Following the Civil Rights and the Black Power activity, the promise of increased political agency, better employment and education opportunities, as well as improved living conditions fell short of the expectations inspired by the introduction of related governmental policies. This is illustrated in a study by the Committee on the Status of Black Americans, published in 1989 by the National Academy of Sciences:
Since the mid-1970s, many signs of stagnation or even retrogression have appeared in some important measures of income, health, education, and conditions of black community and family life: increased poverty, a decrease in college enrolment of blacks, an increased proportion of households headed by poor single women, and continuing high unemployment of both men and women (Jaynes and Williams 45).
The report further suggests when addressing crime and gang-related violence that,
[I]n black communities, trafficking in drugs is a source of tremendous rivalry and conflict between competing sellers. The sale of drugs has become an available source of income for unemployed black youth and adults . . . (463).
A combination of these social problems and the impact of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs,35 which led to the increased policing and incarceration of members of black and Latino communities, as well as government cuts,36 heightened social tensions which resulted in explosive responses, exemplified by the LA riots. These developments are largely associated with the Reagan and George Bush Sr administrations. Thus, in the years which followed the high points of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the continuing combination of acute social and political tensions linked to unemployment and inadequate education opportunities to improve both these circumstances, as well as increasing economic inequality, continued to fracture African American communities. In addition, the impact of drug-related violence and crime resulted in the increased detention and the subsequent demonising of African American and Latino communities (Massood 2003: 150-51).
With these factors in mind, the tenets of the “American Dream,” which pledges that hard work begets an auspicious future, thereby suggesting individual accountability for failure to achieve or improve one’s social and political station, thus places the affected African American demographic in the frustrating position of being isolated – literally in the ghettos and figuratively – in the responsibility for the degradation that surrounds them and in the subsequent struggle to rise up from under it (Hill Collins 2006: 4-5). In other words, there was a reformulation in the conception of why the subject position of the African American body politic persisted. The subsumption in this way of the effects of entrenched racist systems which still contributed to denying African Americans equal opportunities in employment and education, and to fair practice in social sectors and consumer industries, compounded by the continued impact of poverty, defines what Patricia Hill Collins terms,
“new colorblind racism” (2006: 3). Impediments to African American socio-political upward mobility under this elusive brand of racism gave rise to the predominance of Afrocentrism, whose language and tone necessarily incorporated on one hand, black cultural nationalisms
35 For details of this governmental policy, see Shahid M. Shahidulah.
36 Cuts in subsidised housing, job training programs, compensatory education programs, school lunches, unemployment insurance, food stamps as well as budget and tax policies adopted since 1980, reduced the incomes of low and middle-income families, largely represented by African Americans, while increasing the middle-incomes of the higher earners.
and militaristic elements of Black Power, and on the other hand, for the conservatives, a Civil Rights era rhetoric which supported the meritocracy implied by the directives of the
“American Dream.” Thus, as Hill Collins argues, “. . . many African Americans no longer believe that racial integration,” as the “primary strategy pursued by the Civil Rights Movement . . . constitutes a realistic strategy for Black empowerment,” a view which, by the 1990s, was widely absorbed into popular culture through expressive vehicles like hip-hop (2006: 4-10).
The Afrocentric period of black consciousness in the US became more pronounced as the dominance and intensity of Black Power politics receded. Gaining prominence out of arguments for a more sustainable black nationalism which grew from emergent Africacentric cultural ideas in Black Power, Afrocentrism sought to foster a unique, black cultural identity for the purposes of self- and community empowerment, as endorsed by educators like Molefe Kete Asante, Amiri Baraka, and Maulana Karenga. This approach finds its roots in what Mayes terms, the “cultural Black Power” energised by Amiri Baraka’s “calls” in the mid-1960s for alternative holidays which empower and promote African American identities by celebrating – using distinct, African-based cultural practices – an African American heritage.
Mayes concludes by noting that “ . . . what [this] . . . underscored was the politicization of black culture . . . ” (sic) (230). Consequently, Karenga’s “Kwanzaa,” for example, fulfilled this ambition.
