Yo! A Rapper's Domestic Policy Plan; How Clinton Can Bring Hope to Alienated Black America
Although many Americans are joyfully anticipating your inauguration, I see no reason to celebrate yet. In one sense, I'm glad you won. Unlike many of my generation, who bemoan the uselessness or corruption of the political process, I rejected the easy pessimism of not voting and cast a ballot for you.</br></br>Your campaign, however, placed me and most other blacks in a painful predicament. By claiming you were running against the "special interests" (blacks, labor and feminists) that have supposedly kept the Democrats out of the White House for the last 12 years, you skillfully undermined honest debate about racial justice. And by dissing Sista Souljah and distancing Jesse Jackson at a single stroke, you confirmed the bitter belief among many of us that even well-intentioned whites are unable to play the game of racial politics above board.</br></br>Here's our dilemma: If we speak up, we're special interest whiners, but if we keep quiet, we lose self-respect and reinforce our own invisibility. I, for one, cannot remain silent. Your actions were, in my view, calculating and unprincipled, and they angered me - but not enough to make me believe that you could not redeem yourself.</br></br>Although I hold a degree in economics, I am a radical rapper by profession, an artist whose outrage pushed me to write and record "Bush Killa," which appears on my album, "Sleeping With the Enemy." The song has sparked controversy because it imagines the stalking and slaying of the president, that ready-made symbol of politics and policies that have assaulted black America for nearly half my life. I understood that the language in this violent fantasy would be disturbing to many, but what I hoped to call attention to - the real- life economic violence visited upon millions of African-American people every day of their lives - is more disturbing and more real.</br></br>I am, nonetheless, at least slightly hopeful about what you can achieve with your presidential power. I like your rhetoric about putting people first, and I can't see you being worse than your predecessor.