A Cracker from Ohio

As a teenager, my experiences with the war on drugs taught me that politics wasn’t just about voting. Politics is a struggle to control and define your life and the life of your community. That experience, moreover - the experience of daily politics - is different for everyone depending on how their race and class affects their access to power and privilege.

I suppose I could have told you that from a fairly early age. But at the age of nineteen, Dead Prez’s album Let’s Get Free brought the lesson home to me with a renewed urgency.

Never before had I experienced a musical world so full of political anger and passion. Nor had I ever felt so keenly that for some people, I as an individual was part of the white power structure: a cracker, in Dead Prez’s eyes. For these neo-Marxist activists, America split along both racial and class lines, and it seemed I was not on their side.

Who shot Biggie Smalls? If we don’t get them, they gon get us all/

I’m down for runnin up on them crackers in they city hall…

The word cracker, which they use frequently throughout the album and which seems sometimes to include all white people in its scope, was somewhat of a shock to my ears. For once, I was on the other end of a stereotype, trying to make out how I felt about it.

Now, for me cracker does not parallel the n-word in intensity or offensiveness. It’s not the first thing I’d choose to be called, but it doesn’t automatically drive me away from the conversation either. And I came to see why someone whose experiences in dealing with the white power structure had been entirely negative would choose a word like that to convey their emotions. So I listened to Dead Prez, obsessively, despite my discomfort with some of their language. And working through that discomfort turned out to be an invaluable stage in my political development.

Let me give an example to illustrate how different the perspective was from other inputs I was getting. That same year, I took a sociology class called “Race, Class, and Inequality” that took on some of the same themes, especially white privilege and male privilege. But somehow I didn’t connect with the class in the same way I connected with what Dead Prez said. It didn’t help that the white woman who taught the class, despite our difference in gender, came from basically the same educational, class, and status background that I did. So despite her efforts to “overturn assumptions,” her class challenged me on an intellectual, but not emotional or personal level. Reading Nickel and Dimed just wasn’t the same as listening to “They Schools.”

In contrast to the stale sociology of the classroom, Let’s Get Free laid out an entire political world view, from race to education to violence to food and exercise. Updating the message of the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, KRS-ONE, Public Enemy, and NWA, the album aggressively argues that black people are oppressed on all fronts by a corrupt, racist capitalist police state, and that revolutionary action is the proper response. In lyrics that are never timid or dumbed down, Dead Prez continually question the intersection of race, class, privilege, and power in a way that no class ever could.

I didn’t necessarily agree with their world view, but I couldn’t help but grapple with what my role might be in the system they described.

I guess a lot of white liberals/progressives/radicals have faced the question before, but at that time it hit me harder than ever: what does it mean to be against systems of racism when, in certain senses, I am a part of them? Does it even matter what views I have, given that my actions almost inevitably propagate the power structure? Through every step of my life, from brushes with the police to job interviews to loan applications, it is likely that my race and class will play to my advantage. Can I really claim solidarity with people who don’t have those advantages?

I would pose these questions somewhat differently five years later, but I still don’t think they have easy answers. I as a white middle-class male am implicated in systems that privilege me even if I don’t want them to. The normal course of my life, the path of least resistance, would carry me far from anything but superficial contact with other social classes, and even to a certain extent with other racial groups, if I allowed it to. True, I can seek out opportunities to engage with other communities through volunteering, community activism, or simply being open-minded and outgoing, but even in those situations it’s difficult to break out of what sometimes feels like a script we are all acting out. A good deal of segregation, both physical and psychological, still exists in our society, and you don’t need to live in Chicago or DC to know the truth of that. It’s pretty hard to break through some of the barriers.

I think listening to something like Dead Prez, though, can help us break out of those scripts. It matters, of course, whether you eventually take off the headphones and get up off the armchair or not. But in my case, I feel like all the listening and thinking I did eventually prepared me for entering the Chicago hip hop scene and working with people from many different backgrounds. Those experiences in turn prepared me for living in Senegal, where one of the strongest bonds between me and other people my own age, despite differences of race and privilege, was a shared love of hip hop. Having done some critical thinking about my own race prepares me to be more aware of my relationships with other people, from Dakar to DC. It helps me even in majority white, majority middle-class (and upper-class) environments like Georgetown, where I am now. It helps me remember that what may seem politically neutral to some, such as clothing choices, speech styles, and other markers of identity, may be profoundly charged symbols of political power and exclusion for others. Perhaps that’s even the greatest benefit of some soul-searching about identity - developing a different perspective on your own community.

Listening to Dead Prez also reinforced my understanding of street-level politics. As I said in the beginning, for a lot of people in this country, politics means struggling with the police for control of your community, struggling with the courts for the freedom of your young men, and struggling with landlords and bosses for your economic rights. Too often we equate politics with voting, but in reality voting is a small part of the political process. In many ways, politics is the struggle to define and control our lives and communities. The fact that for many white people, this struggle is more muted is a testament to the continued existence of white privilege and power.

This is not a plug for a particular album, though Let’s Get Free is excellent music. What I’m trying to say rather is that race and racial difference, and their political implications, still have the power to shock - and that privileged white people still need to feel that shock. It doesn’t have to be music that accomplishes that, though music by its nature is designed to provoke. The point is, amidst the furor of the supposed “identity politics” that some have claimed is going on in America right now, we need to remember that we still have a lot of thinking to do as a society about race, class, and power - and about how to bridge those divides. Race and politics is an issue that goes beyond legislation and campaigning to touch on how the fabric of society is woven, and how each of us participates in that process. More than many other issues, it brings us back to daily life and its problems, which is after all what politics tries to address. Those problems, challenges, opportunities endure whatever macro changes take place, good or bad.

And if I, a cracker from Ohio, can make some progress on these issues, then I have hope for others too.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Subscribe via RSS or Email  ::  Email This Post   ::  Leave a comment

Bookmark to: