A New Racial Politics

Addressing the Socialist Party of America’s 1920 conference in New York City, Morris Hillquit declared that “A sobered America will look back with gratitude to the small band of Socialists who saw the danger [of war and capitalism] and sounded the warning.”

In the summer of 1955, fourteen year old Emmett Till came from Chicago to visit his uncle in Money, Mississippi. He showed a photo of his white girlfriend to his cousins, who, not believing she was his girlfriend, dared him to talk to a white woman in a convenience store. Not understanding Mississippi race relations, Emmett made a flirtatious comment to Carolyn Bryant, and a week later was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Upon the insistence of Emmett’s mother, his body was brought back to Chicago, the casket open for 50,000 people and reporters to view.

It’s nearly impossible to tell when a nation is on the cusp of substantial transformation. In fact, when a group of people declares themselves the harbingers of a new era or the vanguards of a social movement it’s probably safer to conclude that they’re not. So despite attempts throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, socialism failed in America. And Emmett Till’s comment to Carolyn Bryant ended up catalyzing more institutional change in our country than twenty-plus years of socialist orations.

Surely, the civil rights movement would have been sparked by some other event had Emmett met more fortunate circumstances. And we probably can’t attribute the failure of American socialism to Morris Hillquit’s poor public speaking (in fact, Emmett was the one with a stutter). A more accurate account of twentieth century history would simply consider that a complex web of political factors left America extremely fertile for a civil rights movement in the late ’50s. Nevertheless, this nationwide alignment of factors cannot be anything but a silent process; it would have been impossible for Emmett Till’s mother to predict how her actions would fit into the larger context of American history.

The question at hand is obvious: what if America is now sitting on top of a similar historical moment? What would hint at our having entered such a moment? Once entered, what would that moment mean?

One means of characterizing the current social landscape might be to use music as a proxy. You’re welcome to write us off as crackheads at this point, but maybe we’re on to something interesting. The idea that musical trends are a reflection of political ones is very tenable. It is no coincidence that the extreme fragmentation of musical genres since the early ’90s runs parallel to the rise of internet-accessible media. This same media access, when it amounts to the transnational spread of ideas, is an oft-cited explanation for the nearly global transition from nationally centralized politics to fragmented identity politics in the ’90s. Increased access to information, for both musical genres and political parties, has altered the structure of how we organize ourselves. In short, political and musical trends are accountable to the same forces and leave similar patterns.

If music is accountable to macro-trends, that means groups, singers and rappers don’t rise to popularity completely as a matter of talent, but based on whether they can appear relevant in the current social environment. Take the Seattle grunge scene as an example. On paper, it consisted of a handful mediocre, cacophonic bands who got famous by complaining about how they hated being famous. But apparently that found real traction with American kids, who got off on being annoyed for no apparent reason other than that they found themselves sitting on the tail end of the ’80s, nauseated by glamour. Alice in Chains and Nirvana had sounds that filled a gaping hole in the musical ozone layer. Either band would have gone nowhere a decade earlier or a decade later. In similar ways, gangster rap in the ’80s can be seen as a correlate of Reaganomics-induced social stress and London punk as a response to England’s economic crisis of the ’70s.

So what happens when the coalescence of factors that allow some musical strands to become popular are political instead of simply grungy? The pertinent example here is mainstream hip hop. The political turn that hip hop has taken in the past 5 years is undeniable. The Talib Kweli-Common-Mos Def-Kanye West crew that took over the hip hop scene around 2004-2005 did so by talking about politics and social ills. They were rapping about class, religion, and the war in Iraq, all the while taking swipes at rappers still going on about crack and money. We think it’s highly unlikely that this 180 degree turn in hip hop doesn’t tell us anything about … well … us.

This should be especially true in the arena of racial politics. Hugely different understandings of blackness, whiteness, Asianness are immediately apparent in the dissonance between ’90s hip hop and the current scene.

This weekend thousands of students will invade Cornell for the East Coast Asian American Student Union conference. A large part of the draw is socially, racially conscious hip hop such as the Filipino-American/Iranian-American duo, Blue Scholars. Emblematic of the aforementioned shift within hip hop, Blue Scholars is known to bend their hip hop towards hashing out thoughts on pan-ethnic racial identity. In accordance with our initial claims, we don’t think that kind of hip hop would find its place in our universities and on our iTunes if it weren’t a close reflection of how we construct our own racial identities. Music like this provides us with the single most accurate lens for understanding how race changes over time and what it means right now. And although we still have very little way of knowing whether we’re sitting on the edge of some profound political shift, the current state of hip hop does point strongly to the conclusion that our generation’s politics — racial and otherwise — have moved a great deal away from where they were half a decade ago.

Thu-Huong Nguyen is a sophomore in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Nguyen is the director of entertainment for the ECAASU conference. She can be contacted at ttn23@cornell.edu [1]. Tim Krueger, a Sun Columnist, is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at tkrueger@cornellsun.com [2]. Guest Room appears periodically.