The Hip Hop Anthropologist

Many years ago, a close friend of mine with an MSW—a retired spokesperson for a social service agency in New York—shared with me her biographical experiences at a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in North Carolina, where she had secured employment shortly after relocating to be closer to her aging mother. Her move was motivated by family (her brother was also down there), but also by a desire to remain professionally engaged in a region that, at least on the surface, seemed to offer cultural familiarity and institutional alignment with her values. What she found, however, was a deeply entrenched system of tribalism—one that operated not through overt hostility, but through subtle codes of exclusion, status maintenance, and territorial behavior. I listened carefully to her account, not merely as a friend but as an astute student of both human and group dynamics. Her experience mirrored my own recent encounters at two separate HBCUs in Maryland (albeit years apart), where...

  We have been holding "space" in this country since before our forced immigration here over 400 hundred years ago. The generational trauma to our collective psyche has some of US identifying with our oppressor (Stockholme syndrome) in the vain hope that whitey will be less brutal, release some pressure from his size thirteen jackboot on our necks, while others take an opposite stance. I am personally done because my anger is not directed toward whitey for doing what they do to preserve their 200 year headstart. My angst is directed at deaf, dumb, and blind Black folk who refuse to rise up collectively to effectively push back against the oppression because they are "not all that racist," or "maybe tRump needs to come back," or "I had more money under tRump", or whatever other bizarre rationalizations they can conjure up in their pea brain for supporting a documented bigot. The fact of the matter is chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka ...