It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation

by M. K. Asante Jr

  James Reston, in his 1968 New York Times op-ed, “Political Pollution,” foresaw that Nixon, during his campaign, “undoubtedly will emphasize order in the cities, for that is his best issue… he thinks he can tame the ghettos and then reconstruct them, and he may very well make reconciliation with the Negro community impossible in the process.”

  Reston’s analysis was correct. To Nixon and his cronies, running a successful campaign meant appeasing white fear by promising to enforce law and order by any means, thus creating the illusion of security. As journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, “promise death, and the election is yours. A vote for Hell in the Land of Liberty, with its over one million prisoners, is the ticket to victory.”

  Nixon—who once told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “Henry, leave the niggers to Bill and we’ll take care of the rest of the world,” and complained to Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman that Great Society programs were a waste “because blacks were genetically inferior to whites”—would take office in January 1969, immediately setting in motion a vicious system responsible for much of what we see today.

  Before Nixon could “tame the ghetto,” he would first have to prepare the troops. As president, he immediately allocated millions of dollars to local police forces and heightened the federal government’s role in local policing. In addition, police departments across the country drastically changed their training policies. Prior to this period, about half of the states in the United States didn’t have literacy requirements for their officers and, on average, barbers and hairstylists spent triple the amount of time training than cops did. As Daryl Gates, who would be the chief of the LAPD during the Rodney King beating and uprising that followed the trial, noted in a 1968 article, “the police of America have not been overwhelmingly successful in their control of riots,” and he even acknowledged that their initial efforts to “tame the ghettos” were “pretty awful.”

  Nixon would respond with a plan to not only control, but to profit, as well. Nixon’s presidential crime commission found that most police departments “were not organized in accordance with well-established principles of modern business management.” Police departments around the country, starting with the LAPD, sent high-ranking officers to study business management at Ford, Rockwell, IBM, and Union Oil. Funded by the LEAA (Law Enforcement Alliance of America), police departments set up management development centers and began to embark on a campaign against the ghettos of America—one that would be gross, robust, and, because it was now in tune with “business management,” highly profitable.

  Nixon’s system, in which he was able to target blacks while appearing not to, was the War on Drugs, a phrase he coined to describe his new design to enhance drug prohibition. Nixon characterized the abuse of illicit substances as “America’s public enemy number one.” However, this war didn’t target whites who statistically used drugs at a much more alarming rate, but rather Blacks in the ghettos. Instead of fighting the causes of crime or drug use, they made sentences abnormally long and mandatory and transformed correctional institutions into punishment warehouses for the poor and Black. This Molotov cocktail of fear, brutality, and power ignited a prison boom unmatched in the history of the world. When the late Tupac Shakur rhymes in “Changes,” “Instead of a war on poverty / They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me,” he is, some twenty-five years later, responding to Nixon who declared, “I say that doubling the conviction rate in this country would do more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for Humphrey’s war on poverty.” And with that brutal logic, the onslaught began.

  Passed the Rockefeller laws to make us all State Prop

  Feds handin’ out bids startin’ 15 a pop.

  — DEAD PREZ FEATURING DIVINE, “BABY FACE,”

  TURN OFF THE RADIO: THE MIXTAPE VOL. 2

  In 1973, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller would follow Nixon’s lead by introducing the Rockefeller drug laws, which would prescribe a mandatory fifteen-year prison sentence for possessing small amounts of narcotics. To understand the effects of a law like this on the Black community, consider that in New York State between 1817 and 1981, a total of thirty-three prisons were erected. And then from 1982 to 1999, thirty-eight more prisons were constructed. New York’s prison population during the Attica rebellions in 1971 was 12,500. By 1999, there were over 71,000 incarcerated and today that number has almost doubled.

  The introduction of crack into Black neighborhoods in the eighties was accompanied by a series of new legislation—The Omnibus Crime Bill (1984), Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986), and the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1988)—designed to make existing laws even harsher and more unjust. The racism apparent in these laws, which are still in place, troubles the soul. For instance, although crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the same drug, possession of only five grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence; however, it takes five hundred grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence. Moreover, crack cocaine is the only drug for which the first offense of simple possession can trigger a federal mandatory minimum sentence. Yet simple possession of any quantity of any other substance by a first-time offender—including powder cocaine—is a misdemeanor offense punishable by a maximum of one year in prison. With 90 percent of those convicted in federal court for crack cocaine being Black, these laws were targeted at our communities. As Holly Sklar writes in “Reinforcing Racism with War on Drugs,” “By government count, more than 24 million Americans, mostly White, have used marijuana, cocaine or some other illicit drug in the past year. Imagine if the war on drugs targeted Whites in the suburbs instead of Blacks and Latinos in inner-city neighborhoods. Imagine if undercover cops were routinely sent to predominantly White schools and colleges to sell drugs.”

  Niggaz ain’t scrappin’, they bangin’ ya

  The Judge don’t need a tree branch when they hangin’ ya.

  — STYLES P FEATURING J—HOOD, “G—JOINT,” TIME IS MONEY

  Even as the national crime rate declined, these racist policies were ratcheted up during the Clinton era and can be seen in legislation like the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, which appropriated $10 billion solely for prison construction. In addition, mandatory minimums grew harsher. Although politicians argued that the extended prison sentences were set aside for the worst-of-the-worst criminals, the reality is dramatically different. In 1980, there were 40,000 drug offenders in prison. Today that number has ballooned to over 500,000. The vast majority of these offenders, African-Americans and Latinos, are drug users who simply need rehab rather than punishment. Many others, who may have been caught selling drugs, are petty pawns, “not the kingpins of the drug trade,” but rather impoverished “low-level sellers who are incarcerated and rapidly replaced on the streets by others seeking economic gain,” says Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a national organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice by promoting both reforms and alternatives to incarceration.

  Every crime I did was petty

  Every criminal is rich already.

  — THE COUP, “EVERYTHANG,” PARTY MUSIC

  Although it is often made to appear on the fringes, the observation and analysis of the gross injustices that riddle the current system have maintained a steady presence in the mainstream. In the mid-nineties, a USA Today special report on the War on Drugs acknowledged, among a myriad of other injustices, that:

  The War on Drugs has, in many places, been fought mainly against blacks…. Tens of thousands of arrests—mostly in the inner-city—resulted from dragnets with paramilitary names. Operation Pressure Point in New York City. Operation Thunderbolt in Memphis. Operation Hammer in Los Angeles… “We don’t have whites on corners selling drugs… They’re in houses and offices,” says police chief John Dale of Albany, N.Y., where blacks are eight times as likely as whites to be arrested for drugs…. “We’re locking up kids who are scrambling for crumbs, not the people w
ho make big money.”

  Or, perhaps Nino Brown (played by Wesley Snipes), the leader of the Cash Money Brothers in the 1991 Mario Van Peebles film New Jack City, said it best:

  I’m not guilty. You’re the one that’s guilty. The lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords, all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just like you did with alcohol during the prohibition. You’re the one who’s guilty. I mean, c’mon, let’s kick the ballistics here: Ain’t no Uzis made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing is bigger than Nino Brown. This is big business. This is the American way.

  Nino was right. Historically, it has been the “American way” to subjugate, murder, and oppress people of color. The War on Drugs, often fittingly described as the “War on Us,” proves no different. Chilling evidence of this can be seen if we look at New York, where African-Americans and Latinos comprise 25 percent of the total population, but 83 percent of all state prisoners and 94 percent of all those convicted of drug offenses.

  It’s crucial to understand that “the typical cocaine user is white, male, a high school graduate employed full time and living in a small metropolitan area or suburb,” admits former drug czar William Bennett. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that African-Americans constitute about 14 percent of the drug-using population, 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of all drug convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions on drug offenses. As the Los Angeles Times concluded, “Although it is clear that whites sell most of the nation’s cocaine and account for 80% of its consumers, it is Blacks and other minorities who continue to fill up America’s courtrooms and jails.”

  Got a law for raw niggaz now, playa what it be like?

  When will niggaz see they got us bleedin’ with three strikes.

  — TUPAC SHAKUR, “MILITARY MINDS,” BETTER DAYZ

  In the early 1990s, with crack drenching deep into the ghettos of America, the federal government and twenty-three states ratcheted up the mandatory-minimum concept another notch by passing “three strikes” laws dictating prison sentences of twenty-five years to life for third felonies. These laws have undoubtedly taken some violent offenders out of circulation—but they have also handed out life sentences to thousands of people for petty crimes such as possession or stealing a spare tire.

  Not only did the War on Drugs lock up an inhumane amount of Blacks, but it ensured that they would stay in jail for abnormally long periods of time. Now, “it’s less about more people going in than about people staying longer,” says Allen Beck, chief of the Corrections Statistics Program at the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Take, for example, California’s three-strikes law, which eliminates the possibility of parole for repeat offenders and mandates life in prison for persons found guilty of three felony convictions. The Sentencing Project reports that one out of every eleven people imprisoned are serving life, 25 percent of them without parole. Many of these people are in jail for nonviolent drug crimes, minor robberies or thefts, or are found guilty by association. In California, for example, more people are serving life in prison under the three-strikes law for simple marijuana possession than for kidnapping, murder, and rape combined. Further, under three strikes, more people have been sentenced for drug possession than for violent offenses. To give a personal example, when I was a graduate student at UCLA, I was the editor-in-chief for Nommo. Nommo, a newsmagazine founded in 1968 at the height of the Black liberation struggle, is a historic institution and the first non-HBCU newsmagazine for Black students. Every day, without fail, at least two dozen letters like this one would arrive:

  READ ME READ ME READ ME!

