Defending M'Lady

99 Problems - Jay-Z (mp3)
My Baby Loves Malt Liquor - Roger Alan Wade (mp3)

Ashley Judd needs no man defending her for anything she does. In fact, I get the distinct impression that she would probably despise a fella who tried for being the annoying egotistical Knight on a White Horse. She would likely ride him and that horse right into a Giant Sequoya.

But history is replete with tales of women not needing rescue but stupid men swooping in and trying anyway, and I’m precisely that kind of stupid man, so here I go swooping...

CNN includes the following write-up and excerpts from her new memoir, All That Is Bitter and Sweet:

While speaking about an AIDS awareness program she works with, Judd writes, "Along with other performers, YouthAIDS was supported by rap and hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy to spread the message...um, who? Those names were a red flag.”

Judd continued, “As far as I'm concerned, most rap and hip-hop music - with its rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as 'ho's' - is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny.”

She concludes, "I believe that the social construction of gender - the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interests of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women - is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world."

Because Ashley is a white lady from Kentucky, and because she failed to note that several rap and R&B males are much more into pedophilic abusive relationships rather than merely smackin’ up adult bitches and ho’s, her comments apparently raised some sort of ruckus. She’s apparently racked with guilt over this ruckus and is apologizing for her part in it.

Because Ashley’s much more business-savvy than I, maybe it was the right thing to do. She also rightly acknowledged that plenty of unfair stereotypes are laid at the feet of bluegrass and country music. And we all know those stereotypes are foolish, because those musicians hardly drink alcohol, much less sleep around.

But not a single word of what she said is any more incendiary or unfair than the things Aaron McGruder, creator of BOONDOCKS, has been saying for almost a decade. It’s not all that different than what Bill Cosby says, either, except it’s hard to use Bill Cosby as an example since he has his own womanizing issues and could arguably dismissed as an Oreo in the first place.

Some stereotypes exist because they’re true far too often. Country stars sing about drinkin’, screwin’, and drivin’. R&B stars sing about drinkin’, screwin’, and dancin’. The difference? Country stars sing about getting drunk and sleeping around on their wives or husbands (or being the victim of such activity), while R&B stars sing to an audience for whom marriage is a dying concept, so instead of affairs, they just sing about screwing anything and everything that crosses their path.

Don’t expect me to apologize for acknowledging statistics, and I’m not going to apologize for linking to just one of more than a dozen columns and articles that say precisely what I did except perhaps with a little more decor.

The cynic is then forced to ask a tough question, a question no true Ashley Juddite wants to ask himself: Is her apology merely an attempt to drum up publicity for a controversy that hardly exists in the first place? Is she trying to apologize for something no one was really all that upset about in the hopes that it might sell a few more books?

She might be half-crazy, but she’s also much smarter than your average bear. The hundreds of people who added their own comments to the mix, however (scroll to the bottom of the CNN article), are not smarter than your average bear. They are a reminder why the Web 2.0 is often a depressing look at why we are the society we are.

Slippery Slope Park

String of Pearls - Soul Asylum (mp3)

This is the way a park ends
This is the way a park ends
This is the way a park ends
Not with a bang, but the convergence of nine police officers on two alleged drug dealers selling shit from the trunk of their car.

I took my family to Coolidge Park on Monday evening. We hadn't been down there in a couple of years, due to the complications of a newborn son and our daughters outgrowing bikes we could fit into our minivan. It's no longer the park I remember.

Four years ago, Coolidge Park in daylight hours was home to hippies and romantics and studious Christian college kids. You had drum circles, young kids playing guitars poorly, circles of girls and young women wearing those funky multi-color hippy dresses, families pushing strollers and singing songs from The Sound of Music. On the other side of the bridge, you had young kids and teenagers throwing frisbees and footballs and frolicking.

When we were there last night, I saw:

• a woman who was clearly either in the midst of or recovering from a serious meth problem. She was white and looked like a mix between Karen Carpenter and Skeletor, and she was walking with a black dude with dreds.
  
  
• a couple watching their young son run around the place and invite himself to ride our son's pushcar. They were nice enough. They weren't a day over 22. They were unmarried.
  
  
• a phalanx of police officers -- some of them in goofy bicycle shorts like Ponch -- descend on two black dudes who were "allegedly" selling drugs out of the trunk of their car. Only a few minutes after the cops arrived, a small crowd of young African-American guys and gals circled the scene at a safe 40-foot perimeter to witness it. We overheard one of the young guys say, "Damn, ***** just got out last week an' he's already goin' back."
  
  
• a group of about eight Latino teenagers walking around the carousel area, then sitting and talking.
  
  
• a baby about the same age as my son (1-2 years) playing around the fountains. This very young child was already eyeball-poppingly fat. And yes, "fat" is the correct word here. And yes, the parents were also fat. And no, I won't buy that this child was fat solely because of a genetic disorder, unless the genetic disorder in question is known as "parents who eat too much and feed their child too much every damn time he cries."
  
  
• two goth teenagers snuggling on a blanket and having their pasty flesh scorched slowly by the merciless if slowly setting sun.

Yes, I fully realize that my descriptions are teeming with the kind of judgmental bile that makes people hate snooty middle class honkies like myself. I have done this with some intentional exaggeration, but I can't deny that these are descriptions my uncensored self would offer. I also can't deny that everywhere I looked in Coolidge Park on Monday night, I couldn't help but conclude that the place had deteriorated. It was no longer drawing the same people to do the same things.

Four years ago, the park's population was appropriately diverse. I wouldn't say it perfectly mirrored Chattanooga's population breakdown, but it had to be close, both ethnically and economically. On Monday evening at 7 p.m., the population was very skewed. Poor. Minority. Sketchy.

It's gone from being Target to sliding right past Wal-Mart on the way down to the Brainerd Road Bi-Lo.

Such is probably the natural evolution of the city park. When it's a baby, everyone in town wants to come over and visit. Hold it. Sing to it. Watch it eat and coo and cry and poo. Then, when it's a toddler, people continue to stop by, but with less regularity and less balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm. By the time it's hit the middle school years, most folks are making excuses why they just couldn't quite find the time to visit... and they're also secretly talking bad about the little brat behind closed doors. Then, when it's a full-on teenager, it gets all sullen and starts smoking and drinking and hanging out with the wrong crowd and beating up weak nerds and scaring the little old ladies.

If Monday evening was any indication -- and maybe I just hit it on a totally bad night? -- Coolidge Park is fast approaching the zit-infested voice-changing 10th grade and doing so in full juvenile offender style. Already most concerned parents and schools have banned or strongly discouraged going there after dusk, even though the whole place is wide open.

And when a place spends its teenage years pushing all the right people away, it will get lonelier and increasingly dominated by a crowd less likely to attract Mr. Roger's Neighborhood than Mr. Robinson's. Maybe it's the inevitable and cyclical nature of parks: They're born. They plateau. They fade. They rot. They die. They revitalize with new money and new design and new attraction, or they die and are replaced by condos.

(My apologies to non-Chattanooga readers for such a town-specific write-up.)

Taking Umbrage Is Retarded

Get Over It - OK Go (mp3)
If You're Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough - Roger Alan Wade (mp3)

Two different people forwarded me this email last week:

You may or may not have heard about the movie coming out in theatres around the country on Wednesday that is being protested by a number of national disability groups.

Special Olympics has joined the group. The protest centers on the movies use of the word 'retard' and one of its characters. I'll not try and launch into an explanation which I'm sure will be inadequate. Honestly, I'm not up to date on this issue. Instead, I have copied the link to a news release that came out of Special Olympics in DC today, and was published in a number of national media...including Associated Press. This should fairly give you enough information ... and you can seek out additional information.

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN1029346220080811

USA Today has an even better version of the story.

So I just need to get this straight. Tropic Thunder, a film in which Robert Downey Jr. plays a white guy who surgically alters himself so he can portray a black guy, is being protested by the mentally handicapable...? We're to believe that repeated use of the word "retarded" is picket-worthy but blackface is OK in the right context?

Naw, screw the whole blackface part. That distracts from the stupidity of this particular protest. We're to believe that repeated use of the word "retarded" is picket-worthy on any film?? That's just... just... well... challenged.

Most hypersensitive, hyperdefensive people might dismiss my insensitivity to their plights as a sign I'm a good ol' Southern WASP who's rarely if ever been mocked for my identity or suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous humiliation for the amusement of the masses.

To dismiss me for this reason is both accurate and ridiculous. True because I am indeed a Southern WASP. Ridiculous because (a) I own a scooter and look awkward riding it; (b) I wore JAMS a lot. In 1992; (c) I collected comic books in high school; (d) I own 10 Rick Springfield and Hanson CDs; (e) Do I really really need to go on?

