Letters to the Editor
Subtext
Published Letters: 8
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@ one guy
[Read the article: Crazy for Jay-Z]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]if your criticism of hip hop is that it is actively exerting a negative moral influence on people, you are then implying that those people are incapable of making a distinction between the music they listen to and their own moral compass. and that both is insulting and vastly inaccurate (being based on sweeping generalizations and all). if you don't think those things are true, then you can hardly argue that any negative influence is had.
this also implies that hip hop would not be objectionable if it served as a moralizing force. and that is what i was responding to initially. because again, when black art does NOT serve to moralize, people have a problem with it as there's a long-standing american assumption that a black audience requires moral instruction and to do anything besides that leads to moral corruption (i.e actively immoralizing).
that hip hop does not conform to mainstream america's norms is a good thing. it's raw, unfiltered, uncensored artistic expression, like it or not. and you don't have to like it but you gotta at least be fair. you (and many others who share your p.o.v.) are putting a burden on hip hop that no one would see fit to put on any other artform, period. and that's what i'm taking issue with.
now there's plenty of hip hop that takes stances i don't agree with but it can still be utterly visceral and fantastic art. one of the members of the roots once said that hip hop is the biggest middle finger black america has given to american society since the blues. i tend to agree with that sentiment and i think that's one of the things that's made it so important. if there's one thing in mainstream american that desperately needs to be challenged, it's the moral grandiosity that has led this country (and blinded it as well) to its greatest historical and moral shames.
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@SmilaBee
[Read the article: Ron Paul won't return white supremacist's $500]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you for so perfectly stating what's at issue here. I'm not sure which is worse: Ron Paul making excuses for accepting the money or his supporters making excuses for why it's reasonable (hint: it ain't).
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I only got through two pages so maybe I shouldn't comment but
[Read the article: What role did race play with white Democrats?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]this 'round table' (read: mostly circular jabbering) coulda been reduced to the portion about defection rates. The rest is (unsurprisingly) about as willfully blind as three white guys talking about racism can be. This is the 2nd time this week I've had "Edit your account" open in another tab about to delete my Salon account. Y'all are on thin ice with me. Do better.
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@Joan Walsh
[Read the article: The other 18 million]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"We saw the face of the angry white female backlash against Obama over the weekend, and it was hard not to turn away. On Friday, Geraldine Ferraro complained in a Boston Globe Op-Ed that she's been demonized for saying that Obama's presidential run benefited from his being black, and called her treatment "reverse racism." On Saturday, Harriet Christian replaced Ferraro as the overwrought voice of white female resentment. There she was at the Democratic National Committee meeting, screaming at reporters that Democrats were about to nominate "an inadequate black male who would not have been running had it not been a white woman that was running for president."
Beyond Christian's deplorable reference to Obama as an "inadequate black male" was a wail worth hearing."
Joan, I've been an avid Salon.com reader and subscriber since 2001 and I've posted in comments maybe four times. I barely write cuz they'd get buried in 300+ replies so I suspect this will never be read by, well, anybody, but this time, I'm kinda mad, a little hurt, and mostly disappointed in you and by extension, Salon.com.
The passage above is where you lost me. You use both of these examples uncritically and tellingly leave unsaid that Ferraro's complaint is without merit and an utter distortion of her own asinine comments about the role Obama’s race played in his campaign and the successes of his campaign. The same is true of Harriet Christian. Both smack of the old sentiment of not wanting to "see Sambo walk into the kingdom first" and neither is, in fact, a wail worth hearing.
Ferraro is first and foremost a victim of her own words. You'd think she'd learn to choose them more wisely by now, especially invoking "reverse-racism" when in fact, she's been taken to task for saying something both untrue and inexcusable. And for all of Christian's mean-spiritedness and vitriol, her words are senseless. Obama's candidacy was in no way contingent upon Hillary's and even if it was, he won, so how inadequate can he really be? It only threatens her if she, well, feels entitled to walk into the kingdom first, as it were. Is that what I'm supposed to be hearing in that wail? There appears to be little else really there.
If the assertion is that it's hard out here for a middle-aged white woman, neither they or you are gonna convince this thirtysomething black man by parroting such patently racist statements. You're also not gonna have me as a subscriber anymore.
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@Amerigo
[Read the article: The mix master]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you for providing the basic understandings that Gary Kamiya's article didn't seem to grasp. Between the gleeful blindness to that and the "Barack is not an ordinary black man" line, I was really about to lose my shit. How can this "painful but necessary exploration of the real meaning of race in America" happen when it's initiated by such dunderheaded articles?