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Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:
A couple of folks were asking for a crunk response to Ashley Judd's memoir passages and the resulting controversy. Judd is being called to task for singling out rap music as the "contemporary soundtrack of misogyny." You can read her words here.
There are lots of responses that you can check out but I want to say something about the folks who defend Judd's words with "Well, She has a point."
Black women have been talking about (and back to) misogyny in hip-hop since it's inception. Y'all remember Roxanne Shanté right?
It's frustrating when all the work that black women have done to speak back to music that has particular, real world consequences in our lives is ommitted and unacknowledged. We've also done this talking back with an analysis of the systemic forces that make black men/rap music the scape goats for societal oppression of women. I know it's a personal narrative, but can some hip-hop feminist foremothers get a shout out?
If we can all turn to the Ten Crunk Commandments for Re-Invigorating Hip Hop Feminist Studies, we'll see that the first commandment reminds us to "know and cite" authors who have shaped the field of hip-hop feminism. This commandment doesn't just apply to Judd but also to some of her defenders. If you are going to defend her position, can you cite the black women who have actually done work on the issue in scholarship, film, and action? The "she has a point" camp feels dismissive of decades of resistance and carefully crafted projects by hip-hop feminists and activists.
Rap music's connection to rape culture and misogyny is real explicit. Its visible and repetitve invocations of gendered violence voiced by black and brown men make it an easy target. But by only focusing our attention there, we miss the larger picture of a white supremacist capitalist (hetero)patriarchal society that supports rap's bad rap. It's not a coincidence that we don't know the names of the white men who sign the checks that rappers' cash. Four major music labels account for almost 80% of the industry and not one CEO is a person of color (…and the white man get paid off of all of that).
The gendered violence that Judd experienced in her own life was not accompanied by thumping bass or autotune. To return to the commandments, if Judd had contextualized and situated her comments within her own lived reality, would rap music makes sense as the soundtrack to the misogyny she and the women closest to her have experienced or are experiencing?
CF Esha's last three posts provide important context for how gendered violence is a social issue that goes so much deeper than music. She points to international military attacks by the U.S., national and state legislation, along with a moral cultural war that work in concert to oppress women, and women of color most specifically.
I am a big fan of holding rappers accountable for their misogyny. Trust. But I also want to push for white folks to hold each other accountable for the ways in which they perpetuate systems of oppression in culture writ large. I'm interested to read the whole book to see how she understands white culture's impact on the way she experienced violence. She mentions the soundtrack but what about the movie itself?
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