Black Rage and Afro-PessimismAn Analysis of the Slave’s Journey from Black Tombs to Black Thrones

Justin CajandingStanford University

PWR 1: Oppositional RhetoricDr. Maxe Crandall

Cajanding 1

December 5, 2015

Dear Professor Crandall,

I hereby submit to you my research essay on the topic of afro-pessimism and hip hop. I decided to write my essay on the deployment of afro-pessimistic logic throughout several methodologies against civil society because I wanted to investigate the relationship between how these strategies emerge and the lived experience of people of color. Allowing me to explore academically my own love of hip hop and rap culture, various issues regarding anti-blackness and racism which I find myself engaged with, and the limits of my own ability to conceptually map these ideas in a fashion which gives justice to the rich history and experiences associated with my research topic, I truly found this essay writing process to not only be fruitful in terms of my own contributions to the topic but also in helping me understand my own relation to these issues and how best I can interact with them external to academia. While my writing is as theoretical and dense as ever, I believe writing this paper, especially on a topic that cannot just be captured in theory but in the embodied experiences of those affected by it, I have begun to understand the necessity of understanding where I am writing from and how I am to convey my own opinions and findings to those I am writing for. I hereby confirm that all the work mentioned is original and true to the best of my knowledge. I would prefer written feedback, if possible. Thank you so much for your insights and direction these past 10 weeks and for providing me the opportunity to develop my writing, and myself, more fully.

Sincerely, Justin Cajanding

Cajanding 2

Abstract: This paper serves to analyze overarching paradigms of anti-blackness within the United States and its ability to affect people of color in their interactions within civil society as a whole. In providing a historical and structural context for many instances of racism and oppression from chattel slavery to the modern day, this paper illustrates a current impossibility regarding change in the systems of society and provides an alternative way of understanding the therefore impossible demands of reform and progress in society. Consequently, I argue hip hop and rap serve as crucial moments of departure from the ineffective, violent system of the status quo and as a way of cultivating an afro-optimistic perspective of black agency from the pessimistic undertones of previous analysis.

Keywords: Social Death, Civil Society, Black Body, Anti-Blackness, Afro-Pessimism, impossible demand, progress, gratuitous violence, agency

Cajanding 3

Justin Cajanding

RBA Essay

PWR 1 – Oppositional Rhetoric

Black Rage and Afro-Pessimism: An Analysis of the Slave’s Journey from Black Tombs to Black Thrones

“It's evident that I'm irrelevant to society. That's what you're telling me, penitentiary would only hire me. Curse me till I'm dead, church me with your fake prophesizing that I'mma be just another slave in my head. Institutionalized manipulation and lies, Reciprocation of freedom only live in your eyes. You hate me don't you? “

-Kendrick Lamar “The Blacker the Berry”

2015. A year in which the average American speaks of the progression of our modern

society – the election of a black president, heightened visibility of racialized aggression, the

renovation of our ghettos and inner cities. Yet, even with the triage of the modern milieu

captured in the illusion of incorporation and emancipation, it is in observing the hidden war on

the streets, in our schools, our prisons, our markets, our homes, our communities, and our people

that it becomes incredibly obvious that modern, White America still has blood on its hands –

Black blood which runs through the veins of their glorious system and through the streets. With

institutions of America stained red and black, what demands can be made? How can you demand

from the new overseer respect for the slave, demand the new slave plantation equitable access for

the flesh in the fields, demand painted courthouses for humane treatment of those still rendered

less than subhuman? In this white world upon which black bodies are marked and born for death,

perhaps, rather than articulating such impossible demands upon society, it is better to imagine an

institution free of the blood of the slave and the land of the “savage” – a necessary overturning

which supposes the end of the world. Towards this point, this paper serves to conduct a

paradigmatic analysis of the destructive system of white civil society and to provide a systematic

foundation for the singular demand of the slave and savage: burn down white civil society.

Cajanding 4

“Yeah, officer from overseer. You need a little clarity? Check the similarity! The overseer rode around the plantation. The officer is off patrolling all the nation. The overseer could stop you what you're doing. The officer will pull you over just when he's pursuing. The overseer had the right to get ill. And if you fought back, the overseer had the right to kill. The officer has the right to arrest. And if you fight back they put a hole in your chest!”

-KRS One “Sound of da Police

From overseer to officer, slave quarter to ghetto, lashings to police brutality, Jim Crow to

white flight, de jure barriers to voting to de facto racism, the narrative of racial relations in the

United States is characterized by the constant alienation and dislocation of black bodies whether

it be the temporal dislocation from Africa in the Middle Passage to the physical eviction of black

bodies and social exclusion today. While it is easy to articulate small, incremental changes into a

broad narrative of change and progress, it is in the hidden histories of the United States that an

atemporal, non-historically contingent and structural violence is revealed in the bloodied streets,

courthouses, and jails of America. In a country in which Jamelle Bouie states “African

Americans were the untouchables, excluded from mainstream life, blocked from economic

opportunity, forced into positions of servitude and peonage, and policed with vigilante violence

and state-sanctioned terrorism” it is clear “Even now, it’s still true that we don’t have any

particular use for the lives or experiences of black people. At most, individual African

Americans can stand as bloodless symbols for hazy racial “progress.” (Bouie 1). Yet what

progress can be found in a country in which Africans are still “disposable and dangerous” (Bouie

1)? Where:

white juries are more likely to convict black defendants, than white ones, and in

states with “Stand Your Ground” laws, white defendants are more likely to find

acquittal when the victims are black. African Americans are arrested and

convicted for drug crimes at far greater rates than their white counterparts—

despite lower rates of drug use—and blacks are more likely to have encounters

Cajanding 5

with law enforcement, due to patterns of policing (see: stop and frisk in New

York City). More than a third of all people affected by felony disenfranchisement

laws are black. If you can look at all of this and conclude that the system doesn’t

have an embedded bias against blacks, I don’t know what to say. Because what’s

clear to me is that, for all the real progress we’ve made, this country has yet to

relinquish its long-standing hostility to blackness. (Bouie 1)

What reform can be found in a country in which as Jared Sexton states “every attempt to defend

the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to make substantial gains

insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of black ” as changes amount to little more than dreams

of civic incorporation wrapped in the American dream and ethic of working harder, pulling up

one’s bootstraps, and participating in a system from which, historically and socially, black bodies

have been and to this day are relegated to spaces of exclusion and violence (Sexton 48)? Coming

upon this continuous violence amidst the unanswerable enunciations and questionings that occur

towards the system in response to its murders, annihilation, and erasure of black life and culture,

perhaps it is better to understand not what life is present and being built upon to this day but the

death which has occurred since the first African was turned into slave, a death which Barbara

Omolade characterizes as:

for people of color the world over, starvation is already a common

problem . . .And the housing of people of color throughout the world’s urban

areas is already blighted and inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or

on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the poor may live

without heat or running water. . . For people of color, the world as we knew it

ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways,

Cajanding 6

ended . . .Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have already been

declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families, and our lands.

(Omolade 12)

It is clear in understanding the world as imposed on black bodies, that a way to characterize and

begin to understand the absolute and ultimate violence committed against blackness as a whole

cannot be captured in historically contingent or isolated instances of racism. Rather, it is an

active structural presence which ensures black life is not lived within the world, the white world,

but is relegated to death, socially and politically, absent subjectivity and power to remove the

shackles which haunt the living world from slave ship to inner city.

“Creating crime rates to fill the new prisons they build. Over money and religion there's more blood to spill. The wounds of slaves in cotton fields that never heal. What's the deal?”

-Talib Kweli “Thieves in the Night”

Beyond facile attempts at hiding the wounds inflicted upon black flesh, wounds whose blood

paints the red, White, and blue flags of White freedom in this country, a recognizable narrative

of anti-blackness can be observed. Anti-blackness can be best described as an ultimate

ontological antagonism of white over black – unquantifiable and captured in the lived experience

of the Black Body, an experience marked by the allowed natal alienation, general dishonor, and

gratuitous violence inflicted upon the slave. Observed in the outright brutality of the slaver from

chattel slavery to today, “Contrary to contingent applications of violence in accordance with

legitimate cause (transgression of law, as repressive strategy, as reaction, etc.), violence against

blacks is gratuitous, without any prior reason or justification” (R.L. 1). Rather than existing in

isolation, it is this very violence which Wilderson would state “underwrites the modern world’s

capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her

body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas

Cajanding 7

could be enacted” – enabling violence at any extreme relative to one’s distance from blackness

