On Violence, Responsibility, and Abolition — Remembering what Hip-Hop has been Saying for Decades
“No chains around my feet, but I’m not free.”
Concrete Jungle — Bob Marley & The Wailers, 1973
“We feel that we have a responsibility to shine the light into the darkness. You know…there’s a lot of darkness out here. We watch it all the time…And we have a responsibility to focus on it. You know? Y’all be kool. We know that we know how to make some music and that music ain’t supposed to stand still…”
Intro — Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Blackstar, 1998
A historic moment began amidst tragedy on May 25, 2020, when the quarantined population of the United States witnessed police officers murder George Floyd as onlookers begged for his life for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. All 50 states erupted in protest. Dozens of countries joined in worldwide solidarity. The essence of this watershed moment is captured in pivotal actions like the Minneapolis police station being set on fire by protestors and, a week later, the city council vowing to disband the police department and invest in transformative justice alternatives. Each of these accounts carries such strong imagery and significance that other historical markers etched in U.S. public imagination are conjured; namely the mass property fires in South Bronx during the 1960s and ‘70s, which catalyzed the birth of hip-hop, and the intricate storytelling within hip-hop which highlights the need for healthy community investments not rooted in over-policing and mass incarceration.
Both of these markers are crystallized in Minneapolis’ Resolution to disband the police:
Be it Further Resolved that these efforts heed the words of Angela Davis, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.”
You read that right; Angela Davis, the same woman who was on the run from the FBI in the ‘70s, after decades of educating and organizing for black liberation, is upheld as the model for policing alternatives in a metropolitan area.
Though it feels rushed to say abolition has gone mainstream, to merely say it has caught steam in recent months would also be an understatement.
So, why the sudden change? Well — other than the obvious visibility made possible by the digital age meeting COVID-19 social distancing — the story of hip-hop over the last 50 years shines a magnificent light on why community organizers and peace activists across the nation have a glimmer of hope right now.
The reasons South Bronx was burning in the first place, and the cultural healing made possible by the birth of hip-hop, each highlight a crucial point about responsibility and how U.S. officials can respond in our current moment.
I’ll say it here before I elaborate below: European-Americans’ capacity to empathize with people under racism’s boot is greatly enhanced due to technology bridging the gap. Whether it be what sketches of enslaved-persons tightly-packed on ships did to boost solidarity with the original abolitionists in the 18th century, or what footage of water hoses and K-9s weaponized against peaceful protestors did in the 1950s and ‘60s, or video of Rodney King’s beating did within the public imagination in the ‘90s, or countless recordings in the digital age akin to George Floyd’s have done recently; increased visibility increases solidarity.
Why then has hip-hop, a U.S. household staple — containing much of the abolition principles recognized in scholarship and community organizing — not had a similar effect for non-carceral alternatives in a government supposedly representative of “the people?”
The simple answer is America doesn’t listen to the Afro-Caribbean-Latinx world. Yet, with comparable weight: American whiteness has constructed itself in modes of living detached of responsibility to healing violence in the world. In housing. In education. In economics. Solving our current tension requires undoing the moral apathy of post-World War II U.S. life which has suburbanized our identities and corporatized our relationships.
Good thing Angela Davis and the Fugees have some answers.
A dedication to all the refugees worldwide…
I remember when we used to sit
in the government yard in Brooklyn,
observing the crookedness
as it mingled with the good people we meet.
Good friends we had, good friends we’ve lost
along the way.
In this great future you can’t forget your past,
So dry your tears, I say.
And to my peeps who passed away:
No woman, no cry…The Fugees, No Woman, No Cry (1996)
Original lyrics — Bob Marly & The Wailers (1974)
Before Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michel could deliver the 1996 masterpiece, The Score (which demonstrates some of the creative pinnacles hip-hop reaches when it sticks to its Afro-Caribbean bonds and intentionally highlight women MCs), DJ Kool Herc & Coke La rock, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Afrika Bambaataa had to create — with Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash’s popular DJ battles on the one hand, and Bambaataa’s spirit for community-building on the other. This creation happened in parties sparked by mass housing-displacement which, by the 1980s had impacted over 150,000 people, most of them African-American and Puerto Rican.¹
Looking back on that period in a 2016 interview, Shad K asked Afrika Bambaataa “What was happening, in your understanding, as a Black Spade that made you want to bring more peace and unity?” Bambaataa responded,
“A lot of us are killing each other for nothing, or fighting against each other for foolishness. That we need to turn this around and get the community to start organizing themselves. But we also had many other consciousness organizations that was out here coming to wake up many of the communities. Like the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party. We had to change the paradigm and try to teach and wake up the communities to be warriors for your community instead of being destructors.”
To avoid a lengthy repeat of what is already broadly available via docuseries, Hip Hop Evolution (Netflix), Vivian Vazquez Irizarri’s documentary Decade of Fire, and books by Jeff Chang, Patricia Hill-Collins, Joan Morgan, and Fred Moten (and so many more), I will focus on two aspects from the U.S.’ relationship to hip-hop and South Bronx fires.
First, the ethos surrounding white suburban identity in post-WWII United States fixated America’s understanding of violence onto so-called arsonists at the same time that racist government redlining policies created near-insurmountable obstacles for African Americans and Latino-Caribbean American populations to succeed.
Second, scapegoating hip-hop became a major way racist narratives of black criminality took shape once the war on drugs matured (if you haven’t yet, read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander).
This is odd because, notwithstanding the mainstream rap industry’s overrepresentation of sexism and violence — themes reflected in most U.S. media and entertainment — so much of hip-hop encourages us to take responsibility for violence due to its communal impact. Meanwhile, the U.S. punitively incarcerates more people than any other country on the planet.
While Angela Davis herself was jailed in the early 70s, she penned brilliant analyses on the nature of economics and human bonds. In capitalist societies, she writes, humans are reduced to their biological outputs and authentic familial and communal cohesion is disrupted:
…the break-up of pre-capitalist economic and social life gave rise to a historically unprecedented separation of human beings among themselves — in order to separate them from the means of production. The family, it was maintained, is the direct target of these divisive forces which establish a foundation for the most advanced phase of human development by instituting the most systematic method of human exploitation….especially for the woman.²
What Davis (Professor, Black Panther, Author, Philosopher) evokes here are of both personal and political proportions. The home — the very structure capitalism claims will stabilize family life — was a site of flames for anyone in the way of private interests with deep pockets.
Robert Moses, an urban-building tycoon, monopolized on the U.S. government’s urge to flex its status as the only wealthy nation-state in World War II’s immediate aftermath. The construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (aimed at making Manhattan a site of wealth by connecting it and the suburbs) meant redlined-empowered-white-flight out of South Bronx to new suburbs near highways, followed by a large influx of Caribbean, African-American, and Latinx populations into the emptying South Bronx. Fires became more frequent as more landlords found it cheaper to cash in on insurance money than to house tenants — random individuals on the street were often offered money to actually start the fires. Between 1973 and 1977, over 30,000 fires were set in the South Bronx alone,³ and, as one primary source in the documentary, Decade of Fire states, “there wasn’t no fire engines at all. We was the fire engines.”
In the void created by the government privileging white space for capital development, and demolishing black space in racial antagonism, women, says Davis, are especially isolated and exploited. The cultural norms that take root for women to fulfill gender norms in the (suburban) home are also reflected in the limiting modes of (re)production to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, the government took no responsibility for its dealings in private greed. Instead, the struggling residents were blamed for the fires, and eventually, so-called “welfare queens” (not systemically racist housing and schooling practices) were characterized across the country as the culprit of the black family’s so-called cultural decay.⁴
Social safety nets for elders and youth alike were defunded. Schools struggled to stay open. Resources that could address the root causes of trauma and violence were traded for a war on drugs that coincided with the birth of a prison industrial complex unparalleled in human history. Queens rapper, Nas, long before the public grappled with his abuse towards Kelis over the course of their relationship, has spent a lengthy career rapping about the complex dynamic with violence that occurs when food/housing insecurity and under-resourced education compound in single-parent households. On No Introduction, looking back on his childhood to open his Life is Good album (2012), he raps:
PS 111 had free lunch — embarrassed but managed to get a plate. We was kids hungry, mom’s working, I was famished, she’s getting home late…So I decided now I’m in charge. Either stay full or starve….
Roll with a shooting squad. How could I not succumb? How could I not partake? Fifteen, I got a gun, sixteen, I robbed a train. Licked off a shot for fun; what’s got inside my brain? A hustler’s job ain’t done, till he becomes a king. But I’m a righteous son, despite I’m in the midst of, dudes who switch up and change, they wanna carry me like I’m some kind of lame; I never let them though, I just forgive them though — either that or the pistol blow…
The final lines of his dense verse urge the audience to think about the resolve it takes to confront the struggle between forgiveness and violence — to birth peace through childhood trauma.
In Queen Latifah’s (Latifah means “delicate” and “very kind” in Arabic)⁵ 1993 classic, U.N.I.T.Y., she attempts a balance between the use of force and protecting herself from the harms of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. After narrating a scene of self-defense after a man groped her in public, she raps about abuse in private:
I hit rock bottom, there ain’t nowhere else to go but up. Bad days at work give you an attitude and you erupt — and take it out on me but that’s about enough. You put your hands on me again I’ll put your a** in handcuffs.
Other than the attention she draws to norms of (male) violence in the public and private spheres alike, what is striking about Queen’s (whose parents were a teacher and police officer) situation is the lack of other communal protections to the point that jail and policing are thought to diminish violence rather than perpetuate it. Nas’ be-a-king-or-righteous-son tension, on the other hand, is akin to what bell hooks describes as the quest for self-love amidst imprints of white supremacist patriarchy within black men’s struggle for uplift.⁶ Both Nas and Queen Latifah reflect on violence, not just in reference to one’s own violent tendencies or protection from the violence of others, but promoting those same values on the communal level (i.e. Nas’ 1994 One Love (produced by Q-Tip), or Queen’s U.N.I.T.Y). Angela Davis’ abolition has something that builds on this type of communal solidarity in a way that addresses the root causes of violence to promote healing. To understand it, let’s return to hip-hop’s story by way of its “elder kin,” reggae.⁷
Hip-hop historian, Jeff Chang, synthesizes the links between hip-hop and political strife in Jamaica so seamlessly.
The blues had Mississippi, jazz had New Orleans. Hip-hop has Jamaica. Pioneer DJ Kool Herc spent his earliest childhood years in the same Second Street yard that had produced Bob Marley. “Them said nothing good ever come outta Trenchtown,” Herc says. “Well, hip-hop came out of Trenchtown!”⁸
Just as the U.S. was building its post-war private-monopoly structure in-hand with the prison industrial complex, Great Britain joined them in managing their previous colony, Jamaica, which gained independence in 1962.⁹ This shift towards government policies that consolidate economic power within powerful private/corporate interests is called neoliberalism. Outside of the mainland U.S., the management of debt and funding by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank function as a neocolonial stronghold.¹⁰ These atmospheres undergird both the isolating suburban experience Davis described earlier and the rich cultural resistance within hip-hop and reggae.
For those seeking political power in Jamaica, harnessing the cultural influence of music & dance was indispensable. This boiled to violent heights in the aftermath of the 1972 election, in which democratic socialist, Michael Manley of the People’s National Party (PNP) took victory over Edward Seaga of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). By 1976, Bob Marley took up exile in the Bahamas after his historic performance at the Smile Jamaica Concert in Kingston two days after he (Rita Marley and his manager, Don Taylor) survived an assassination attempt.¹¹
Manley (PNP) was being surveilled by the CIA due to his connections with Cuba and other leaders in the Caribbean and Africa acting on their commitments to reforming their lands’ education, voting, and economic system on socialist principles. The U.S. and European allies responded to his activity with heavy economic sanctions on Jamaica that pressured Manley into accepting emergency loans from the IMF. The impact this had on Jamaica’s local industries bred widespread poverty, labor frustration, and eventually, a State of Emergency issued by Manley to quell gang violence as they struggled for power over territories. As the U.S.-backed JLP armed gangs to gain more electoral support in the past, fears of violence remained for the upcoming 1978 election. Various local leaders garnered broad Rastafarian influence and got Marley to return to headline the One Love Peace Concert to fundraise money for affected ghettos.¹² Once he took the stage, Seaga and Manley stood on either side of Marley. He grasped each of their hands and lifted them high, saying “Love, prosperity be with us all…Jah Rastafari. Selassie I.”¹³
Unity outshined violence for the moment. If western superpowers put forth a fraction of the effort peace activists did to heal the countries/communities they have harmed as they did to building pax-Americana principles for private life, movements for racial justice could become a thing of the past. Just as the U.S. assassinated and imprisoned Black Panthers and peace activists during the civil rights and black power era domestically, those who waged peace in Jamaica were met with police hostility and murder.¹⁴
The post-WWII U.S. Presidents have campaigned and governed with differing degrees of “law and order” and “tough-on-crime” rhetoric to gain the U.S. population’s trust in their capacity to keep us safe. Under the Eisenhower presidency, “In God We Trust” was even added to U.S. currency, and “under God” was inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance to strengthen religious zeal that U.S. hegemony is somehow of natural consequence.¹⁵ That these coincide with Jim Crow and mass incarceration demonstrates that black-and-browned-skinned individuals should expect antagonism rather than state cooperation. By 1980, Jamaica had Seaga and the JLP; the U.S. had Reagan. Bob Marley remained under CIA surveillance, and actively on tour until he died of cancer in 1981.¹⁶ I would spend more time highlighting corporate/government malevolence, but the spirit of this piece is music, not noise.
“Increased punishment is most often a result of increased surveillance. Those communities that are subject to police surveillance are much more likely to produce more bodies for the punishment industry. But even more important, imprisonment is the punitive solution to a whole range of social problems that are not being addressed by those social institutions that might help people lead better, more satisfying lives. This is the logic of what has been called the imprisonment binge: Instead of building housing, throw the homeless in prison. Instead of developing the educational system, throw the illiterate in prison. Throw people in prison who lose jobs as the result of de-industrialization, globalization of capital, and the dismantling of the welfare state.”
— Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, Angela Y. Davis
Abolition begins with divesting from the prison system as a means to address society’s ailments. The hunger-and-gun-filled environment Nas described, and the gender-based violence Queen Latifah unifies us against are both addressed in transformative justice models. Addressing violence at its root requires funding to be (re)allocated to those educational, health, and social services that were defunded amidst an absurd war on drugs. In Judith Herman’s 1992 book, Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence — from domestic abuse to political terror, a text popular in the fabric of social services today, she writes “Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection to others.”¹⁷ What the prison industrial complex does is interrupt this ability for all of us to connect with each other — whether it be by the enforcement of “law and order,” which traumatizes communities, or the deflection of responsibility which pigeon-holes us into private isolation. Racial justice must include resistance to western individualism.
Meaningfully addressing social norms of violence and sexual abuse consists of building communal infrastructure for individuals and families to have what they need to have healthy relationships. American leadership needs to take responsibility in forming this partnership with us without the destructive prison system.
Hail Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. The great American flag is wrapped in drag with explosives. Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters. Barricaded blocks and borders; look what you taught us: it’s murder on my street, your street, back streets, Wall Street, corporate offices, banks, employees and bosses with homicidal thoughts — Donald Trump’s in office. We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again, but is American honest or do we bask in sin?….It’s nasty when you set us up, then roll the dice, then bet us up, you overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us — gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera, America’s reflections of me, that’s what a mirror does.
- XXX. (FEAT. U2.), DAMN., Kendrick Lamar, 2017
We gave you life, we gave you birth, we gave you God, we gave you Earth, we fem the future, don’t make it worse. You want the world? Well, what’s it worth? Emoticons, Decepticons, and Autobots, who twist the plot? Who shot the sheriff, then fled to Paris, in the darkest hour, spoke truth to power?
-Django Jane, Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe, 2018
For a final hook, let’s turn to when Davis was on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. The life of George Jackson of the Soledad Brothers, and Jonathan Jackson, his little brother, is a modern tragedy. Davis’ sense of communal solidarity in the midst of it resulted in criminal charges that carried the death penalty: aggravated kidnapping and the murder of Judge Harold Haley in the first degree. She was eventually cleared of all charges,¹⁸ but the story of her getting there makes clear the choices with which African-Amerian children are confronted in the face of U.S. antagonisms.
George Jackson (CA) was 18 years old in 1960 when he was convicted in a second-degree robbery for driving a getaway car after his friend robbed a gas station of $70. George was sentenced “one year to life” in prison. His younger brother, Jonathan, was seven years old at the time. In her autobiography, Davis writes, “Jonathan only wanted to talk about George. All of his interests, all of his activities were bound up in some way with his brother in Soledad [prison]. At sixteen, Jonathan was carrying a burden which most adults would refuse.”¹⁹ George had been in prison for nearly 10 years. Over Jonathan’s childhood, he read through a thick stack of letters written by George from prison; among these letters were numerous stories of abuse from prison guards; certainly not the end of George’s troubles.
In 1970, there was a yard fight in Soledad between two prisoners: one black, one white. When the smoke cleared, prison guard O.G. Miller, known to be racist, had killed three black prisoners from his spot in the gun tower. The Grand Jury ruled this “justifiable homicide.” As the imprisoned men mourned and raged over this, a guard was beaten and pushed over the railing to his death — no one knew who pushed him. What was known, however, is that George Jackson (and the other two accused, John Clutchette and Fleeta Drumgo) were considered “militant” due to their black power politics. Since Jackson was already there on a “life-sentence,” being indicted on the charge meant the death penalty. The three were scapegoated and became known as the Soledad Brothers.²⁰
When Davis heard of the case, and especially after hearing George’s mother painfully retell the story of his initial imprisonment, she was moved to action with the Soledad Brother’s Defense Committee. Jonathan was eventually spending his third year at Pasadena High School trying to gain more traction for the cause — even writing an article for the school newspaper — but to little effect. Where does a 17-year old turn when the death penalty looms on his brother and the justice system is the aggressor? The answer he chose was to the courtroom, armed.²¹ He took the courtroom where Judge Haley presided as leverage to free the Soledad brothers. When guards responded, the barrage of bullets left both Jonathan and the judge dead. Davis didn’t know anything about the plot, but guns Jonathan used in the courtroom were registered in her name.²² She went on the run. When the FBI caught up to her, war-on-drugs-progenitor Nixon praised the FBI for capturing “the dangerous domestic terrorist, Angela Davis.” The global mobilization around her freedom is a story for the books.
I’ll prolly die anonymous, I’ll prolly die with promises….I’ll prolly die ‘cause that’s what you do when you’re 17.
-FEAR., Kenrick Lamar, 2017
George and Angela’s letters during this time are both preserved in their respective writings. George (who previously wrote how “crazy” it is that women, “even the phenomenal women, want…a promise of brighter days, bright tomorrows. I have no tomorrows at all.”) believed his brother’s death should mark a new measurement of history, in which “We reckon all time in the future from the day of the man-child’s death.”²³ Angela also looked to the future, knowing
that there was only one way to avenge Jon’s death — through struggle, political struggle, through people in motion, fighting for all those behind the walls. Not to fight in this way was to leave Jonathan forever lying on the asphalt…not to fight would be to forever deny him — all the young and unborn Jonathans — ….A childhood full of smiles and nice toys and older brothers who are beautiful, strong and free…²⁴
After Michael Brown was murdered by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri (2014), Kendrick Lamar’s Alright became an anthem of black solidarity across the country. Echoes of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds resound through the lyrics; meaning government noise must not be far behind. Lamar’s 2015 BET Awards performance of Alright targeting mass incarceration and police brutality landed him on a Fox News segment in which the host demonized hip-hop as a greater damaging force in “young African-American male communities than racism in recent years.” Lamar’s response (after decades of lyrical geniuses before him — Outkast, The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, Biggie, and Tupac (and Blackstar’s Mos Def & Talib Kweli) to name a few of my favorites), DAMN., became the first hip-hop album to win a Pulitzer Prize in music (2018). We must ask ourselves what it means to live in this neoliberal world in which we can stream our favorite abolition narratives at low-cost, but struggle to find government allies who will invest in community reparations.
Similarly, in a world showing progress towards LGBTQ representation within hip-hop, but is also in tension with rainbow capitalism, Janelle Monáe offers such a generous display of how to posture ourselves in Afrofuturistic hope which embraces free gender expression and sexual fluidity as cultural markers of people resisting artificial existence. Her art serves as a profound commentary on collective responsibility today.
U.S. lawmakers have a lot of catching up to do. In addition to defunding the police as a step towards non-carceral alternatives within abolition, a good starting point is addressing the racist Insular Cases within our legal system which subordinate U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands) to a status that consists of neither full American rights (Statehood), or independence from colonial control. Global cooperation for peace must begin at home. The Afro-Caribbean revolution of hip-hop is evidence that what unites us to create healing, reaches far beyond political constructs for division.
One love.
Endnotes:
¹Vivian Vazquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran, Decade of Fire (2018; New York: Passion River Films), purchased via vimeo.com.
²Angela Y. Davis, “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation” (1970) in Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 168.
³Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Introduction by DJ Kool Herc (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 11–15.
⁴Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 49–51.
⁵Queen Latifah stated this in an interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio, 2006.
⁶bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 137–139.
⁷Chang, 23.
⁸Ibid., 22.
⁹Ibid., 23.
¹⁰ Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, Institutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 162–163.
¹¹Chang, 30, 34.
¹²Ibid., 31, 32, 37.
¹³Ibid., 38.
¹⁴Ibid., 38–39.
¹⁵Kevin M. Kruse, How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), Introduction.
¹⁶Chang, 39.
¹⁷Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence — from domestic abuse to political terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 214.
¹⁸Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers), 394–395.
¹⁹Ibid., 252–254, 266.
²⁰Ibid., 252–253.
²¹Ibid., 277.
²²Ibid.
²³George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Baltimore: Jonathan Cape and Penguin Books, 1970), 261, 290.
²⁴Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 279.
