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Warning!! The following Nelly video is not safe to view at Work. View at your own discretion.

“Tip Drill” by Nelly

So now that we have all seen the “Kid’s Freak Fest!” video and have become equally appalled by what we have seen, we now need to figure out where this type of behavior comes from and what is needed to stop it. Sure, we as parents have the most important role in raising our children but, what about the kids that do not have good parents? What can we do to help them? Well for starters, we can need change the media portrays us. We especially need to change how our own music portrays us. As I have said before, we are letting our “Black” music define our African American culture. Our kids are learning how to walk, talk, dress, treat women, treat men, have sex, etc…from music videos. Hip-Hop has become synonymous with African-American culture. To behave differently from Hip-Hop is to act “White.”

 Our TV shows aren’t much better. Have you ever seen “The Flavor of Love?” We need to monitor what our children see, or hear. However, in a society where more and more children are being raised in a single-parent home or where both parents have to work, kids have more unsupervised time than ever before. So that is why we need to take our defense beyond our homes and into the record company offices, the TV studios, the FCC headquarters, and our elected officials doorsteps. We need to let advertisers know that their products are not welcome in our homes either, if they continue to support the stations that broadcast these negative stereotypes of our people.
Our children are our future and we are letting them become exposed to POISON during their development into adults. Yes, our music has become Poison and I am not alone in that assessment.

Misogyny and Women of Color
Objectified female bodies are everywhere: in advertising images, on magazine covers, and television and movie screens. Presenting a one-dimensional portrayal of male heterosexuality, using the female body as an advertising vehicle limits the ways in which men and women can interact. As Byron Hurt says in HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, “Some people say that it’s just boys being boys, but I think it has a lot to do with boys figuring out early that girls are there for us to sexually objectify or to be our sexual playthings.”

While media images might be written off as “only pictures” or “fantasy representation,” they remain a very real part of American culture, with real-life implications for viewers and consumers. Writer and actor Sarah Jones explains, “The image of scantily-clad women is supposed to affirm some image of masculinity, the man as a mack…. But in actuality, what they show themselves to be is incredibly insecure. And the idea is, these men are so important and so powerful, and these women conversely are so dime a dozen… that they don’t matter, they’re just eye candy, they’re worthless.”

For women of color, misogyny and (mis)representation is two-fold, playing on stereotypes of both gender and race. Scholar Jelani Cobb blames sexist music videos for taking “a view of women of color that’s not radically different from the views of 19th-century white slaveholders.” Communities of color must also begin to value fighting misogyny and violence against women as a crucial issue and one that is inseparable from racism and other power imbalances. As writer and teacher Michael Dyson says, “If we have a glorified sense of our own victimization as black and brown men, what we must not miss and what we often do is to understand that black and brown women themselves are so victimized, not only by a white patriarchy, but by black male supremacy and by the violence of masculinity that’s directed toward them.”

· Black women are 35% more likely to be assaulted than white women.
· Only 7% of black women who are assaulted report the crime to the police. The rate in the entire population is 42%

The Shift

Hip-hop lovers reminisce about the “golden era” of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a diversity of music makers included conscious rappers, party rappers, gangster rappers and more. But today, with the onslaught of media conglomeration and hip-hop’s full establishment into the mainstream, commercial rap’s lyrical content has grown increasingly limited and one-dimensional. Hip-hop, which began as a form of cultural expression in marginalized communities and was once poised to become a vehicle for African American empowerment and political activism, is today stereotyped as misogynistic and homophobic, glorifying violence and racist caricature.

One explanation might be that labels simply refuse to put out anything else-commercial rap simply sells more, especially now that media corporations are involved.

· The Hip-Hop industry garners more than ten billion dollars a year

· Seventy-percent of mainstream Hip-Hop is consumed by white men.

· Five media conglomerates control more than 80% of broadcast and cable television viewing.

· More than 90% of record labels, magazines, TV Stations, radio stations, and retailers disseminating Hip=Hop related products are white-owned.

 So let me get this straight. White people own the TV stations, Radio stations, and the Record Companies… Which means they also own mainstream Hip-Hop music …Which means they also own African American culture as a bonus.