“The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of others.”
-James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown”
“I don’t think they ever noticed that I noticed it.”
-Vince Staples, “Nate”
These days I am tempted to write blog posts that consist of nothing but James Baldwin quotes, or excerpts from by Vince Staples’ verses. Why? Because these writers, among others, have already given us sufficient answers to the questions about race and poverty and drugs and violence posed every day in the mass media and endlessly debated by celebrities, commentators, and celebrity commentators. In the case of Baldwin, he published the essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” in the July 1960 issue of Esquire. Today, 55 years later, I look at America, and wonder if anyone ever read it. In the case of Staples, I listen to his music and hear a more cogent, clear analysis than anything offered by the army of “analysts” on TV and the internet.
For the most part, America did not read Baldwin’s essay, just as most of America does not listen to Staples, these being just two of many black voices that have answered so many of our perennial questions about race. The reasons we continue to debate these questions are numerous, but at the heart of all this activity is this: we often debate the questions as if they are complex because we don’t want to hear the actual, rather simple, horrifying answers. The crime of our public conversations on race, police brutality, white privilege, etc. is that one can walk away from the debate thinking that the answer to the questions are a mystery, that we can say nothing definitive, that they are all a matter of more or less vehemently argued opinion. The work of Baldwin, Staples, and others who carry on the American prophetic tradition, leaves no room for such disingenuous debates. Baldwin said “The situation of our youth is not mysterious,” and he was right. And since he explained it, it has been explained to us again and again. Tupac explained it to us, Chuck D explained it to us, Treach explained it to us, in poetry of such ferocious beauty and vulnerability, unmatched nearly anywhere else in American literature. The problem is not a lack of explanations, but the fact that many Americans aren’t interested in listening, and have deep interests (material, social, cultural, psychic) in not listening. (For more on why this is, which I don’t address here, see the works listed at then end of this piece).
If you want to understand what’s happening to black children across America right now, born at the nexus of so many crosshairs they border on crosshatching, listen to Vince Staples. A poet of crystalline, cinematic vision combined with some of the most sobering reflections on being the son of an addict/dealer under the War on Drugs regime. On Common’s “Kingdom,” a far more revolutionary track than the lauded and rather safe (hence popular and lovable) “Glory,” Staples recalls “We still wading in the water/ Cocaine, blunts marinating in the water/ Lena took a puff and then she passed it to my father/ Used to take the bullets out so I could play with the revolver.” He filters the child’s innocence and naïveté, as well as the child’s outsized capacity for feeling terror, through the structural oppressions sculpting his parent’s life chances, and thus his own. Because his father is a “felon and parolee,” a drug dealer and an addict, Staples has traumatic experiences that no child would choose, though society will hold him responsible as an adult (often by the age of about 15 for black males) for its post-traumatic effects: “Black bandana on his arm, needle in his hand/ Momma trying to wake him up/ Young so I ain’t understand why she wouldn’t let my daddy sleep.”
But even though his dad drinks, smokes, rages, beats his mother, and invites “junkies with the sour face” into their home, the most terrifying of all forces knocking at his screen door, by far, is the “Police knocking at my door/ Pretending nobody hear ‘em/ Police knockin down my door with judicial system’s permission/ Contraband in where we livin/ Hope I don’t get thrown away.” With “pots on top of the furnace” and “Glocks on top of the kitchen,” every time the police come near, he’s faced with the prospect of his father going back to prison, and the possibility of losing his family as he’s thrown into the maelstrom of child protective services, foster care, and the like. Of course, with the way trauma works, every knock at the door could be the police, and thus that banging sound, whether a neighbor or friend or random addict, can evoke that monumental terror every time.
Beginning with the word “hope” in the lines above, a child’s vocal track begins doubling Vince’s vocals, and we are reminded that the war on drugs is a war that traumatizes children and alienates them from our dominant institutions. At the same time, Staples is not simply reiterating what we already know; he updates critical narratives within hip hop culture. From the opening of the song, he’s situating himself within a tradition while pushing it forward. His prelude “You are about to witness the strength of narcotics” is an allusion to the opening of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton”: “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” Staples does not need to directly critique police brutality and the state’s routine abuses of its monopoly on violence, because his forebears have already done so. Staples builds on their foundation to detail the constellation of childhood traumas caused by state violence and its long-term effects on the subjectivity of the adult.
The opening hook that immediately follows the prelude is another revision. “Who’s that peakin in my screen do’/ I got what you need what you fiend fo’” is a scramble of Goodie Mob’s hook on their paranoid masterpiece, “Cell Therapy”: “Who’s that peakin in my window, POW!/ Nobody now.” Unlike Goodie Mob, Staples is helpless against the forces that impinge upon his domestic space, as his father invites inside the mysterious, dangerous characters lurking about. In many Staples tracks, guns symbolize the desire for a sense of power and control over one’s environment, appearing as a toy in some places, and in other places as a self-defense tool against actual tyranny. On Earl Sweatshirt’s “Hive,” Staples’ is “Strapped up long as the chief of police armed,” as he embodies a character that is both a terror to America and an effect of the country’s structural oppression: “Come around, we gun ‘em down/ Bodies piled/ Auschwitz/ Bulletproof outfits/ Weapons concealed, I’m ready to kill/ So test it, all my weapons is real/ Selling thizz, couldn’t tell em what the recipe is/ Got em wishin that they never gave these weapons to kids.” The violence of the most deadly of death camps was organized, industrialized racialized violence; the racialized violence in southern California is also industrialized, organized, almost predictable, and definitely a functional part of an expanding law enforcement infrastructure and booming prison industry. The final line reminds us that, ultimately, adults are responsible for this violence, for the environments that children live in, for what ends up in their hands. As Baldwin put it, “these are all our children. We will all profit by, or pay for, what they become.”
For all the critical acclaim bombarding Kendrick Lamar, I would say that Staples is the most poetic and prophetic of a new crop of young LA emcees who sustain that most necessary of West Coast rap problematics: laying claim to the paradox of a full black humanity, exercising the All-American rights to bear and use arms in self-defense and pre-emptive offense, and doing both with fearlessness and abandon. This is political feeling and voice on the other side of a nostalgic Civil Rights Movement respectability; it is what happens when a generation of black children with nothing to lose cease being concerned primarily with what white people think of them and instead prioritize their own human flourishment. This poetry is so indispensable to the American democratic project because it explains the root causes of social problems while refusing the false choice between individual agency and systemic oppression. These emcees assert that they have an individual character and they make choices—in a word, they are human—and that those choices are made within a limited range whose boundaries are set by the social collective to which they both belong and have been excluded from.
Staples’ work distills the world and worldview of the black child as described by Baldwin in a New York Times piece published in July 1979, just a few months before “Rapper’s Delight” would make its radio debut and give birth to commercial rap music. As the ebonics debate raged, Baldwin characteristically cut through the static dominating the national conversation to the heart of the issue, which America was, characteristically, denying. This is why so many conversations about race are so convoluted and confused in the United States: we have not yet fully absorbed our own history and acknowledged that white supremacy was and is a fundamental structuring ideology of the nation. When we refuse to acknowledge this, and most conversations on race in this country can begin only after this unspoken and nearly universally practiced refusal, we foreclose any possibility at understanding, much less addressing, what is happening here. Perhaps that is why people don’t read Baldwin very much, and if they do it’s often Go Tell It On The Mountain or Giovanni’s Room, or The Fire Next Time. It is rare that I run into someone who has read The New York Times piece (not to mention all the other Baldwin editorials and essays that make The Fire Next Time look rather tame). Baldwin concludes the piece with an analysis that helps us understand why Americans still act puzzled on topics clarified for us so many times so many years ago by The Geto Boys, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, A Tribe Called Quest, Paris, Naughty by Nature, De La Soul, Elzhi, Nas, Jay-Z, Gang Starr, The Roots, The Fugees, 2pac, Mobb Deep, Raekwon, Ghostface, Rakim, Melle Mel, Elzhi, AZ, and more recently by Vince Staples, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and so many others:
“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.
And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets–it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.”
It’s time to read Baldwin, even if, and especially if, the language above bothers us. If we can let the questions that have been answered be answered, and accept those difficult and tragic truths, then we can move on to what is actually a highly debatable question, an actual mystery that we must attack together: what are we to do?
(Further reading: George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Eric Lott, Love and Theft; Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; also see the classic essay by Cheryl Harris, who happens to be the mother of Staples’ collaborator Earl Sweatshirt, “Whiteness as Property”)