorities; and state-sponsored racism, to name a few.
    And what about other ghettos around the world—do you see yourself as related to them?
    Of course. Every ghetto—from Soweto to L’île-Saint-Denis, from Brixton to Chiapas, from favelas to shantytowns—I am one with.
    Why?
    ’Cause oppression is oppression is oppression, man.
    Some people say that you’re a “state of mind”?
    Which people?
    Um —
    I say survival is a state of mind. That’s where soul comes from.
    And what’s soul?
    Soul is graceful survival against impossible circumstances.
    That’s heavy. All right now, can you talk about your roots as the Black American ghetto?
    Definitely.
    All right, so, 40 Acres & A Mule is not just the name of Spike Lee’s film company, it’s also the colloquial term for the reparations that were supposed to be issued to enslaved Africans after the Civil War—forty acres of farmland and a mule to cultivate that land. The official name was Special Field Orders, No. 15, and it was issued on January 16, 1865, by Maj. Gen. William Sherman.
    So what happened?
    Well, when President Abraham Lincoln was killed, Andrew Johnson, his replacement, revoked Sherman’s orders. The very few Blacks who had already received land had it quickly taken away.
    Abolishing slavery with no restitution is like opening the door to a prison cell, while leaving all other exits bolted, chained, and locked, and telling an inmate that “they are free.” The cell door, although perhaps the most confining, is but a multitude of forces that keeps the prisoner imprisoned.
    Anyway, without any restitution, Blacks were forced into a vicious cycle of sharecropping, also known as Slavery II, where they paid rent to white landowners from their yearly yield. This form of neoslavery also occurred later in South Africa and Zimbabwe where it was illegal for Blacks to own their own land. Sharecropping is a vicious cycle because, by the end of the year without fail, the sharecropper is alwaysin debt, meaning he can never free himself from the land. This, coupled with de-citizenizing Jim Crow laws, made it impossible for Blacks to own land in the South, binding them—through the law—in the shallow pits of poverty.
    That was in the South. What about in the North?
    Around the times I just mentioned, 1865–1876, Blacks comprised less than 5 percent of industrial northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, et cetera. Blacks in the North, because of racism and discrimination, weren’t allowed to work in factories or join unions, which reduced them to the lowest, dirtiest, grimiest, nastiest jobs—jobs no one else would do.
    Beginning around 1914, though, large numbers of Blacks started moving to industrial hubs like New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Maryland, Detroit, Chicago, et cetera.
    Because things were so bad in the South?
    It was
“so
bad” everywhere. But mainly because World War I, which began in 1914, called for a lot of unskilled factory workers. And you know when America needs weapons, they don’t care who makes ’em.
    Blacks kept coming North, looking for work, even after the war was over. During the twenties alone, over two