Double standards

By Deauwand Myers

Recently, I wrote on Jay Park about his controversial music video: displaying guns, tattoos, and the usual tropes and stereotypes too many people associate with being a black American. I argued that the bigger problem was not cultural appropriation, as much as a reductive, narrow, boring, uncreative imagining of black American life.

Then when this newest scandal emerged with black, American rapper "DaBaby," where he spews vile anti-gay and stigmatizing remarks about sexually transmitted diseases within sexual minority communities, a lot of the Internet was ablaze with criticism.

But wait. DaBaby routinely calls black women crude, misogynist terms, uses the n-word, extolls women if they are sexually pliant, and on and on. There was no such outcry about these lyrics and the countless other rappers who deploy this same kind of trash. In fact, plenty of minority groups and the larger Caucasian audience sing along with these lyrics with glee.

This exposes the point I made in a previous article: minority groups, like the LGBTQ+ community at large, particularly those who are non-black, do not and have not in a large and substantive fashion engaged in the dismantling of white supremacy, anti-blackness, and anti-black female sexism and objectification. Only when virulent homophobic, anti-Asian, or anti-Semitic comments or lyrics are spouted is there a chorus of condemnation.

This abject example of double standards is disheartening for its rank hypocrisy, and frankly, cruelty. Let's go back to the Jay Park incident. So, his wearing Afrocentric braids and carrying guns in a video was sophomoric and culturally appropriative, but when all the videos with him or his label mates include scantily-clad women dancing suggestively, and are clearly present as flesh backdrops (of Korean and black descent), there wasn't a mumbling word. In this way we see what we see time and time again, women's bodies are disposable and can be commodified like any property, and the "woke" masses stay as quiet as Peter when he was asked about Jesus three times.

Let's call a thing a thing. It has always been OK with everyone, including too many black people, for other blacks to use racial slurs to other black people, and objectify women's bodies, especially black women's bodies. We, as a global society, and indeed in Korea, Japan, and the U.S., are far, far too comfortable with black-on-black degradation, the violent, reductive sexualizing of women's bodies, the fetishizing of said bodies, rank consumerism, and yes, living a life of hedonistic dissipation.

Oh, but let's not use homophobic language, because that would include white gay men, famously uncaring and unbothered with the destruction of their colored counterparts. Title 9 (of which a larger proportion of white, female professionals have prospered from), Civil Rights, Voting Rights, hate crime legislation, and so on were all championed most fervently, with all the death, bloodshed, and pain attendant to that, by black people with their own black bodies.

Black people have always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. DaBaby, and a host of other rappers, along with their white superiors, have always prospered from the internalized self-hatred of black people, and since that anti-blackness is shared like a good cocktail worldwide, there are and most probably will never be any repercussions for this kind of thing.

This doesn't mean the giants within the rap industry aren't geniuses, and a lot of their content I enjoy. NOTORIOUS B.I.G. chief among them. And one must ask the nuanced question, if hip-hop is art, can't expletives and racial slurs be used in that artform just as it is deployed in exquisite literature from black writers, for example? "Beloved," "The Color Purple," and "The Bluest Eye" are masterpieces that contain very controversial subject matter and language.

And as an English major in undergrad and graduate school, plenty of writers I like and read were horrible human beings: racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, etc. The Bible, if made into an epic mini-series, could only be shown on HBO, and be given an NC-17 rating, particularly the Old Testament. I mean, have you read what's in there?

DaBaby's comments, just like some of Jay Park's choices, are problematic in their own ways, no doubt. And what DaBaby said was so over-the-top, I get the furor. But that same energy from lots of folks, especially some people of racial and sexual minorities, is often absent when anti-black language and imagery is involved, regardless of who it's coming from.

No other group uses racial slurs against themselves so often and so consistently in all walks of life than black people. That doesn't mean other people, who are non-black, can then think such language/imagery is fair game to deploy or enjoy. It just means we, as a society, have a whole lot of work to do.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul