The Hip Hop Anthropologist

Sistas claiming to be conscious first need to lose 8' long cadaver or Brazilian wigs, which is a pathetic ode to Eurocentric standards of beauty that diminishes their advocacy, self-respect, and agency while affirming their subservience. Black women futilely trying to look like white women while playing lip service to liberation, espousing self-determination tongue-in-cheek, is the textbook definition of cognitive dissonance. It is jarring. They cannot be taken seriously because I cannot get past their $1,000 sewn-in, dead girl, weaves or synthetic wigs to actually hear what they have to say. The voluminous horse-like manes get in the way of any substantive conversation.

I think most of us old "revolutionaries" are still around in various iterations (if not dead or rotting away long forgotten in some remote prison); mainly in the academe where we're relatively safe from reprisal. We're still writing, agitating, acting as agents of change while "educating" the younger generation interested in learning about the "struggle for self-determination." We used to have a remarkable "rap session" in Detroit that I miss desperately. It was comprised of both young and  old, college-educated and under-educated, law enforcement and ex-cons, gay and straight, dreadlock and "baldhead." But everyone was conscious. We'd smoke a little weed, drink a little beer, liquor, or consume nothing at all. But the information conveyed by those elders with often a memorably humorous delivery was invaluable... Now many younger brothers in their twenties and thirties are too "hypersensitive" to talk to or exchan...