(i.e. sharing “blackened” traits such as economic disenfranchisement, phenotypical darkness,

proximity to foreignness) and which codifies every violence and aggression in subtending the

complete opposite of the black body – the white subject – upon which the foundations of every

structure of oppression and antagonism is formulated (Wilderson 6-7). While easily identifiable

due to its absolute nature which is openly excused by white civil society, it is the general

dishonor of the slave – the criminalization of blackness which posits black bodies in a constant

state of degradation beneath being a human political and social subject with agency- which

precludes effective response. As illustrated in concrete examples “political discourse since the

1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the US

and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs exacerbates—or, more precisely, mystifies

and veils—the ontological death of the Slave” (Wilderson 13) for “It is not necessarily one’s

‘whiteness’ that matters inasmuch as one is not black enabling entrance and participation in civil

society. Barred from the immanent capacities of living, anti-blackness is the necessary ground

for the definition and propagation of life in general” (R.L.1). It is in this that the social death of

the Black Body is revealed – Black life is “constituted by disorientation rather than a life

interrupted by disorientation.” (Wilderson 3) constantly since the moment of birth, natally

alienated from the world and its practices as “the world—and not its myriad discriminatory

practices, but the world itself—was unethical.” (Wilderson 7). Forever removed from the world’s

politics, decisions, and activities it can be noted “Whether it was the owning and trading of

slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black existence is

excluded and stockpiled . . .black existence is also a fungible object, infinitely malleable in its

content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim

Cajanding 8

subjecthood” (R.L. 1) a realization that identifies that while anything can be done to black flesh,

little can be done through civic enunciation for a body whose proximity to death and whose

utmost value can be determined and thrown away at a whim en masse.

“You can't tell me life was meant to be like this, a black man in a world dominated by whiteness.

Ever since the declaration of independence, we've been easily brainwashed by just one sentence

It goes: all men are created equal”

-Gang Starr “Conspiracy”

This social death, the void of subjectivity and political recognition, speaks not just to the past

and the present but also to the future in its removal of the possibility for civic and social

participation by those rendered antagonistic to the concept of the white human and civil subject.

As Farley would indicate:

We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the

grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The

progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black

to white-over-black to white-over black. The slave only becomes the perfect slave

at the end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is

only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect

itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave

perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. (Farley 237)

Highlighted in the inequitable treatment of black bodies and the persistent excusatory posture

towards white murder and violence, in the system which renovates itself to allow on paper

judicial protections which will never reach the slave, and in the false progress narrative which

creates token spaces and institutions to hide entire spaces of death in the inner cities and prisons

Cajanding 9

of this country is a removal of actual political life and agency in lieu of illusory promises

towards future liberation. In this the atemporal and ultimate nature of anti-blackness is revealed

– not only does the system ensure the impossibility of black bodies effectuating the system

through it’s a priori exclusion of non-white political enunciations in both de jure and de facto

fashions but it perfects the subordination of the future slave through its ability to insert the

conspiracy of modern society, the myth of positive progress, in the minds of the unfree and

shackled to ensure the radical demand of overthrowing one’s captors never enters the realm of

the realistic and necessary. Even if we recognize, as Wilderson states, “the violent overthrow of

the state . . . followed by trials in which the defendants used the majority of the trial to critique

the government rather than plead their case, have as much if not more pedagogic value than

peaceful protest” (Wilderson 35) ,which is characterized as little more than “pathological

pacifism” (Churchill) which clouds political debate” (Wilderson 35), the irrational hope for legal

progress in a world which always already renders black bodies as illegal seems to be constantly

returned to, suggesting, perhaps, it is time to theorize an alternative purpose to the impossible

demand towards the state.

“What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with

violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions

so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless

they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the

“Savage.” Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple

words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled.”

-Frank B. Wilderson “Red, White, and Black”

Cajanding 10

The fundamental demand behind any operation to end the world and with it the system of

white civil society which it is synonymous with can be captured in two simple sentences, thirteen

simple words. Yet, understanding that these very demands question what remain unquestionable

in civil society and that questioning from a position within the void of black subjectivity remains

itself an impossibility begs the question of the importance of the impossible demand. As

Wilderson would indicate, it is not its ability to effectuate change in the socially and political

unchangeable world that grants the demand legitimacy and importance, but rather its ability to

activate an agency external to the status of servitude ensured by legality and civility that makes

even the impossible, dangerous.

the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose

the question is the greatest power of all . . . The question’s echo lies buried in the

graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army

soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in

solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy

where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. . . a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream

of the Settlement and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical

core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of

political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy

(Wilderson 9-10)

Buried following the extra-judicial killing of black radicals, the elimination of generations of

black leaders and intellectuals, and in the slow conversion of academy to its role in magnifying

the pacifism and subordination of black bodies, the dream of the destruction of this world

remains in the slave tombs, awaiting the calling out from death to destroy the world when it

Cajanding 11

emerges to ridicule the absolute hypocrisy of the modern world. Yes, the very nature of the

world precludes the return of sacred Turtle island to the “savage” and repair of the slave broken

to death, yet it is this nature in which “these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only

render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine” (Wilderson 8).

Impossibility in its ability to reveal the futility of previous attempts towards peace in the death of

each activist by the system and its ability to capture the truth behind the conspiracy which is

modern white civil society remains the utmost state of possibility for black bodies and first step

for totalizing change – revealing a truth, that the world will never concede a demand to the black

body until its end, which time and time again has been subverted, co-opted, and hidden by white

guardians of the current world of violence and which waits the moment it can return to haunt its

murderers to the death.

We must know that in this nation,

Every single generation

Strange as you say, I say revolution

Need for change brings on revolution

-Public Enemy “Revolutionary Generation”

Emerging to a newly revealed world of gratuitous super-violence, to what conclusion does

the realization of the current state of social death and the necessary total overturning of the world

itself point to? As the authorship which contends the very world is built upon the annihilation

and subjugation of blackness would argue, in a world in which violence is not only inevitable but

intrinsically tied to humanity and existence, rather than accepting inevitability as the end of

Cajanding 12

possibility, the only possible ethical solution for the Black Body would be the redirection and re-

appropriation of that violence.

To overcome anti-blackness, there would have to be what Fanon had called a

‘program of complete disorder,’ an expropriation and affirmation of the very

violence perpetuated against black existence and a fundamental reorientation of

the social coordinates of the Human relation. It would entail a war against the

concept of humanity and a war that splits civil society to its core, a civil war that

would elaborate itself to the death. (R.L. 1)

Characterized as a “program of complete disorder”, this affirmation and expropriation of

violence can be understand as a recognition, simply, that “No conciliation is possible” – that

rather than enacting change from a neutral middle ground between social progress and the

maintenance of society the only efficacious change can occur from accepting the radical position

of actively rejecting the system and breaking down every fundamental structure (Fanon 38).

While this program concludes ultimately in burning down white civil society, this in the

impossibility imposed by the current world remains in the world of theory and a diverse range of

interpretations of how to begin the process of removing the system in its entirety exist. One

example includes Farley who argues that the removal of civil society begins with the rejection of

every fundamental political and material barriers to life in the world hidden by the façade of

reform and equal rights when he illustrates:

The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The

system of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system,

hierarchy, produce white-over black, white-over-black only, and that

continually . . .The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as

Cajanding 13

stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way

back from the undiscovered country only by burning down every plantation.

When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it

makes the free choice to not be . . . Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black

is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue

its calling that is not a calling. (Farley 225)

Yet even some afro-pessimistic authorship posits this approach as too passive, demanding the

most literal interpretation of Fanon’s war against civil society, such as Wilderson when he

demands:

the violent overthrow of the state. . .retaliating against police by killing one of

them each time they kill a Black person, the expropriating of bank funds from

armored cars in order to further finance armed struggle as well as community

projects such as acupuncture clinics in the Bronx where drug addicts could get

clean, and the bombing of major centers of U.S. commerce and governance

(Wilderson 35)

While this is based in the common recognition of a necessity to fight even against suicidal odds

to reclaim the agency and life which should be allowed every person, such as when argued in

Huey Newton’s famous passage” at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide . . . it is

better to oppose the forces that would drive to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk

the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing

intolerable conditions. This possibility- is important, because much in human existence is based

upon hope” it is in being presented with a similarly impossible scenario – fighting in the streets

against the United States who already commits itself in open domestic war against black bodies –

Cajanding 14

that I will argue for an alternative method for re-articulating violence that may glimpse at a

world which is only allowed in the death of black bodies and in their tombs (Newton 3-4).

“Our freedom of speech is freedom or death We got to fight the powers that be Lemme hear you

say Fight the power”

-Public Enemy “Fight the Power”

Confronted simultaneously with the impossibility of civic participation and of

articulating the destruction of civil society through actualized violence, with the impossibility of

black agency in the world and of articulating it absent co-option or renovation of whiteness, it

becomes clear that rather than beginning at the point of emergence – the method in which

blackness is actively imposed against the world – it is necessary to establish firstly a

paradigmatic shift within the black body itself, returning agency within individuals in a way

inaccessible to white structures around them so that they, in their recognized potential, begin the

process of slowly breaking down the structural and ideological barriers to the new world in the

making. This I would argue, can be found in the generative potential of hip hop and rap which

emerges from spaces of dereliction, not only criticizing their existence and the reality imposed

upon rap artists and the black body and revealing the truth of social death to the black barely

living but also serving as a method which reverses and re-articulates the violence enacted upon

the body. From N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” in which a black courthouse finds a white police

officer of being guilty of the murderous system they have been complicit in to modern examples

such as Kendrick Lamar’s album “To Pimp a Butterfly” which takes several opportunities to

directly confront white listeners and individuals for their hatred and violence against black

Cajanding 15

bodies, the history of rap is highlighted by moments of reclamation against the odds of an

already rigged system. As Best and Kellner would indicate “Rap artists like Grandmaster Flash,

Run DMC, Public Enemy, Ice-T, N.W.A., Ice Cube, Salt 'n' Pepa, Queen Latifah, Wu Tang Clan,

Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac Shakur, the Fugees, and countless others produced a new musical

genre that uniquely articulated the rage of the urban underclass and its sense of intense

oppression and defiant rebellion.” (Best and Kellner 1) Characterized by a synthesis of the anger

of black punk, the tones of blues and jazz, and the rhythm and feel of the spiritual, hip hop as a

phenomenon, in its electric beats and harsh rhymes, became the mode of expression of countless

unique and diverse experiences under social death and simultaneously, the method of

development of dozens of politics of resistance, illustrated when Best and Kellner recognize

“East coast rap ranged from the black nationalist fervor of Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu

Nation, to the radical politics of Public Enemy, to the feminism of Queen Latifah, to the

emphasis on ghetto experience of Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, and KRS-One” (Best and

Kellner 3). Yet, it is not enough to recognize the breadth of critique that characterizes the

theoretical aspects of rap and hip hop when, in reality, it cannot be understated that rap itself

acted and acts as the most accessible, most prolific voice for the alienated and ignored in last few

decades.

“I freed you from being a slave in your mind, you’re very welcome. You tell me my song is

more than a song, it’s surely a blessing.”

-Kendrick Lamar “Mortal Man”

While the demand for refusal of legal systems endangers those who, although haunted by the

same system, rely on it to deal and bandage wounds and the demand for militant revolution

demands literal black death against a system that has mastered enslavement and violence since

Cajanding 16

its creation from those who already cannot pull themselves from the death they face every

waking moment, it is the utilization of hip hop, its disorientation of the values and ethics of white

civil society, its refusal of compromise with the structures it criticizes, and its language which

stems from the unknowable, unique black lived experience that serves not only to open up the

process of dismantling whiteness to black bodies other than theorists but also to the possibility of

imagining worlds beyond the current white world and the void of black destruction. While

definitely not opposed to theoretical musing which can match any of the authors who attempt to

identify and critique anti-blackness, it is the narration of hip hop and rap which plays upon the

lived experience in the hood, the individual retelling of moments of police brutality and

economic disadvantage, and the common experience of blackness which is revealed and

celebrated that serves as the gateway for countless voiceless and bodiless spirits, who await in

the tombs of black existence for a grammar of resistance – a language capable of enunciating the

unexplainable violence embodied by black life and returning black existence to the realm of the

human where it aggressively begins to compete against the structures of white-over-black. While

endless examples of this configuration can be called upon, using a specific exhibit out of “Fuck

tha Police” it is easy to illustrate, as Viney would indicate “the gangsta as avatar provided an

accessible if narrow critique of poverty, exploitation, and especially the carceral system that

reinforces them. And what more accessible critique could there be than the one that repeatedly

chants "fuck the police"?”(Viney 1) Denying the demand to speak in civic, legal, and white

terms, rap operates as the reclaiming of value for black enunciation, for an experience which lays

consistently out of conceptualization by white forces and therefore untouchable by white co-

option, and most importantly, as the process of revealing worlds beyond the present in refusing

the language and possibility of the present world for that of another. While it is easy to get lost in

Cajanding 17

the outright declarations of aggression, the deaths and murders, the lies and unspeakable truths,

in the undeniable pessimism of recognizing the world is held in contradistinction to your

existence in every verse and line, as Jared Sexton would indicate:

Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that

black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil

society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of

history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the

colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world

system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived

underground, in outer space . . . black life is lived in social death (Sexton 28-29)

For all the positing of the material white world as being uninhabitable for black bodies, it is easy

to forget, while spaces may not be found outside, it is within that black thrones and excellence

are formulated, new worlds built beyond the world’s illusions by the aspirations, dreams, and

struggles encapsulated by the uncontrollable power of rap.

While the emancipatory nature of rap cannot be understated, especially given its presence as

a media to elucidate experiences of brutality and violence which otherwise would go unspoken,

as with any radical methodology, the danger of recreation similar structures of oppression or

harming other endangered bodies remains very real. Although not confronted directly in the

paper, the existence of homophobia, sexism, and other troubling mentalities within hip hop and

rap cannot be ignored. As Julius Bailey would warn “The oppressed is compelled to subject

others to the same structure of domination from which he once suffered. And when a popularized

art form like rap music appropriates this strategy, oppression becomes normalized in the society

in which it is accepted.” (Bailey 83) While sometimes directly caused by those who participate in

Cajanding 18

rap, or even by white civil society as it pits marginalized groups against each other to preclude

resistance, crossfire amongst those who should be allied against structures of whiteness in this

ongoing domestic war must be analyzed and addressed if any future free from the status quo is to

be secured. For although this should not serve to question the intentions of those who retaliate

against the world through rap, we must remain vigilant in attempting to recognizing systems

which remain invisible in tombs of their own.

Cajanding 19

Works Cited

Bailey, Julius. “The Cultural Impact of Kanye West”. First edition. 2015. Print.

Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. "Rap, Black Rage, and Racial Difference". UCLA.

UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies Publications. N.D. Web 21.10.15

Bouie, Jamelle. Is "Justice for Trayvon" Even Possible?”. Prospect.org. The American

Prospect. 7-15-13. Web. 12-5-15.

Fanon, Frantz. “The Wretched of The Earth”. New York. Grove Press. 1963. Print.

Farley, Anthony P. "Perfecting Slavery”. Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 36, (2005):

225-256.

Gang Starr. “Conspiracy”. Daily Operation. 1992. CD.

KRS-One. “Sound of da Police”. Return of the Boom Bap. Jive Records. 1993. CD.

Kweli Talib. “Thieves in the Night”. Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Rawkus

Records. 1998, CD.

Lamar, Kendrick. “Mortal Man”. To Kill a Butterfly. Top Dawg Entertainment and

Aftermath Entertainment. 2015. CD.

Lamar, Kendrick. “The Blacker the Berry”. To Kill a Butterfly. Top Dawg Entertainment

and Aftermath Entertainment. 2015. CD.

Newton, Huey P. “Revolutionary Suicide”. New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1973.

Print

Cajanding 20

Omolade, Barbara. “Teaching about Peace, War, and Women in the Military”. Women’s

Studies Quarterly. Vol. 12. No. 2. Summer 1984. Pp. 12

Public Enemy. “Fight the Power”. Fear of a Black Planet. 1990. CD.

Public Enemy. “Revolutionary Generation”. Fear of a Black Planet. 1990. CD.

R.L. “WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH”.

Metamute. June 2013. Mute Magazine. Web. 12-5-15.

Sexton, Jared. “People-of-Color-Blindness”. Social Text. Vol. 28. Number 2. 2010. Pp. 48

Sexton, Jared. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black

Optimism”. InTensions Journal. Issue 5. 2011.

Viney, Liam. Prophets of pain: the art of NWA’s F*** tha Police. Theconversation. Web.

September 2015.

Wilderson, Frank B. “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.”

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

Wilderson, Frank B. “Vengeance of Vertigo”. InTensions Journal. Issue 5. 2011.