The Hip Hop Anthropologist

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...

The sporadic protests by diverse coalitions of angry, disaffected young black folks, white progressives, liberals and others with a profound concern for an abysmal lack of fair play and injustice spurred by questionable killings of three unarmed black men, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice (who was certainly not a man but a pre-teen) over the last, past six months may sound the death knell for white supremacy in these United States. Utterly irrelevant, angry, aging, racist relics like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former New York State Governor George Pataki, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity as well as a host of less well known but equally influential white folks, (like the corrupt, racist judges who unlawfully took my child from me), prosecutors who refused to indict these killer cops, just to show there was enough probable cause in those deaths meriting a trial would have quelled these protests not by righting a demonstrable wrong but by letting a jury decide th...

                                                                            Us Black Folks                                                                         By Dennis Shipman    Unlike any other ethnic group or, more accurately, sub-group in the United States, upwardly mobile Black folks have been all too willing to sacrifice cultural affinity on the self-serving altar of rugged individualism than any other group on earth. Individualism is a concept that does not exist among any indigenous group found in Africa. Social scientists often argue, only to be cast as apologists for tribalism, that this phenomenon ...