  In 1994, I was convicted and sentenced to serve a (40) year to life prison term, pursuant to the then (new) “Three Strike Law.” I received this sentence for the theft of a bicycle.

  I am guilty of the theft of the bicycle, but not to the tune of a (40) year to life prison term.

  In all my years I have never hurt any one, there are white prisoners here to whom have killed two or three people, yet they do not suffer the sentence that I must.

  READ ME READ ME READ ME!

  Tragically, stories like this were/are common. Moreover, these stories are not exclusive to adults.

  They put kids in Jail, for a life they ain’t even get to start

  That’s murder too, and it’s breaking my heart,

  It’s breaking our nation apart.

  — TALIB KWELI, “JOY,” QUALITY

  Even more tragic, more horrifying, is that the onslaught on poor African-Americans and Latinos begins early. According to the Justice Department, African-American youths are six times more likely to be sentenced to prison than white youths. For youths charged with drug offenses, African-Americans are forty-eight times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison and serve more time once there. Consider, for example, the unconscionable case of fourteen-year-old Shaquanda Cotton. She explains:

  I am a 14-year-old black freshman who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun and was sentenced to 7 years in prison. I have no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor—a 58-year-old teacher’s aide—was not seriously injured. I was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until I turn 21.

  To illustrate how deeply entrenched judicial racism is, consider the fact that just three months before Cotton’s sentencing, Judge Superville sentenced a fourteen-year-old white girl who was convicted of arson to probation. Fortunately, a national campaign led by Cotton’s mother generated media interest and after a year, after support from the NAACP and other groups, Cotton was released after serving one year. For every Cotton, and she is still a victim, there are hundreds of thousands of others who, despite unfair trials and sentences, are never released.

  Cases like Michael Lewis, an African-American from a ghetto in Atlanta, who at thirteen years old was arrested for a murder that a mountain of evidence suggests he did not commit. At the time of his arrest he was a ward of the state, but Michael was never assisted by Child Protection Services or even read his Miranda rights.

  “We are going to try this boy like a man,” declared D.A. Paul Howard at the onset of the trial. Tried as an adult under Georgia Senate Bill 440, which allows children aged thirteen to seventeen to be prosecuted and sentenced as adults for certain offenses, Michael was sentenced, after a mere three-day trial, to life in prison at the age of fourteen. This, despite the fact that the only evidence against Michael was the testimony of an admitted drug dealer and murder suspect; despite the lack of forensic evidence; despite not interviewing or subpoenaing any of Michael’s alibi witnesses; and despite the fact that Michael’s public defender was facing his own criminal charges. Despite all of this, Michael, at fourteen years old, was taken to Lee Arrendale State Prison, a maximum security adult prison. Michael’s case is not unique. Since Bill 440 was passed, 94 percent of the children tried and convicted under this law have been African-American. Michael rhymes in reflection: “The streets raised me / jail enslaved me.”

  The enslavement that Michael speaks of is a keen observation and one of the critical components to this crisis. Many have been writing, saying, singing, speaking, and hollering that the current crisis is a form of enslavement. You cannot have any real discussion of the modern-day prison industrial complex without addressing the economic component. Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, director of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that “when you lock up millions of brothers, you have reinstituted the institution of slavery.”

  Although most people believe that slavery was abolished in the United States after the Civil War by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, it wasn’t. The Thirteenth Amendment reads:

  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exis
t within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

  Clearly, the Thirteenth Amendment was not about abolishing slavery, but rather limiting it to prisoners. After the Civil War, many freshly “free” Africans found themselves enslaved once again as prisoners leased out to plantation owners to work fields of cotton for free.

  We used to run around tryna’ get money and power

  Look at us now, gettin’ fuckin’ twelve cents a hour.

  — OSCHINO, “JAIL LETTERS,” BEST OF OSCHINO

  “Prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation or pay,” explains Linda Evans, a prisoner in California. Since the Supreme Court’s 1993 ruling that inmates did not have the right to minimum wage, corporations such as American Airlines, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, and Toys “R” Us have exploited and continue to exploit prisoners to meet their bottom line. Prison labor allows corporations to boast “Made in the U.S.A.” while paying paltry wages that are even lower than the slave wages doled out in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America. This has made prison labor a cost-effective alternative to relocation. And because of this fact, the number of prison inmates working in prison industries between 1972 and 1992 shot up by 300 percent, from 169,000 to 523,000. Put another way, the prison industry hires more people than any Fortune 500 company, with the exception of General Motors. Prisons profit so much from leasing out their prisoners to corporations that they’ve even begun ad campaigns like the following one from Wisconsin: