Mass Black incarceration was the general white population’s answer to the Sixties movement. We can say this with certainty, since the vast racial disparities in imprisonment obtain in every state and locality in the U.S., without exception, and all data show that the movement to put ever increasing numbers of Blacks behind bars began in the early Seventies. Naturally, a horrific cycle of social disintegration was set in motion in Black communities, nationwide. But one would not know it from the popular Black music of the late Seventies, inspired by the rising fortunes of Black businessperson-musicians, producers and media owners. “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now – we’re on the move,” they proclaimed – and many of us wanted to hear it, even if it were only true for a few. “Celebrate Good Times, come on…it’s a celebration.”
“Hip Hop’s ascension in the eighties and nineties threw the black elite’s world into crisis.”
Black youth could stand this insane crap no longer. They were rotating in and out of jail, jobs were long gone, yet the Black elite were celebrating. Hip Hop was invented, thanks to newly available, cheap technology. The social divide that the Black elite had welcomed as the terms of conditional acceptance into the larger society, was finally answered by a mass Black youth cultural response: fuck you and your bougie music, too.
The Black leadership classes were shocked at the crude rebuff by the cultural shamans of the Black masses, who with their numbers, energy and percolating genius had earlier fueled the movement that enabled the elite’s breakout from the common Negro condition. Hip Hop ascension in the Eighties and Nineties (code for low class Black folk “actin’ out”) threw the Black elite’s world into confusion. The elite response has been insufficient, and dishonest. Any fool can see that Black people are in crisis, felt most keenly by the youth, yet elite leadership offers nothing but condescension and slogans that they, themselves, betrayed in the aftermath of King’s death, when the movement was disbanded. As we wrote on June 24 of last year, there is a solution: “There Needs to be a Movement”: