Common sense. Simple common sense.
I’m rereading Chuck Klosterman’s IV and just got through with the article about Mike Skinner, the mastermind and uniquely prophetic proprietor of the Streets. Now, I don’t want to get into anything serious here but it’s hard to avoid exploring one piece of the interview that really caught my attention. Keep in mind that the article was written back in 2003, and Skinner’s personal philosophy may have changed in the presence of money and fame; but without question, the subject matter of what I’m about to discuss is totally as prevalent today as it was then.
The context actually comes from Klosterman’s inclusion of an extraneous quote by Nelson George, the author of Hip-Hop in America. I’m paraphrasing here: rap in America is all about race, while rap in the UK is all about class. But Skinner suggests that class doesn’t exist in Britain anymore, at least not within the collective consciousness of common England. He claims in the interview that his lyrics aren’t about class, but rather his life, the best he can express it musically. (Truth be told, I feel the loneliness and depression of working-class life in his music, but the beats are so beautiful that they create a silver lining that, at times, almost spills over into the reality of the situation.)
It’s pretty peculiar to think about the argument of race versus class, and how England’s biggest proponents of the problem are the royal family and their various offshoots. Other than that, almost nobody even considers its existence anymore. A society that hinged on a strict caste system for hundreds of years has transcended the very concept of class within the last century (and maybe even faster). What’s more, it’s been replaced by a lax, unpressured factor of coexistence. And nobody forced it to happen but rather simply dismissed the previous hierarchy as it grew more and more antiquated.
Considering all that, a new question comes into focus: is the problem of race any more serious? And even if so, if the problem of class is all but defunct in the UK, why the hell are Americans still talking about race like it’s 1962?
I wonder about the cause of this rift. When you compare the psychographic nature of each country, the US and the UK aren’t all that different. There’s a healthy mix of ethnicities in large cities and an unhealthy discrepancy between the financial classes, and we both have similar laws and corrections systems; yet (and I have to look up more concrete statistical data for this) there are far more black criminals per capita in America—I think it’s one in every nine—filling up the prisons far faster and costing the government (read: your tax dollars) far more than it would to educate every young person in an underprivileged situation. So where’s the problem stemming from?
Hip-hop is a big part of it, in my opinion. While rappers—both black and white—create music that is overtly race-centric, they elongate what dissolution could be happening among various races and perpetuate racism in its purest form. I’m not a racist—in that I consider every race to be equally capable and genuinely critical for the positive growth of humanity—but that doesn’t mean that I’m likely to ever start thinking about white and black people as exactly the same or start describing them with purely egalitarian terminology. And that’s not a problem, no matter how much the current American socio-political subconscious tells us it is. The truth is, people are all fucking different; and it’s a result of every environmental qualifier possible, ethnicity included. And while hip-hop is a major proponent of this unending stigma, there are political and religious leaders with incredible reach whose followers can’t help but subscribe to this counter-productive dogma and obsessive-compulsive racism after hearing their beautiful, powerfully worded sermons and speeches.
Of course, the problem is not in our inherent differences, but the ongoing quest to make everyone the same—or worse, to ignore our differences. We want everyone to get along, but it’s not in our nature. We want everyone to think the same way, but without individualistic (or at least environmentally-bred) ideals, art would cease to exist. We talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence and how robots are going to take over the world as soon as they learn to think independently of our control; but governments and globalist corporations do just as much to robotize humans as tech companies do to humanize robots*. And while none of this is even remotely possible, the powers that be continue to blindly pursue the homogenization of the American people through Protestantism and manifest destiny propaganda.
I don’t usually think about race; but that’s not to say I’m any more enlightened than the next guy. I have to believe that I haven’t been exposed to enough racial disparity in my life (I grew up in some of the whitest areas of the country, for God’s sake) to know much about its real affect on the American cultural landscape, except that it’s pretty significant. And I’m not using this entry as an excuse to preach against the evident flaws in civil rights as they exist today…although I could fire off a few. The idea here is to present a situation in which idiosyncratic paradigms of an entire society have given way to understanding and, in a strange way, indifference. In England, people don’t concern themselves with class because it doesn’t matter. So why do we continue to let the problems facing America be race-related? They aren’t really…the system is simply so stagnantly archaic that nobody is willing to appreciate the differences between races.
It’s not a hard thought: rock and roll is a black invention, and some of the best rock musicians are white. Poetry has long been a white European medium (aside from the ubiquitous East Asian faction), and some of the best contemporary poets are black. It’s this whole symbiosis that pushes the status of art forward and will continue to, so long as we don’t keep trying to quash the differences between us.
I’m glad I don’t understand people who come from different backgrounds. If I understood them nothing would excite me. My naivety gives me all the more reason to appreciate the art, the insight, the culture and the struggle of anyone who’s experienced life differently from me. It’s my opportunity to explore cultures operating on a level that I can only hope to understand but never will; and that—the continual exploration of humanity—is the most beautiful human quality of all. *Side note: check out the Honda robot because it is completely insane!
3 years ago