Black Women & Hip hop Part 3: The slaughter of Sexual Identities and The Pimp Agenda

By Daniella Maison BA (Hons) MA

“We need educators and leaders who are oriented towards our destiny because they are rooted in a deep understanding of our culture and traditions…who identify with and are a part of us…who see our children as their own.  Those who love our children and who have the will to teach them will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to raise our children up where they belong.” Asa G. Hilliard III

For some community activists in New York, discomposure about pimping, prostitution, Gangster Rap and children came into focus about a year ago, when according to a speaker at a community forum on urban crime, a disturbing incident had recently taken place on the stairwell of a New York City school. There, an 11-year-old girl was found performing oral sex on a line up of 12-year-old boys. Another child, her prepubescent ‘pimp’, had arranged the session, charging his friends a few dollars each for the experience. Later he was to profess that ‘pimping’ was a vocation he learned from the Gangster Rap music he esteemed so wholly and a pursuit his friends blindly, yet wholeheartedly, participated in under the same potent influences.

We are living within the blight of interesting times, and as the structure of our permissive society momentously buckles under the heaviness of the primordial male need for power, every rancid, misogynist substance slowly emerges from its depths. Hardly any of this spillage has proved more detrimental, squalid and strangely lucrative than the existence of the Gangster Rap ‘Pimp’ ideal.

In our modern and allegedly developed era, black youths in the UK, in comparison to their white and Asian counterparts, are 44% more likely to be detained under the mental health act, twice as much at risk of being referred to mental health services by police, and the suicide rate is disproportionately high with more than 30% of suicides being preventable with appropriate, early, interventions. In 2006, the Department of Education and Science found that 1,000 black pupils were permanently excluded from school each year and more than 30,000 receive temporary exclusions. Now more than ever before, a significant proportion of young black men, particularly in the working classes where societal pinches sting more, are said to be suffering from an acute self-loathing and a desperate, consequential need for power. It is in this climate that as statistics rocket and wane, their self-esteem diminishes, disillusionment reigns, recognition is impossible, tumescence is harder to achieve, and power is unattainable. It is in this climate that the Gangster Rap Pimp is appositely birthed and succeeds.

The Gangster Rap ‘Pimp’ acknowledges no great design of which he is part, and bends his knee before no image. He congratulates himself upon transcending moral norms, and assumes that he has entered the world of the crowned heads. He has no education, and would convince you he never needed one. He has no father, and would convince you he never wanted one. He commands respect through violence, torture and any method that proves him to be the definition of man he sees fit. He neither loves needs nor wants women, he owns women (anything else would be too submissive in the mind of the aspiring despot) whom in turn feed his bottomless pocket on their backs and without question. He pushes drugs, he pushes women, and his quest for power has no bounds, no limits, no rules. His drugs, whores, money, and inhuman reputation are all the trappings that enable him to believe he is a Machiavellian trailblazer, and not the bottom feeding scumbag he is in actuality. The gangster rap pimp also happens to be the avatar of misogyny, egotism, manipulation, and opportunism. The same intricate description has long applied to the casehardened street pimp and even the clichéd, tawdry Hollywood pimp. The problem is, with the meticulous help of imaging and marketing, these are the nauseating icons the modern, discontented, child loves most.

The pimp ideal is the well-marketed, multifaceted, spectacularly crafted conception that promises the type of explicit power gain method that appeals to young men hungry for recognition in a world that does not understand them. The irony is that the numerous Gangster rap artists’ cashing in on the Pimp ideal, have merely put a match to an agenda that was already in full swing when they were still lolling around their ‘hoods desperate for escape. They are the houseboys of the head honchos and suits whose expertise is in making money from weakness. Behind the Gangster Rapper, the expendable foot soldier of the sex industry, stands the suited media pimp who has taught them, bought them, to corrupt ordinary people living ordinary lives, by promoting their black ideals: The pimp and the whore.  In this ideal, any problem can be solved in an hour or two, with an abundant application of sex and violence. Meanwhile real people, our children, whose lives cannot hope to measure up, slump beneath the shadow of the media machine, and under the cracking whip of failing statistics, and are overcome with feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness.

“We MUST reclaim the minds of our children… When other people control what we think about ourselves, they will also control what we do about ourselves…” Dr. John Henrik Clarke

Aside from ailing statistics concerning young men, the male ego has an instinctive hunger for power. Males are born with their maleness. Masculinity, however, is a taught cultural construct. That being the case, if a dominant culture teaches that being a pimp is what is necessary to accomplish something, that being a pimp is the epitome of cool, that being a pimp is the personification of power, then this is what, ultimately, becomes the masculine modus operandi. Significant portions of our black young men asphyxiate in the belief that if you want to be somebody in this world, you must behave like a ‘pimp’. This is the real and hazardous message from MTV. This is the algolagnic, power hungry mandate from Gangster Rap culture.

