Orals … Head … Genius: The Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure of Hard Core

Abstract

There are “blk / puritans” among us, Sonia Sanchez wrote in a poem from We a BaddDDD People (1970); and they would have us believe that “the word fuck / u / mutha fucka” is “evil” (Sanchez 1970, 17). The Black Arts Movement poet mocks these puritans by saying they came “straight off the boat” called the Mayflower. It was the great orator Malcolm X who would most famously and forcefully remind us that there were no Black folk landing on “Plymouth Rock” in New England, among the original, white puritans who came to colonize North America; genocide “Indians” (“Native Americans”); and enslave Africans for centuries. Although they present themselves to history as seekers of freedom, they wrest freedom away from non-Europeans in the name of their freedom. Their Puritanism has since become synonymous not simply with a specific religious sect (i.e., Calvinism, Presbyterianism, or Protestantism), but with social conservatism in general and sexual repression in particular. For there to be “blk / puritans,” then, there must be some Black people, some elite class of Blacks, who imitate the puritans who enslave or oppress them. They do so in large part by denouncing the masses of Black people and the Black culture of resistance that will scream “fuck / u / mutha fucka” in the face of white racist power. It is not this language of Black folk that is “evil,” consequently, in We a BaddDDD People; it is “WITE / AMURICA” or its society of oppression that is “the only original sin” (17).

Lil’ Kim, keep messin’ niggas’ heads up with your nasty self.

(Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot, Supa Dupa Fly’s “THANK YOU’S” [1997])

Take your genius lifestyle and flaunt it! … We’re geniuses and proud of the fact that our intelligence is accumulated outside totalitarian regimes.

(Nightjohn, The Hiphop Driven Life: A Genius Liberation Handbook [2005])

You neva seen this stroke o’ genius: [I] put tha cleanest, meanest lips on ya…

(Lil’ Kim, The Notorious K.I.M.’s “How Many Licks?” [Remix] [2001])