A book review of Cora Daniels' book Ghetto Nation with the reviewer's commentaries.

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A book Review of Cora Daniels' Ghetto Nation

In this half self-confession, half-autobiography, and half-hearted report from the "hood," Mrs. Daniels, a black Yale and Colombia graduate and noted Journalist, gives us all the "down side" of Hip-hop culture, without giving us the "up side," and, arguably, without in any way investigating its causes to see how it is otherwise attached to the larger American socio-cultural family portrait.

The short version of her book is that the Hip-hop culture is a convenient symbol of a fast moving self-destructive ride on the "down escalator" into the subbasement of American culture. It is her view that in recent years, Hip-hop has had the unwelcome and unintended consequence of spreading this mental version of "cultural Ebola," to the white suburban youth mind. This single fact, that Hip-hop culture is now taking down white culture too, seems to be the only reason the author has belatedly rushed to white society's rescue. Like the best volunteer fireman, she has dutifully rang the societal alarm bells with this book.

She cites chapter and verse from her own Brooklyn experiences, both to justify her point of view and to establish her bona fides as an "authentic ghetto resident." However, all she seems to see "as facts on the ground" are the daily parades of: baby-mamas in mini-skits, pushing strollers with their boots or high-heels on, wearing blonde wigs, and their babies sucking Pepsi cola from nippled bottles. And too, just across the street, she sees the baby-daddies, those man-boys still standing on the corners at age 38, proud of their multiple kids, with their pants hanging off their butts, and holding onto their manhood like they fear it may be taken away from them at any minute, while still hawking female passersby, and doing so during working hours, while still living in apartments paid for by their mommas.

Sadly, these facts in the author's graphic portrayal are indisputable. But her Brooklyn affectations are not. Her overall message betrays her feigned sympathies for the ghetto that she claims to have grown up in. It is transparently obvious that the author has staked out a one-sided position in which one of the symptoms of the illness "that is American society" -- Hip-hop -- has been mistaken for the disease itself. And as a result (in her mind at least), these self-destructive symptoms have become their own cause?

Accordingly, with this kind of "blame the victim" analytical posture, one is led to doubt that the author's deeper sympathies lie with the "down-and-out" classes of any inner city -- with or without Hip-hop culture, whether or not she lives there, and whether or not they are white or black.

At the author's level of analysis, and arguably, she is looking at American culture through the wrong end of the socio-economic telescope, the details of the picture we get from her, summarized graphically in the paragraph above, seems focused too rigidly on an isolated, detached, ground level view of American culture. And while it is true that she does mention as an aside, the fact that the entrepreneurial vultures are constantly hovering over the black ghetto, (even if they do so at a standoff distance equal to the distance of the nearest suburb), ready to pounce and pull out any morsel of exploitable creative talent they might spot, she does not mention that, at least in the US itself, they show absolutely no interest in the art form of Hip-hop itself beyond its profit potential. These "culture vultures," somehow hoover over this graveyard of death and despair without once acknowledging that it too is an integral part of the US family portrait.

I say this because a great deal of their money is made on advertising and selling Hip-hop as "positive American culture" outside the US to other nations. So why they make the very thing they profit on, a national scapegoat beats the hell out of me? Why tear it down at home while selling its positive virtues abroad?

I know this is true because, if you go anywhere from Paris, to Rabat, to Bamako, and everywhere in between, Hip-hop culture is alive and well and is not denigrated as is done in this book, but is celebrated on the streets and in the clubs. I saw some of the best Hip-hop groups to be found anywhere in the world in Manila, in Seoul, in Phenom Phen, and even on the beaches of South Spain and France.

Which gets me to the crowning point of the book, her claim that the level of self-destruction, despair and low-expectations emanating from the black ghetto today, is unique to this, the Hip-hop generation?

I am sad to have to admit that there is indeed a kernel of truth to this claim, a kernel of truth that should disturb us all. But I believe it is better captured in a reference made by Stanley Crouch in his recent book about Charlie Parker called "Kansas City Lightening," than by the attempts at "tough love" used here to try to do so by embarrassing Hip-hop culture:

Crouch too has sensed the same phenomenon that Daniels has singled out: that we blacks, somewhere between the 1960s and the Hip-hop generation, have lost that vital ability to "live in a segregated world" without allowing it to produce in us "a segregated mind" -- that is, without allowing our minds to be infected by America's continued "top-down" racist cultural structures.

In the world that we grew up in -- the 1940s to the present -- the astute among us, knew well the challenges a segregated world presented, and we were not about to allow racist rules create fences in our minds (as they were intended to do!). We never developed a segregated vision of the world, or of human possibility, or of our own ability to achieve, or indeed, of our own humanity. We saw, and still see, "racism of the mind" -- that is to say, America's structural and existential racism -- as a "white only" disease, a moral disease that is a fallout of living in the fetishized and fantasized dreamworld of white supremacy, one that in the past, as much as it tried, was unable to affect (let alone destabilize) the black mental condition.

But now, I must agree with Daniels and Crouch, that this no longer seems to be the case. The Hip-hop generation, even with a "scared do-nothing mulatto" as president, whose mantra was hope and change, no lest, does indeed seem to be giving up all hope for this country.

But again, at the risk of repetition, I must say that even "their giving up hope" is just a symptom of a larger disease, "the disease of American society," not to be mistaken for the disease itself.

In a world that has been completely privatized, shaped to allow as few blacks as possible escape ghetto misery, who could blame them? What else could we expect other than the organic growth of another rebellious counter-culture? Youth have done this in the US since the Boston Tea Party.

Does anyone still remember the hippies? Today, that rebellious counter culture is Hip-hop culture. They act-out in "un-normed" ways because there is no maneuver room left "within the norms" for them to survive or thrive. When this happens, there is nothing else left to do but to go outside the norms -- something that all counter-cultures have done throughout American history. So, I disagree with the author that the Hip-hop cycle of despair and low-expectations, followed by counter-cultural actions is unique. In fact it is as American as the proverbial Apple Pie.

And if I had to mark a point in the sand where Mrs. Daniel's downward escalator metaphor really began, when the changes really began to kick-in, I would argue that it was with Ronald Reagan's administration policies. That is when a definite pall set-in over the inner city mindset. Arguably, it was at this point that the downward escalator into black oblivion that the author speaks so elegantly of, was greased for ghetto citizens to hop on and take an uninterrupted one-way downward ride.

It was with the Reagan administration that the last props leading to upward mobility out of the ghetto, were summarily kicked away -- and done so under the pretext of, alleged serial rapist, Bill Cosby's, and our mute Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas', bootstrap metaphor.

It was at this point that the public schools budgets were cut and were gutted not just of enriching art and music programs, (which, had they been available, these hip-hoppers may well have been busy taking music lessons and learning how to blow horns and become the next generation of Jazz musicians like those in "quality schools," still do), but also were gutted of its main societal function: serving to provide an adequate education.

It was at this point that the Hip-hop generation was then left to its own devices, to create something from the ashes Reagan left, or die on the vine. Having to rely on re-segregated inner city schools, warehousing and care-taking shells that are even worse today and more segregated, than the old segregated schools in the deep South were during my own era, was unappealing to them. So they elected to create: And, voila! Hip-hop.

It was seeing all our cities being turned -- right before our own eyes -- into burnt-out bomb fields and toxic waste dumps and minefields, miles upon miles of decaying city blocks, that has led to the new inner city despair, hopelessness and low expectations that Mrs. Daniels sees at ground level in Brooklyn, not Hip-hop culture.

The shells and cluster bombs that are raining down on Detroit, Newark, Philadelphia, LA, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, and Brooklyn, are the shrapnel and fallout from bad social and economic policies: Like the war on drugs, the three strikes and you are out law; like the war waged to deregulate and privatize everything; the war on our health with the first ever drop in the life expectancy of an American cohort group, (and guess who? the black male); like the scuttling of unions and Pell grants, the kicking away of all worker's benefits, the stagnation of the minimum wage, the race to the bottom of the global labor pool through globalization, and the raising of rents as well as the cost of college -- while at the same time, drastically cutting taxes for the rich and multiplying the salary of CEOs to 500 times that of the average American worker.

Reagan's not so silent war on the poor, seems to me a justifiable reason for despair and hopelessness as well as for a recalibration of one's expectations about the possibilities of success in this country, to set in -- especially since the war has been waged relentlessly, expanded and has been taken up without abatement even by Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who had the nerve to call Ronald Reagan "the President he most admired?" (Go figure?)

The larger point here is that if we were to be completely honest with ourselves, and working at a level of analysis quite a ways above the street level at which the author has painted her caricature of Hip-hop life, the policy changes Reagan instituted, seen in retrospect, have had the unintended effect of -- turning our inner cities into bombed-out war moonscapes, into the "gateway feeds" to the prison-industrial complex, central station for the illegal drug market, and to the pharmaceutical and un-health producing elements of Agri-business -- much more than they have given ghetto citizens any reason at all to hope for a better future.

The low expectations of Hip-hoppers may also be tied to the 75% of ghetto residents who are over weight because there is no healthy food in their neighborhoods; the one million in jails, which has further destroyed their families; the continuous rash of justifiable homicides of shooting of young black males on sight; the increases in suicide rates and in heart attacks, diabetes and strokes -- arguably, all byproducts of the rich waging war on the poor, with Ronald Reagan serving as their only retired five-star General.

In short, these young Americans, who are the byproduct of failed re-segregated schools that are no longer designed to educate, schools that were once a vibrant pipeline for Jazz musicians, artists and entertainers, but that are now designed to warehouse and babysit; whose communities are flooded with drugs imported and handled by "top-down" operations; communities that are now cutoff from all legitimate avenues of upward mobility, a counter-cultural response is the only natural and organic response to these kinds of draconian anti-people policies.

Did the author forget that it was this same educational pipeline that once produced the Harlem Renaissance? Is she so blindly biased against the excesses of Hip-hop culture that she can not see that this pipeline that once produced so many great black Artists, Jazz musicians in particular, now has been clamped shut forever? Three stars

Authors Bio:
Retired Foreign Service Officer and past Manager of Political and Military Affairs at the US Department of State. For a brief time an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Denver and the University of Washington at Seattle. A graduate of the National War College and a Phd from the University of Southern California.