Concurrently, the prestige of the western woman has withered away to virtually nothing. The modern young woman is increasingly aware that regardless of all other achievements, she is a failure if she is not a carbon copy of the sex hungry man-eater presented by the blinkered media that haunts her. Agony aunts in teenage magazines advise dressing up, talking dirty, and hiring porn movies as paradoxically bona fide suggestions for mending their failing relationships. The pimp ideal merely reminds the modern teenage girl that her function is wholly sexual. That being a ‘hoe’ is what is required of her, demanded of her, if she wants to be something in this male world. In the grotty Gangsta Rap ideal, the exploited woman is a voiceless, souless, sex machine, and in our reality she remains unvoiced, unheard, unseen.  It may well be that the persecution of women for power, profit and pleasure, has been a permanent feature of patriarchal society, but at the start of the millennium contempt for the woman seems to have assumed a whole new dimension. For corporations, the embodiment of misogyny, the pimp, is a vast profit-making venture; for young men it is a feasible and attractive power gain method.

“Oh! You built nice! You built like a black girl! You been sitting on a fortune. You need the right person to represent you, get the connection. You could be in the $4,000 range.” (Snoop Dogg’s comments to a white female interviewer, for the duration of which he refused to look at her, except to ‘price’ her)

Naturally, philosophers have long and cynically conceded that in our fatally desensitized arena, the Western media apparatus has ensured that we no longer realize greatness when it stands before us. Similarly, we no longer recognize travesty when it repeatedly clouts us in the metaphorical face. We are too immersed to see anything beyond the dazzling billboards that scream lies into our perception. That modern teenagers (93% of whom in the UK listen to Gangster rap) might be so seduced by the pimp ideal should not mystify us, nor should it surprise us. The gangster rap agenda draws directly from the street methods that have made pimping, as a lifestyle, as an industry, as an image, such big business. Let us look for a moment to the psychological method of the street pimp. The experienced street pimp knows how the standard ‘grooming’ process can be used effectively on young children. They survey carefully for a specific type of ‘victim profile’ and avoid anyone who may be uncontrollable, prominent, or dangerous. They focus on young people coming from families that are abusive, poor, dysfunctional, loveless or non-existent. They work to become adept at identifying vulnerable, dissatisfied children, and ‘befriending’ them. These are all the devices the Gangster Rap pimp uses to mastermind and sell his pimp agenda to our progressively more disenchanted children. So, if we have deluded ourselves into thinking that the psychological ploy of the average street pimp could never have an effect on our own family members, we might now take the opportunity to think again. The self-confessed ‘pimps’ of the Gangster rap universe are hard at work grooming, profiling and befriending our modern youth via MTV while we sit in the room next door. And as our needy young men study the Gangster Rap pimp on MTV base, heart rate and galvanic skin response measurements shooting through the ceiling, they sit and learn that this is their only visible, viable, method of regaining recognition. The message proliferates slowly, and with devastating consequence.

Some time ago reports of the lengthy and vicious gang rape of a 13-year-old girl (which took place in daylight and in her local park at the ruthless, angry hands of some boys from her school) made the papers. Her humiliation was not to reach an end until the boys proudly paraded her, bloodied, distressed and barely able to walk, on a dog leash around the council estate on which both victim and attackers resided. The message was, to all whom understood the modern language of misogyny, that the young girl had been conquered. And most importantly, (and the manifestation of their delusion) that they were the big, bad, dangerous boys behind this act of power gain. In their minds, this, surely, would earn them the respect they so craved and their idols had promised. The homage was a direct nod to Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent whom begun the phenomenon of women on dog leashes and had recently released their famous P.I.M.P video which proved such a hit visual success they were nominated by the MTV Music Video Awards; they attended the red carpet event clasping semi naked women whom fiddled uneasily with the dog collars around their necks as they were exhibited. A sordid message of misogyny and power gain that did not go unmissed as these six boys plotted, schemed and then embarked on a sadistic attack that left their victim unable to leave her home and under constant psychiatric observation. A message that did not go unmissed as they connived to mimic their black heroes and collect their overdue respect at any cost.

We know that the young man whom now feels he must pimp, beat, stab or rape his school friend was not always so malevolent. So, at what point in his short life sequence did his behaviour slip from typical to deviant, from warm to sadistic? In his memory, clearly, it never did.  With this in mind, the overly defensive may recline in their seats a while as we slowly absorb that what we are witnessing here is not an inherent innate inclination by young black men to partake in gang rape, but rather a learned and coded behavioural system significantly inspired by the propaganda of the Gangster Rap Pimp. The issue of gang rape among our young people is a very real issue. The multi-million dollar Gangster Rap porn company, G-unit porn, ensures that movies such as ‘Groupie Love’ glorify the group sex (whereby sizeable men heavily outnumber young women) that reminds its viewers that this is the behaviour of a Real Pimp. Concomitantly, young boys whom do not partake in gang rape are, at the very least, notably participating in line-ups in which a single girl issues oral sex at their local park. For our young men, pathological, disengaged sex is becoming easier to obtain than a McDonalds drive-thru. In those murky moments the man-child forsakes the mother who is mirrored in his young soul, the matriarch who bore and nurtured him, such is his need for egotistic satisfaction and ascendancy. Make no mistake that in their uncertain moments young men turn to their surrogate fathers and learn that exploitation is acceptable, that sex with loathing is better than sex with love, that sex by force is superior to the quixotic pursuit of sex by wooing.