I get mocked. I got mocked a lot as a little kid. I got mocked plenty in high school. I passed out at a fraternity house in college and woke up with permanent marker on my nose, cheeks, ears, and both kneecaps, and I had "TOOL" written in beautiful capital letters on the back of my neck and on my stomach (with an arrow pointing up, not down).

I've always identified with Cinderella, as we were both raised in a house with wicked step-siblings who enjoyed verbally and physically terrorizing us. (Go ahead and insert your snickering gay commentary and get it outta your system.) While Cinderella fraternized with mice, my step-brothers preferred placing me in locked rooms with several possums. In real life, they don't talk, and they're not cute. Not when you're seven, anyway. This was one of any number of acts from my growin' up that formed my notion of what is offensive and what is worth just getting over.

However, it's different to be mocked as an individual as opposed to being mocked for your involuntary membership in a group. There's no Dorks United Movement or anything that stands up for my kind as a collective, so I can't claim to suffer the same level of indignities as women, homosexuals, minorities, the mentally challenged, the physically challenged, the overweight, the underweight, models, or cat lovers.

In college, I was the poorly-timed butt of several jokes. A friend infamously skilled at putting his foot in his mouth at the wrong times managed to tip past the scale of the culturally acceptable, and all I could do was shrug, acknowledging with him that he deserved his shame. And then laugh at him. Let's call him Julius.

The first time I was hobbling out of a building with my newly-broken ankle, incompetently using my crutches to navigate some stairs, when Julius shouted at me from across the quad. "Hey! Cripple! Gimp! Yeah you! You look pathetic!!" he shouted. He didn't notice that, about 3/4 of the way from him to me was a young lad in a wheelchair. Because, well, Julius wasn't talking to that cripple. Vitriolic arrows of hate were fired from many bystanders' eyes at my pal that day.

Another time, a large group of acquaintances -- most of us were still getting to know one another -- were headed to the dining hall when Julius punctuated a conversation with, "Yeah, Billy's a real bastard." And everyone kinda nodded, not knowing the depth of Julius' attempted humor. So he explained. "No, really. Billy's, like, 24 hours away from being a bastard. Like, in real life!" He was trying to explain the joke, you see. So he kept explaining.

My biological father was killed in a car wreck the day after I was born. Ha!

To me, his joke wasn't remotely offensive. I'd known Julius for years and was used to his wit, which often had the acidity of high molarity hydrochloric acid. But I knew him, and I knew his intent, and he knew I had relatively thick skin in these matters. Nothing to take offense at, honestly. But I also knew he'd overstepped his bounds with everyone else in our company. The conversation died like Thelma and Louise driving over the cliff. Three different girls in the group pulled me aside at one point or another to make sure I was OK. The guys just kept saying things like, "That's cold, dude."

But "retarded"? Are they really trying to make that the next N-word? Do we really need another N-word? Isn't one word that is known merely by its first letter enough? As Dumbledore so astutely observes in the very first Harry Potter, "Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself," so how many Voldemorts do we want in our lexicon?

Is "retard" really worth that fight? Is Tropic Thunder the right place to dig in the heels and fire away?

My smell test in matters of offensiveness is admittedly egocentric: If I don't see the big deal, then our culture ain't ready to think it's a big deal. And if our culture ain't ready, then taking the wrong tack to bring it to our attention only annoys and alienates, distancing the very people needed to change the culture.

So to those of you hypersensitive to the plight of folks rarely referred directly as retarded? You'll need to come back in a decade or two. For now your complaints are only annoying and reek of seeking attention for a problem that's not nearly as dire as others in our midst. (If you want proof, check and see how many times people refer to Obama as "retarded" to scare your votes away and compare them "black" and "Muslim.")

"Get Over It," admittedly closer to an bona fide "hit" than we're generally aiming for on this blog, is from OK Go's debut eponymous album. "If You're Gonna Be Dumb..." is from Roger Alan Wade's first album -- yes, he now has two -- All Likkered Up. I'm actually pretty sure both are available on iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site but was to ashamed to look the latter up.

Always BET On Black

WARNING: This week's songs contain naughty words and roughly 400 repetitions of the racially-charged "N" word. Listener discretion is advised.

I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Niga - Public Enemy (mp3)
Dignity - The Heavy (mp3)
Blackjack - Everclear (mp3)

Few things are less wise than for a pasty white boy to dare get mixed up in opinionating on something like the Black Entertainment Network. The minute a pasty white boy throws his opinion out into the world, it can be sliced and diced, critiqued and lambasted, because it's as pure a Catch 22 as you can get. Fortunately, this pasty white boy's opinion only goes out to a small handful of people who already know better than to pay attention to his rants, so hopefully I'm in a relatively safe harbor.

If you didn't know, a number of corporations including GM and Pepsi have pulled their ads from BET's afternoon programs. Their action is the result of protests, chiefly from a group called Enough is Enough that is trying to fight the negative stereotyping of African-Americans in our media. There's more sex, booty-shakin' and gangsta threads in two hours of afternoon BET programming than there are holes in George Bush's logic.

Enough is Enough makes an admirable gesture made all the more admirable for their willingness to take on one of their own in the BET. Although Viacom-owned (read: overseen by rich honkeys), the folks at the top of the BET ladder are most decidedly black and have been the target of some scathing critiques, including Aaron McGruder, creator of The Boondocks (early part of the linked YouTube clip includes an example of this).

(Side Note: Aaron McGruder's sense of humor is so harsh it makes late-model Bloom County and Outland read like Family Circus. Boondocks can be so harsh, in fact, that it's often just not funny. But I admire the dude for channeling some serious and righteous fury into a cartoon.)

The damned if ya do or don't part of this is, BET isn't losing any of the advertising from these corporations. They're still paying BET exactly the same amounts as before, but their ads are now going to different time slots. Why the half-assed protest? Because the minute these big white corporations pull all their money from Black Entertainment Television -- no matter that they would claim it's in the interest of quashing stereotypes, no matter that a group of black activists are in full support -- they're opening themselves up to accusations of racism.

So BET isn't losing a penny in this, and they'll never have to face the level of scrutiny for their misdeeds that Don Imus in his goober cowboy hat will receive for his comments, in spite of the fact that, without question, the shit BET shovels is swallowed by more people and does far more damage than Imus ever could.

I can't even pretend to be in touch with my Inner Brotha. I learned more about race relations in high school from one CD -- Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet -- than I learned the previous 17 years of my life (OK, without Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, I'd never have known about Fear of a Black Planet, so I owe that movie a good bit as well).

Mine has been an existence of cultural cluelessness, although I've always hoped for the best and tried to minimize whatever racist tendencies I've witnessed in myself or those around me. I'm not one of the gajillions of stupid white people who starts any sentence with "I'm not a racist, but..." Those words always seem to preceed an extremely racist comment. How could it not? The entire reason for the existence of those five words is to grant the user carte blanche (or should I say "carte black"?) to utter inappropriate opinions or observations.

It's a shame The Cosby Show is so under-appreciated, as is Fat Albert, for that matter. Bill Cosby is proof, to me anyway, that even a philandering perv can have some seriously righteous causes and make positive cultural waves, often in spite of himself (see: Bill Clinton).

But Bill Cosby, Public Enemy, Spike Lee... these are influences long past, relics of previous iterations of race relations. Recently, it's either become easier to avoid these kinds of cultural awakenings, or they're just not as powerful as they used to be. I've never seen a Tyler Perry movie. I've purchased maybe two dozen R+B or HipHop albums in my entire life. Our culture will have a hard time exorcising BET's demons when so few of the other networks seem willing to step up to the plate and make a legitimate and compelling drama or sitcom revolving around black people. Is The Great Debaters really as powerful as Glory was 20 years ago?

To be fair, it's difficult to sound the alarms too loudly when our most bankable movie star is black, our most influential TV personality is black, our most esteemed athlete is black, and we're on the verge of electing our first black President. The existence of four supremely successful people doesn't magically erase racism from our culture, but it sure as hell buffers one's righteous fury, especially if you're a clueless pasty optimistic white boy.

One day, pasty white people and black people with a variety of melanin levels will have the ability to sit down together and calmly discuss misconceptions, ignorance, opinions, and observations without the dreaded fear that the discussion will end with the two sides feeling assaulted or more distant. I'll probably be dead by then, but I'll keep my eyes open just in case.  

"I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Niga" is off Public Enemy's fourth album, Apocalypse 91... Public Enemy Strikes Black. "Dignity" is off The Heavy's only album thus far, Great Vengeance and Furious Fire. "Blackjack" is off Everclear's 2003 album, Slow Motion Daydream. All are available on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.