I just had one of those experiences when people in the room are saying, "White people are always.... You know, they're white so..... Why do they (white people) do that thing.....?"
The thing is, I'm Anglo. So it was a little odd. Due to my education and penchant for reading, I am aware of white privilege as something I get to walk around in like a protective shield or mobile force field. I am reading The New Jim Crow and I get so angry and discouraged at the same time that I can only read short sections before I need a break. I am not saying this to make myself out some kind of saint, or someone who deeply understands what it means to be Black in the USA. This is not about me wanting to take on some hip hop identity or co-opt Black culture....or save anybody.
Since I am just as culpable, take for instance what I think of white boys listening to misogynistic rap with the bass amp making the car bounce and sounding echoes off the houses on the road.... To visit that judgment for a moment, they could've picked country music, plenty of patriarchy and non-feminist texts there, so why the rap industrial complex? Maybe it speaks to something that they need, besides the overt wealth and hyper masculinity.
I just don't think we are going to get anywhere--from any 'side'--if we talk about those (identifier) people instead of meeting up with a person who has all sorts of complexity, including the construct of race. Or age, or immigration status, or gender, or sexual orientation, or weight, or education, or class, and so on. This is not some new mega-idea of course, but each of us can take ideas in our lives when they become needed and give them substance by pulling them into praxis.
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