Insanity. Sheer insanity.
“Popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot corporations profit off of it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing,” said Bill Kristol. He added that Tipper Gore “tried to raise this issue, and was widely ridiculed,” referring to the parental advisory labels the future V-FLOTUS enacted after her daughter purchased Purple Rain thirty years ago.
“The kids that are buying hip hop or gangster rap, it’s a white audience, and they hear this over and over again,” Joe Scarborough said. “So do they hear this at home? Well, chances are good, no, they heard a lot of this from guys like this who are now acting shocked.”
When I heard what Bill Kristol said on Wednesday's
Morning Joe, I had to listen to it again a few more times to make sure I wasn't mis-hearing it. This man just blamed white racism not on bad parenting, not on historical poison, but on black rappers. The conservative author and commentator formed his lips to somehow blame hip hop
for the racist chant that the SAE fraternity at the University of Oklahoma was recently recorded performing. This strategy of blaming black people for white racism isn't new. In fact, whites routinely blamed blacks for their own unlawful lynchings in the South.
Kristol, blaming black hip-hop artists for a white fraternity with a deep history of racism chanting a song about lynching black men, whom they call "n*gg*rs" they want to hang from trees, is in the same illogical lineage as blaming Emmett Till for his own lynching, instead of the ugly racism (and racists) who are really at fault.
Thankfully, the University of Oklahoma president doesn't agree with Kristol and has called these students out for what they are and issued a zero tolerance policy on racism for his campus.
Hip hop had zero, zilch, nothing to do with what the SAE students (and their fellow sorority sisters who seem to have gotten off) so giddily chanted. To even ramrod hip hop into this discussion isn't just a distraction, it's wrong. All of the blame for everything those students said falls on them and their fraternity—particularly in light of the revelation that this chant is being performed by the same fraternity on other campuses as well.
Listen, I know Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough say dumb stuff, but this denial, this attempt to push blame onto anyone other than racist white folk is cowardly and only perpetuates the same cycle of denial that feeds racism in the first place.