The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop

3. Can’t Knock the Hustle: Hip Hop and the Cult of Playa Hatin’

3 Can’t Knock the Hustle Hip Hop and the Cult of Playa Hatin’ My train of thought is that of a hustler/or a nigga wit his shirt off/tryin’ to get his work off to customers. —Common, “Dooinit” Respect the game/that should be it/what you eat don’t make me shit. —Jay-Z, “Heart of the City” Fuck Y’all Analog Niggas, We Be Digital One of the most compelling television moments in recent memory is the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Senate confirmation hearings of 1991. The precursor to what is commonly called “Reality TV,” Thomas/Hill would whet our appetite for that ultimate blockbuster, the O.J. Simpson trial, which would come a few years later. The sweeping epic that developed around O.J., of course, would eclipse all other television dramas, both before and after, but it was the Thomas/Hill hearings that set the stage for the public by offering a real-life melodrama that, in many ways, exceeded the increasingly bland offerings available on network television at the time. Just out of graduate school and needing to come up, I pursued my life as a professor in the only place that I could find willing to pay me at the time, the University of Utah. I spent a year of cultural house arrest in Salt Lake City, back in the 61 early 1990s. I was living in SLC, and teaching my first course as a professor during the Thomas/Hill hearings. I remember vividly one day, as the hearings became more entrenched, getting on an elevator in a downtown office building, when a White male Mormon proceeded to get on behind me. The gentleman, conveying his best permanently painted on smile, looks over at me and says, “How about our man Thomas? Hope he makes it. . . .” The gentleman got off the elevator before I could answer him, but I was left to ponder his statement disguised as a question. Our man Thomas? To be honest, I originally thought that he was referring to Isiah Thomas (Zeke), the outstanding Detroit Piston point guard, who had recently been involved in an unfortunate encounter with Utah Jazz power forward Karl Malone’s vicious elbow to the head that resulted in a some forty stitches over Zeke’s eye. The blow came after Thomas had burned Jazz stalwart John Stockton for some fortyfour points in a game earlier that season in Detroit. Since Zeke, one of the game’s greatest point guards and floor leaders, had been curiously left off the original Dream Team and Stockton had been selected, many felt that the forty-four points was intended as a message to the world about who should have really been selected. So upon the Pistons’ visit to Utah that year, Karl Malone decided to send another message. Jumping to the defense of his White teammate, Malone, known as one of the “dirtiest” players in the league, next to Stockton that is, tried to blind Zeke with a lethal elbow to the head on one his drives to the basket. Blood poured from his head like a faucet that could not be turned off, and Zeke went to the hospital , only to return and finish the game. Anyway, being from the “The D,” I was a die-hard Piston fan who was still quite peeved that my man Zeke has been left off the Dream Team, and I was even more disturbed that Karl Malone had decided to jump to the defense of “the White man, “ as it were. This was what was on my mind when the cat on the elevator asked me that question that day. CAN’T KNOCK THE HUSTLE 62 As I began to think to myself, “How does this guy know I’m from Detroit?” It dawned on me that he was not talking about Isiah Thomas at all. Instead, he was talking about the national obsession that had developed over these confirmation hearings. It was the gentleman’s assumption that because Clarence Thomas was an African American, like me, that I, of course, would be a supporter. The gentleman embraced Thomas not because of Thomas’s race but because his ultraconservative views were directly in line with the religious right’s. Yet, he felt that these views combined with his race were enough to establish a bond between the two of us, for however brief that moment on the...