Monday, December 21, 2009

Hip Hop Morality

Morality is an important topic. I mean let's be honest, it's nothing less than how we ought to live. Growing up in the inner city in the 1990s I grew up surrounded by hip hop culture and now that I'm older I can look back and see how incredibly ignorant many of its principles and morals are. I've written about this before and want to hit it from a different angle, slightly.

Let's look at hip hop's morals and break them down. Generalizing a bit, in hip hop culture stealing what you don't have or can't afford is alright, in fact its recommended. Women are all either bitches or hoes, depending on their attitude or number of sex partners, and they are to be used like pieces of meat and treated like shit. It's ok to drop out of school and sell drugs, because "real niggas" don't go to school, come on. It's perfectly fine to use violence as a way to solve just about every problem, even murder. "Real men" get women pregnant and move on to others.

Now when you have a culture that raises generations of young people with these values it is no wonder that blacks and hispanics drop out of school at the highest rates and end up in jail the highest rates. I am by no means blaming hip hop or its greater culture for the problems of minorities, as these problems existed for many years before anyone set up two turntables and a microphone. But what hip hop culture did was it adopted the worst aspects of the 'hood, glorified it with out any realistic way of addressing the issues, and instead just shrugging its shoulders and saying "that's how it is."

I'm glad that hip hop culture is changing to the point where we don't see this huge gauntlet of credibility that rappers must pass through as much anymore. Rappers can be a little preppy and don't have to have grown up in the projects and have been shot 9 times.

The past is the past, let's look ahead now for our future and the next generation's future. I want to see an end to the violence and apathy I see in the inner city. I want to see more minorities involved in science and technology and philosophy. I want to see more minorities graduating school and getting regular jobs. I want to see an end to the gang culture that permeates through minority males all over the country. I want to see peace, prosperity and positivity. I want an end to the culture of ignorance.

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