The Hip Hop Anthropologist

The unions voted overwhelmingly for this nut. Don't believe the hype or what their leadership is saying. You can hear the hollow echo of their paid endorsements bouncing off the walls of deserted factories across the rust belt, but the membership, the actual men and women with dirt under their fingernails and bills in their hands, they pulled the lever for him anyway. It’s a spectacular, nauseating display of manufactured consent masking genuine, deep-seated economic anxiety that was cynically exploited and then thoroughly betrayed. The leadership puts out statements about job protection and collective bargaining, yet their collective endorsement was nothing more than political stagecraft, a rubber stamp on a strategy of self-destruction. The rank and file fell for the spectacle, the bombast, the sheer, theatrical lie of the strongman act, and now the entire working class is left holding the empty bag, wondering where the hell the promised boom went. The man never built anything. T...

  I used to think social anxiety was a private wiring, something that lived inside a person and only occasionally flared in crowded rooms. Then I began to watch people I know—friends, younger cousins, former students—change shape under the pressure of life lived online. Their stories are not clinical case notes but small, living proofs of how connectivity can manufacture isolation. Miriam: The Curated Self Miriam built a life in public. Her feed was meticulous: staged mornings, witty captions, carefully edited triumphs. Off‑camera she was frayed. I remember sitting across from her at a café as she scrolled through her own hour‑old post and counted likes with the intensity of someone auditing their pulse. She described conversations that never happened because she had rehearsed them for an audience instead of a single listener. Her anxiety came from the mismatch between an exhausting, performative visibility and the quiet absence of true intimacy. She was visible to thousands and al...

I was making supper. While standing in the kitchen I mused about how the only freight forwarder who had responded to my shipping order says his American partner told him they do not handle "household goods" and "personal effects." I spent an awful lot of time in trucking to finance my work, education and research. 'Dey a lie...' immediately came to mind because even according to the overlapping national and international laws and treaties that govern shipping, household goods are not treated any more or less the value than the owner declared. In short, it ain't that deep. A rebuke of the energy trying to hinder me from packing up this apartment. Now like most Black folks and all educated ones, I speak colloquial English typically. But "code switch" back into the more comfortable Black English when among close acquaintances or perhaps family. I cannot ever recall using that exact phrase - ever. But I clearly recognized it having a Creole root. W...

There has and will always remain an entrenched racist segment of the country, a bitter residue that will linger long after we emerge from whatever new configuration defines us following the current civil conflict. Yet, to distill the failure of the last election down to merely "racism" or the suitability of the candidates like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden is a profound, self-indulgent lie perpetuated by a segment of the Democratic base—the so-called silly ass liberals. They cling to this comforting narrative because it absolves them of the need for difficult action, allowing them to remain comfortably nestled within a failed political structure. The bitter, unvarnished truth, which they willfully ignore, is that the election was allegedly rigged, lock, stock, and barrel. By the brain-dead comic carnival barker, aka Klueless the Klown's own admission, and in light of the highly suspicious involvement of figures like Elon Musk, the evidence points to a massive operation to li...

The bane of my existence is Black folks who want to play by rules that were not either meant or written for them because they have personally benefited by their duplicity, not because they hold deeply held convictions about ethics, morality, the rule of law, or fair play. Working in Corporate Anywhere is a disputation of one's own values. Rationalizing it by saying, it is not how I act in my personal life is further evidence of this caustic erosion. So bragging rights because you may never have been arrested, seen the inside of a police car, station or court is meaningless if you approved the denial of a meritorious health claim, auto loan or mortgage, occupational licensure, rent application, job, admissions or financial aid application because "those are the rules." Congratulations. You played yourself. And you are an active participant in the oppression of your own people; your moral relativity is not merely hypocritical but a betrayal of universal laws—norms and mores...

 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sean-combs-prison-sentence-personal-letter-1235439918/ How much time is Sean Combs going to be sentenced to? No less than five years, but probably eight. No one in the history of the U.S. has gotten more time for being so stupid. He wanted to play a thug in real life, threatening rivals, intimidating competitors, assaulting enemies, and beating up girls. He had every opportunity to straighten up and fly right. But from his time with Jennifer Lopez shooting up a club—that one of his flunkies took the fall for—this mfer has been a nightmare. I mean the sheer, unmitigated hubris to think that nobody is watching a wealthy, high-profile cat like this, f***ing boys and girls, wrecking shop and careers, and then expect to get away with that sh** by turning himself in. He had to suspect those white folks were going to dig in that ass. If he didn't, he's stupider than I thought. Bottom line is, if he had any sense, that mfer should have tak...