What is a Hip Hop Story?
In these blogs I’ve been asking, with great regularity, that people send us hip hop stories. I don’t think that I’ve ever specified what a hip hop story is. This week I’m going to take a shot at it.
When I think of a hip hop story, I basically think of a story about something that is a status crime. Not a status crime that has to do with age, like drinking alcohol before you are twenty one or staying out past a parental curfew. Not a status crime of wanting to do something than everyone else is able to do but you can’t because of who you want to do it with, like marrying someone else of a different race if you lived in Virginia in the sixties, or marrying someone of the same gender anywhere in the U.S. until just recently. (These are all stories that have been recently pitched to me.)
It’s the status crime of just being born into a particular race.
The crime of being born black in America, or the crime of being from a particular economic level – being poor.
Or the worst crime of all, being black AND poor.
What’s a Crime to You?
I was thinking about this riding the subway the other day.
There was a large poster with a list of prohibited activities that you can’t do on the subway. Some of them brought a wave of nostalgia – I don’t know anyone that still carries around a boom box. Others, well….Let’s just say that was surrounded by “criminals.”
People were eating. People were drinking. They were talking loudly. And heaven only knows how many people had matches or lighters.
According to the poster, these things are crimes, but they are not enforced. Maybe I should say they are selectivity enforced, as these rules seem to be disproportionately enforced when done by poor people of color.
Even things that are not crimes, like having a bar-b-q, raking leaves in your front yard, driving a car, or spending too much time opening the door to your home, can be considered suspicious, if you’re black.
Do you find this to be true?
These are all hip hop stories. These are the stories we want to tell.