Why I Want To Like Dead Prez (And Why I Can't)

Dead Prez is my favorite rap group that I don't like. Seriously. They have sick ass beats, good flows, and really good rhymes. A lot of their stuff really speaks to my experiences growing up in Dansville, and my feelings about how to make sure future generations don't go through any of that shit. A lot of their revolutionary sentiment and all their ideas about knowledge and self-improvement are right in line with what I believe. All of their stories about public schools, the cops, and the system in general I can identify with on some level. Seriously. I can't say I've never had ideas about whether or not a communist state would be better than capitalism. But I don't like them. As a matter of fact I think that what they're doing is counter-productive and is only going to make racial and social equality in this country that much harder to bring about.

A couple other people have already spoke on this, but these dudes are almost psychotic in their anti-white rhetoric. Look, if they weren't talking about how much they hated white people on every other song I wouldn't have issue with "I went to school with redneck crackers". Now I hate both of those words but I can understand the sentiment. How do these guys think that isolating an entire section of the population that has a lot of the same issues as their community's going to help anything? Sorry dude, people descended from deported criminals, indentured servants, debtors, and yes even slaves aren't oppressors. There have been two distinct groups of Caucasians in the United States ever since there's been a United States. I find it odd that while M1 and stic.man were reading all those books they didn't realize that. As Bomani pointed out, robbing the pizza man isn't jacking the system. So theoretically, attacking both the "white servant class" and the white aristocrat class doesn't make sense. Especially according to Marixst class dialectic.

See, us in the "white servant class" are put in a really weird situation when it comes to this stuff. At the heart of it is the question as to who we identify and align ourself with as a community and as a culture. Now to me, and the other politically aware, hip hop obsessed, working class rural whites (hey, there might be another 3 or 4), the choice is obviously to align with Blacks and Latinos, both of which we share a common history and struggle with. As the book I linked to up there will tell you, Blacks, poor Whites, and Native Americans had tons of insurrections together way back in the 1600s and 1700s, and the number one fear of the White aristocrats was that all the people of different colors and cultures would get together and rebel. So then they took steps to keep them all apart. And the connection with Latinos is a bit different. At least in the Midwest, Mexicans and Whites share the same jobs and live in the same areas a lot of the time.

The sad part is, most working class rural whites choose to align with the other class of white people, which is what holds us back in a lot of situations. And in a perfect world we wouldn't have to "align" with anybody, and everybody could just relate to each other as human beings. But it doesn't work like that. I can't expect to walk into Little Caesar's in Okemos wearing a fitted and a Carharrt hoodie and expect to be treated like an equal. I've actually heard people from the suburbs say to my face that they "get a lot of reverse discrimination from redneck types who think we think we're better than them". Well you just called us rednecks, what are we supposed to think? I have love for all humans forever, but I can't just pretend like everything is hunky dory and that it's just a few bad apples in the burbs making the rest of them look bad. The fact of the matter is that stereotypes of my culture and all other cultures are put in people's minds by the media, and people think that's the reality. I've had and still have friends from the suburbs, but a lot of those friendships are over because of this shit.

So in closing, I ain't mad at Dead Prez. They're not as enlightened as they think they are, but they still make bangin' music. They're only falling victim to the attitudes that the man wants us to have about people of different colors, so I kind of pity them. The ants are gonna conquer the elephant, but only when they learn to not hate on the other ants because of the color of their skin.