I’m bout to show you how my pimp hand is way strong

you dead wrong if you think that pimpin gonna die

12 piece with a 100 whores by my side (Snoop Dogg, P.I.M.P)

Let us at this point make certain that the rapist, often inorgastic, ability to victimise a terrified girl, thump her until she is bloodily unrecognisable and then rape her amidst her squeals for mercy has nothing to do with sex. An act so brutal that its physical consequences typically consist of chronic pelvic pain, pregnancy (and the distressing abortion which likely follows), STD’s, acute vaginal tearing, and the stalking self blame and post traumatic syndromes that leave their victims scarred, agoraphobic, manic depressive and suicidal, could never be about sex. Incidents such as these have nothing to do with increasing sex drives, hormones in the water system, androgens in the uterine environment, libidinous urges or too many sexy storylines after watershed. The object of rape is degradation and power far and beyond sexual gratification.  They have everything to do with imperious feelings of impotence, the ravenous need for power, and a deep and resultant self-loathing. In this disappointing atmosphere, it is as though every act must produce feelings of power. Sex, demotic, normative, loving or otherwise, is no longer good enough, young boys now hunt their victims like sleuth hounds, earnestly keen for expression of the anger and aggression which plagues them, and the unremitting hunger for power and the proving of their status as Pimps, not as men.

‘Our nation is Our Selves’ Imamu Amiri Baraka

When our young black women are raped by black male perpetrators, they frequently remain silent because they feel alone. They are apprehensive about confirming racial stereotypes; their families and communities tell them, verbally and otherwise, to stay hushed; they fear the authorities will not take their cases seriously and they will end up branded as liars or jezebels; they fear the ruinous ramifications of manhunts at the hands of their peers if they are believed. They also remain silent because they have been a victim of something that is not altogether alien to their psyche, every time they are a victim of misogyny from being called a ‘bitch’ on the high street, to having their bottom groped belligerently as they walk though a party, or being coerced into the unwelcome sex which quickly spirals into a gang attack, they are merely partaking in a practice they see everyday courtesy of one of the most popular mediums on the planet.

There is a saying in the African community that ‘Black women raise their daughters and love their sons’. At times it seems that this is the echoing legacy of the enslaved mentality. At times it seems this denotes our communal protectiveness of black men, from the cosseting of baby boys right through to our evident reluctance to expose this issue of rape. We are ever more silent about black women as victims and survivors of sexual assault by black men. When Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver confessed the motivations behind his lengthy career in rape (his ‘insurrectionary act’), he alleged that he succeeded in rehearsing his power driven pastime on black women because the silent tolerance and faded values of the black community, made it easy: ‘I started out practicing on black girls in the ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day.’ If this still rings true in the council estates where so many of these attacks take place, this is where our immense need for a durable community spirit comes into play. In centuries past, cultures were acutely aware that without knowledge of self, of history, of culture, of community, we will remain as desolate as brooks without a source, as trees without roots, as bodies without souls. If we are in any doubt over this, we need only look at our children, wading aimlessly through these turbulent seas and begin to centre ourselves within our own self-definition: to name ourselves, and not to be named or defined by the mendacious gangster pimp his corporate puppet master, or otherwise. The Pimp agenda that pulls the wool over our youths eyes forms the brutal fabric of our nation, promotes myth, not fact and feeds on our silence. We have endured this calamitous state of affairs too long. Our children have endured the charade of bogus, self-serving Gangster heroes too long, and the effects are patently visible each time we switch on the news. Here and now, we are failing to heed the clarion call to stand up and verbalize on behalf of our youth against a music agenda that deviously plots their demise. Change will surely not come ashore until we once more find our tongues, redeploy our responsibilities, and allow our young people to once more discover their heroes….

To Be Continued………

Poem for Black Boys (Nikki Giovanni)

Where are your heroes my little Black one

You are the Indian you so disdainfully shoot

Not the big bad sheriff on his white horse

You should play run-away-slave

Or mau mau

These are more in line with your history

Then our old friend Hide and Seek becomes valid

Because we have much to seek and ourselves to hide

From a lecherous dog

You will understand all too soon

That you, my children of battle, are your heroes

You must invent your own games and teach us old ones

How to play