Abstract
“If you don’t want to get shot by the police… keep your ass out of stolen cars!!!” These fiery words served as the rhetorical climax in a sermon delivered from the pulpit of a prominent African American church in the United States. This message came in response to community unrest around the latest in a string of police shootings that sent yet another young black man to an early grave. Just prior to these remarks, the preacher had rebuffed the calls of the activist community for a massive demonstration of protest against the police department. “I’m not marching!” he thundered emphatically. “This is the wrong poster boy for social justice. He’s a criminal! He’s a thug…!” In subsequent sermons over the next several months, the minister continued to insist that what African Americans need in this moment is not so much a renewed Civil Rights Movement, but a radical Civil Responsibility Movement.
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Notes
Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 21.
For an excellent treatment of “gangsta rap,” as a subgenre of hip-hop that emerged in the late 1980s giving voice to the violence of the urban landscape, as experienced by marginalized black youth, see Eithne Quinn’s Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
In The Hip Hop Wars, cultural critic and American Studies professor Tricia Rose explains “debates about hip hop have come to stand in for serious discussions about race, gender, sexuality and black culture.” See Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (New York: Basic Civitas, 2002). Ricky L. Jones takes this further, arguing that too many (both black and white) reductionistically assume, hip-hop culture is black culture. See “Before and Beyond Don Imus: On BET, Hip Hop Culture and their Consequences,” in What’s Wrong with Obamamania: Black America, Black Leadership, and the Death of Political Imagination (New York: SUNY Press, 2008).
For an introduction to scholarship on moral panics, see Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics: Key Terms (New York: Routledge, 1998).
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. xxxv.
For more on the role of black elite and the public policing of the black underclass, see Cathy J. Cohen. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). In particular, see her chapters “The Boundaries of Black Politics” and “Marginalization: Power, Identity, and Membership.” For the role of the “Black church” in this policing and marginalization, see “Willing to Serve, but Not to Lead.”
The use of “the hip-hop generation” as a way of describing those who have come of age in the post-Civil Rights Movement era, was popularized by Bikari Kitwana in his book, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (New York: Basic Civitas, 2002). Kitwana defines this generation as those born between 1965 and 1984. These dates are highly contested, as Kitwana recognizes, but nevertheless serve as a guide for thinking about those whose cultural context and sense of identity has been highly influence by the rise and eventual globalization of rap music and hip-hop culture.
Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post—Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 128.
See Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008).
Adolph Reed, Jr. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 167–170.
See S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. x—xi.
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© 2014 R. Drew Smith, William Ackah, and Anthony G. Reddie
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McCormack, M.B. (2014). Black Churches, Moral Panic, and the Empowerment of Black Youth in the Era of Hip-Hop. In: Smith, R.D., Ackah, W., Reddie, A.G. (eds) Churches, Blackness, and Contested Multiculturalism. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386380_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386380_18
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