Kwanzaa marks a period at the end of the calendar year in which its practitioners gather together to celebrate in thanksgiving, and to collectively engage in series of events and spiritual observations that promote and strengthen a sense of community. The apportioned or fixed time of its occurrence and the spiritual observations that characterise the celebration, suggests that Kwanzaa amounts to elements of what Hill Collins terms the “civil religion” of Afrocentrism (2006: 85-94).37 As notable in the practical application of many Afrocentrist principles, Kwanzaa was developed from a process of editing a pre-existing traditional Zulu harvest festival to suit its African American audience and US American setting (Mayes 230).
“Maat,” which is intended as a guiding moral principle for African Americans, presents another example of the response to the desire for alternative cultural practices for shaping empowered African American communities (Karenga 3). On Maat and the reasons for his explorations into it, Karenga writes that
37 A discussion of this term will be taken up later in the chapter.
[in] addition to its primary purpose, this work is also part of an ongoing intellectual project of constantly dialoguing with African culture. By dialoguing with African culture, I mean constantly asking it questions and seeking from it answers to the fundamental concerns of humankind. Moreover, it is to continuously bring forth from this quest the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense, speak this special cultural truth to the world, and use it make a unique contribution to the forward flow of human history (409).
He states that “[this] project is essentially a project of moral philosophy . . . ” of which he writes that his interests lie “in extracting from the available texts a reliable portrait and understanding of ancient Egypt’s highest moral standards, its delineation of right and wrong, its definitive concepts of relational obligations and rules of conduct and other data which composed and informed the ancient Egyptian moral universe.” He sets out to do this with the purpose of “exploring the usefulness of Maatian ethical thought as a resource for modern moral discourse and philosophical reflection on critical moral issues” (3).
Molefi Kete Asante defines the Afrocentric philosophy as the fruit of intellectual and cultural critique of “an oppressive situation” for “Africans in America,” which places
“African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior” (2).38 Accordingly, Afrocentrism, which Hill Collins characterises as an “ethnic mobilization,”
insists on grounding critical reflections of the socio-political challenges faced by African Americans in language and contexts that oppose Eurocentric frames of reference (2006: 82).
In this way, it emphasises African American agency which is distanced from a Eurocentric perspective’s implicit negation of African American (and black) histories, culture and experiences. Discussing some of its qualities, Gilroy describes “Africentrism,” as a “heavily mytholigised Africanity . . . stamped by its origins not in Africa but in a variety of Pan-African ideology produced most recently by black America” (1993: 86-87). In affirmation, Hill Collins states that, “[by] seeing their connections with Africa and defining themselves as African people, the lost children of Africa who were enslaved in America can reclaim a Black consciousness and once again become centred in a true African personality” (2006:
88). She further argues:
Some see the resurgence of African American interest in Black nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s as a direct result of an increasingly conservative political climate in the United States, the deteriorating economic base in African American communities resulting from changes in global capitalism, and the persistence of an increasingly sophisticated racial segregation (2006: 96).
38 The philosophies incorporated into Afrocentrism can arguably be traced back to earlier black nationalist thinkers such as W.E.B Du Bois et al. and therefore includes a number of other noteworthy scholars and educators. See Barbara Ransby’s chapter in Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront African American Experience for a succinct rendering of these political actors.
Scholars like Austin posit that the rise to prominence of Afrocentrism is attributed to the necessity of combating the symptoms of societal decay (for example, drug and alcohol-related violence, poor or limited educational opportunities, increased incarcerations) experienced by African American communities in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
Additionally, elements within Afrocentrist camps promoted ideas that black poverty and other social problems were, amongst others, cultural – not political and economic – and were thus problems that required a cultural solution.
Calls for black solidarity in the face of continued white oppression insisted on the recognition of an African American identity shaped by African Americans themselves with a rhetoric that appeared to reject the idea of being “American” (which implied conforming to white America, as many increasingly believed the Civil Rights Movement was doing), in favour of the need to identify as “black”39 and re-identifying with Africa, though with strong emphases on cultural nationalist approaches.40 Hill Collins captures the logic behind these conceptions succinctly in the following:
As a step toward recovering their identity and subjectivity, Black people needed to undergo a conversion experience from “Negroes” to “Black.” “Negroes”
mesmerized by Whiteness could be distinguished from authentic Black people prepared to participate in liberation struggles by completing a conversion experience. Completing a four-stage transformation – moving through stages of re-encounter, encounter with Whites, immersion in Black culture, and internalization of a new Black identity – constituted the path toward a new black identity (2006:
89).
One of the ways in which Afrocentrism was seen to respond to the afore-mentioned socio-political challenges was in, for example, the creation of the independent black schools.
These comprised one of the arenas for the dissemination of its black cultural nationalist agenda and focused on educating African American children with the consequent objective of establishing and maintaining strong African American communities. Their educational programmes and reading materials, as evidenced by the blurb and by the titles of workbooks created by Jawanja Kunjufu and Folami Prescott, aimed to “tackle self-esteem issues that many African American youths face in today’s media-driven culture.” The reasoning was that by developing a sense of self-worth and a feeling of community cohesion grounded in
39 As previously discussed, “black” here is meant to identify “African Americans,” (who in this context, are expressly politically-conscious and “pro-black”).
40 See, for example, Hamilton and Ture’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.
common cultural connections, African Americans could create and protect resilient communities, free from the ideological hurdles of the contemporary struggles.
As a black nationalism whose resistance is expressed through cultural forms, it follows that Afrocentrist messages found an avenue in contemporary pop mediums. In this regard, as Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews write in their contribution to Race and Class, “[it] is in this barren and politically hostile landscape that we witness the resurgence of a very narrowly defined cultural nationalism, the popular version of which manifests itself in some sectors of the Hip Hop community and in nostalgic hero-worship, and the academic wing of which comes under the banner of Afrocentrism” (58). Thus, hip-hop and the culture which characterised it, became another avenue for the articulation of black nationalism.
Further to this, in his discussion of the urgent desire for African Americans to control “their images in literature and beyond” (20) and citing the hip-hop group Public Enemy’s reference to minstrelsy in some of their lyrics as evidence of this, Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar writes that
[the] visibility of black people . . . increased concomitantly with their distance from an ostensibly white middle-class cultural standard and aesthetic. The organic consciousness of this dilemma became pronounced as hip-hop entered the era dominated by conscious artists who laced lyrics with a hard-edged black militancy (22).
With rap music as its literal mouthpiece, hip-hop was, as Angela Ards writes, the
“artistic expression” developed by black and Latino youths from within a “tradition of defiance, of creating ‘somethin’ outta nothin’,” that allegedly first emerged from the South Bronx in New York city (312).41 An “underground world” constituted of “crews” who were, as Ards describes, “the peaceful alternative to gangs,” hip-hop, whose art was defined by commenting on and responding to the immediate, decaying, urban environments in which the artists lived, meant that this form of artistic expression became sources of social commentary and thus created spaces for critiquing the conditions in which they lived, thereby reactivating expressive social and political consciousness to a new generation of African Americans (312). Due to the fact that within the body of rap music are tracks with lyrics that contained critical socio-political commentary, as hip-hop evolved, aspects of its messages began to play a more pronounced role in reviving sentiments of the black consciousness movements of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. This is because, as Forman notes in his work The ’Hood Comes First,
41 From a wide range of available scholarship, see, for example, Forman and Neal 2004, Ogbar 2007, Krims 2000 for a genealogy of the hip-hop’s emergence and the politics which inspired it.
“through a more pronounced ideological discourse and explicit cultural agenda, rap artists established strong and consistent links between issues of race, space, and youth identities”
(2002: 158).
Responses to the afore-mentioned socio-political conditions in pop media are notable especially through the burgeoning hip-hop culture (which includes rap, djing, dance, graffiti art, and fashion) and the emergence of hood films, which amounted to the visual representation of the geopolitical landscape affiliated with hip-hop culture (Massood 2003:
148). Like the artists and content of hip-hop culture, hood films, as Massood writes, “are characterized by identifiable urban settings” (2003: 145) with a “specific cinematic technique that connote both temporal immediacy and documentary verisimilitude” and which
“incorporate the music, clothing, speech idioms, and personalities from their respective cultural contexts, thus echoing through visual and aural signposts” (2003:146) an urban, African American audience’s lived experiences. Hood films thus demonstrated their correlation to hip-hop because they too claimed to reflect the lives of urban African American communities affected by the consequences of contemporary government initiatives and legislations, and the selling and use of hard drugs and the subsequent incarcerations that resulted from these. In this way, both use what Massood terms, “the iconography of the inner city” as grim representations of the realities of the ghetto with the resultant prominence of gangs and gangsters (2003: 152). The expressed ghetto experience was thereby necessarily tied to notions of authenticity, the absence or presence of which determined the value of the hood film or other articulations of hip-hop culture in the opinions of the consumers.42 Moreover, as the subject matter of their artistic material was the environment in which they lived, the reputations and credibility of hip-hop artists and rappers was signified by their relation to the lived experiences vocalised in their rap lyrics.
When the visual and vocal expression or articulation of a lifestyle or state of being becomes associated with a particular vernacular, aesthetic or demographic by both those within and those who are perceived to be outside of these (like the terms hip-hop, punk, hippie etc., signify), they can become, in the language of marketing, brandable. For, as Gilroy notes,
[I]dentity has even been taken into the viscera of postmodern commerce, where the goal of planetary marketing promotes not just the targeting of objects and services to the identities of particular consumers but the idea that any product whatsoever can be suffused with identity (2000: 98).
42 For an assessment of this assertion, see Forman and Neal 2002/2004, Hill Collins 2006 and Massood 2003.
Recognising what the terms hip-hop or punk, and hippie infer signifies its transcendence from politicised personal expressions to an externalised sphere, which invites any who subscribe to or identify with the tenets that define what politics or social commentary the terms are affiliated with, to adopt or appropriate the externally expressed visualisation of them, so that they too are identified as being “hip-hop, punk or hippie” by others. At this juncture, the culture becomes exploitable and authenticity becomes a marketable element of this exploitation with terms like “imitation” or “fake” setting the value level, a process summarised by hooks as follows:
When young black people mouth 1960s’ black nationalist rhetoric, don kente cloth, gold medallions, dread their hair, and diss white folks they hang out with, they expose the way meaningless commodification strips these signs of political integrity and meaning, denying the possibility that they can serve as a catalyst for concrete political action. As signs, their power to ignite critical consciousness is diffused when they are commodified. Communities of resistance are replaced by communities of consumption (sic) (1992: 33).
As asserted in this quote, as the art form evolved, there was a noticeable shift in thematic concentrations from the one of political agitation in “message” rap to the materialism espoused in “gangsta” rap. Todd Boyd, writing on the devaluation of the political themes within hip-hop culture and rap in That’s the Joint!, cites the “emergence of gangsta rap” and its “open rejection of politics by those involved,” as well as what he calls the
“mainstreaming” of black nationalist politics exemplified by Spike Lee’s rendering of Malcolm X in a film of the same title released in 1992, “events [that marked] the end of political flirtation in rap music and, by extension, African American popular culture” (325).
In referencing the mainstreaming of black nationalism in the way that it was done through Malcolm X, Boyd is alluding to the oft-cited correlation between the commercialisation of African American lives and cultural history and the subsequent dilution of the black consciousness expressed within them. Furthermore, the Afrocentric fashions worn by some hip-hop practitioners as a demonstration of their Africacentric black cultural nationalist politics became, as Boyd posits, “easily devalued as it is transformed into a mass commodity” (328). As will be shown in chapter three, the character of this depoliticization is referenced by Haile Gerima in his 1993 film, Sankofa.
Thus, as a consequence of the “new colorblind racism” and the manoeuvrings of the commodification processes referred to above, as Boyd writes, “ . . . the issue of class struggle has been reduced to mere spectacle, as opposed to a sustained critical interrogation of