My man, Talib Kweli wrote a very interesting blog in titled: The Convenience Of Comedy- Don't Be Fooled By Your TV!!! in which he predicates the Don Imus's disrespect for the black college basketball team to a systematic mental manipulation scheme that was allegedly advanced by a slave owner Willie Lynch in this speech supposed to have been delivered to other slave owners in 1712.To give you a brief background, the Willie Lynch Speech is a treatise that offered a breakthrough method of keeping the black man enslaved for 'generations to come' not by binding him in shackles and chains but by employing various psychological tools such as 'divide and rule'.
...you must pitch the old Black male vs. the young Black male, and the young Black male against the old Black male. You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female.
Kweli makes a lot of valid and strong points;
What Imus did had nothing to do with hip hop, do not let them fool you. Hip hop sells, so every time Hannity and Colmes does a show about hip hop, their ratings go up, period. These talking heads on the TV trot out fed up sisters, uncle tom negroes and political vultures who equate hip hop with the devil, but have never heard a record by Lupe Fiasco, the Roots, Immortal Technique, Common, Jean Grae, Little Brother, the Coup, Dead Prez, Zion I and too many other incredible artists to name. They love the earning potential of hip hop, and they how they sound bashing it, but the have zero respect for the art.
I would also take the argument further: by inferring that a 60+ years old TV veteran said something because a 21 year old ex-dope dealer says it in his songs, also allows a father to make the excuse that he 'tried to peek under the skirt of the woman at the grocery store because his son does it all the time'. I can easily see Sean Hannity decrying the double standards because the 'liberal media' says nothing when the son does the very same act!
On substance, I therefore wholly agree with Kweli but he disappoints me by falling into the trap of the conspiratorial 'they holding the black man down' school of thoughtlessness by basing almost his entire piece on the Willie Lynch speech which with just a quick research, he would have found out, is a fraud.
I quote two African American historians of great repute who have debunked the authenticity of this speech. Prof. Manu Ampim says:
I quote two African American historians of great repute who have debunked the authenticity of this speech. Prof. Manu Ampim says:
...the only known “William Lynch” was born three decades after the alleged speech, that the only known “William Lynch” did not own a plantation in the West Indies, that the “speech” was not mentioned by anyone in the 18th or 19th centuries, and that the “speech” itself clearly indicates that it was composed in the late 20th century.
The fact that the speech could only have been composed not earlier than in the late 2oth century is shown by the numerous anachronisms contained in the text. An anachronism is something that does not fit in the context of time. In this instance, the author of the speech uses words such as "refueling, fool-proof and Black (to refer to negroes) are all of 20th century origin.
Jelani Cobb, author and historian says:
Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been “discovered” it would’ve been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never “discovered,” but rather it “appeared” – bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way via internet directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria.
In my opinion, the Willie Lynch farce falls in the same category as the belief that the US government blew up the levees in New Orleans in order to flood out blacks. I believe that African Americans face serious challenges and by advancing a line of thinking that cannot be backed by facts or even one that goes against the facts, they are not only trivializing the true fight but also providing an easy escape route (especially in the Willie Lynch Speech case) for their community's woes.
Believers of this 'program' argue that it is for that reason that blacks are still living in miserable conditions, literary still enslaved, 200 years after the abolition. To quote Prof. Ampim,
it is naively assumed by a large number of Willie Lynch believers that this single and isolated speech, allegedly given almost 300 years ago, completely explains the internal problems and divisions within the African American community.
As much as the effects of slavery are still prevalent to date, it does not help the young kid with a whole future ahead of him/her when you tell him/her that he is essentially doomed from the get go, and that anyone is capable of manipulating his minds in way that is described in the speech. That is dispempowering them.
A modern day Martin Luther King is going to be that person that shall have enough courage to look in the mirror and admit that at times, what he sees is foul.
