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WILLIAM JELANI COBB 21 The Hoodrat Theory The flyers posted in Cosby Hall said it all: “We Care About Your Sister, But You Have To Care About Ours, Too.” The slogan explained the position of the studentactivists at Spelman College whose protests over Nelly’s 2004 “Tip Drill” video led the artist to cancel his scheduled appearance for a bone marrow drive on the campus. But in a real sense, their point went beyond any single rapper or any single video and went to the center of a longstanding conflict in the heart of the black community. We have, by now, been drowned by the cliché defenses and half-explanations for “Tip Drill,” most of which fall into a formulaic defense of Nelly’s “artistic freedom” while casting hellfire on the unpaid women who participated in the creation of the video. The slightly more complex responses point to the pressing need for bone marrow donors in the black community, saying that saving the lives of leukemia patients outweighs the issue of a single soft-porn music video. But rarely do we hear the point that these students were bringing home: that this single video is part of a centuries-long debasement of black women’s bodies. And the sad truth is that hip-hop artists’ verbal and visual renderings of black women are now virtually indistinguishable from those of 19th century white slave owners. History is full of tragic irony. Full Disclosure: I am a history professor at Spelman College. I’ve also taught several of the students involved in the protests over the video. I don’t pretend to be unbiased in my support for their actions. I openly supported the students, who—and this is important—never uninvited Nelly or canceled the marrow drive. They did however request that he participate in a campus-wide forum on the problematic images and stated that if he did not, the marrow drive could continue, but his presence on campus would be protested. That Nelly’s organization decided to cancel the drive rather than listen to the views of women who were literally being asked to give up bone and blood is tantamount to saying, “Shut up and give me your bone marrow.” This is the truth: hip-hop has all but devolved into a brand of neo-minstrelsy, advertising a one-dimensional rendering of black life. But stereotypes serve to justify not only individual prejudices, but also oppressive power relationships. In the 1890s, the prevailing depiction of black men as sex-crazed rapists who were obsessed with white women served as a social rationalization for the insanity of lynching. Nor should we forget that Jim Crow took root and evolved in tandem with the growing obsession with blackface caricature of African Americans as senseless children too simpleminded to participate in an allegedly democratic society. It is no coincidence that the newborn The Hoodrat Theory 211 NAACP made its first national headlines for protesting D. W. Griffith’s white supremacist epic, Birth of a Nation. In short, stereotypes are the public relations campaign for injustice. In the case of black women, the body of myths surrounding their sexuality served to justify the sexual exploitation they experienced during and after slavery. And in so doing, the blame for adulterous relationships that produced biracial offspring shifted from married white slaveholders to insatiable black temptresses who led them astray. The historian Deborah White has written of the prevailing images of enslaved black women: One of the most prevalent images of black women in antebellum America was of a person governed almost entirely by libido, a Jezebel character. In every way, Jezebel was the counter-image of the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh.1 As long as black women could be understood to be sexually lascivious, it was impossible to view them as victims of sexual exploitation. Some went so far as to argue that black women did not experience pain during childbirth—evidence, in their minds, that black women were not descendants of Eve, and therefore not human. In 1895, when Ida B. Wells-Barnett began traveling abroad to publicize the horrors of American racism and highlight the recreational homicide of lynching, this same set of ideas was employed to discredit her. One editor charged that she was not to be...

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