Have I mentioned that I’m in love with Mos Def? Side story: Right before I left New York I walked past him walking down the street near Washington Square Park with a woman who was pushing a baby in a stroller. The baby was cute. Mos Def was cuter. I swooned.
My crush on Mos Def aside, do check out the video. Feminists and other equal rights activists often discuss the value of simply putting non-male, non-white, non-heterosexual, non-able-bodied people on TV, in newsrooms, and in the public eye, and I think this video helps to illustrate why that argument is important. It’s not because there’s one Woman’s View or Black View or Queer View; it’s because it (a) helps to normalize regularly “othered” groups, and (b) it shifts the conversation and the hierarchy of what’s important. When you have more women in newsrooms, regardless of whether or not those women self-identify as feminist, things that are important to women but traditionally demeaned as “women’s issues” — education, health care, child and elder care, etc — get more front-page play. They become normalized as everyone’s issues. When the people who are setting the agenda come from a wider range of backgrounds, the agenda becomes more inclusive.
Here, you have Cornel West and Mos Def bringing up issues and starting conversations about things that have probably flown beneath Bill Maher’s radar. West is a long-standing conservative boogeyman, but as Samhita says, his points here are illuminating.
And to pre-empt what happened in the comments section at Feministing: No one is saying that Mos Def and Cornel West are perfect human beings who we should put on pedestals and follow at all costs. Applauding their performance on this show is not the same thing as embracing everything they’ve ever said. Saying that I like Mos Def or hip hop (and like Samhita, I am also a Miss Fat Booty fan, although Umi Says may be surpassing it on my iTunes most-played list) does not mean that I think every lyric he’s ever written is pro-feminist. Girl Talk dominates my top 25 most-played on iTunes (10 of the 25 slots), and he uses some pretty foul shit in his mash-ups. It’s not feminist. But it is creative, and it is fun, and I do like listening to it. And I can examine the shit out of it, but at the end of the day, if my feminist card is contingent on listening to the Indigo Girls,* you can have it.
A lot of rap and hip-hop isn’t feminist. This isn’t new. A lot of music of every other kind isn’t exactly feminist either, but it seems like hip hop is always a target. And honestly, I get really sick of social conservatives using feminist talking points to attack black artists. Country artists like Toby Keith aren’t exactly female-friendly, but they aren’t getting attacked the American Family Association. For people like Jack Thompson, what’s offensive about hip-hop isn’t a negative view of women; it’s the naughty words and particularly the “African-American vernacular.”
I don’t accept the allegation that it’s anti-feminist to listen to hip-hop; I don’t accept the argument that liking hip-hop is hypocritical for a feminist (and if that’s what you think, I would suggest looking up “hypocrisy”).
What I do think is interesting is that the “OMG misogynist music!!!” argument comes up almost exclusively in response to anything hip-hop-related, when we all know that hip-hop does not, as a genre, have a monopoly on sexism. I also think it’s interesting that Mos Def gets called out on the Feministing thread for totally unrelated comments he apparently made in other settings. It’s kind of the equivalent of negating every intelligent thing Andrea Dworkin ever said with responding, “But she pretty much said that all sex is rape.” Except most feminists don’t do that to Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon or any of the other radical feminists who, for all their shortcomings and problems, contributed immeasurably to the movement. We realize that feminist thinkers like Dworkin and MacKinnon are complex people; we realize that supporting one thing they said does not amount to supporting everything they said.
Why aren’t we there with people like Mos Def and Cornel West?
*They’re on my iTunes playlist too, so no Indigo Girls hate here. It was just an obvious example.