N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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СКАЧАТЬ mercenaries, misogynists, and homophobes in gangsta rap cannot be denied (stand up Rick Ross et al.). But what also cannot be denied by anyone who actually listens to the music is the way some of its most popular and accomplished performers—Pac, Nas, Hov, and Ice Cube—spit lyrics laced with political commentary and invitations to sympathetically identify with black criminals, including violent black hustlers and gangbangers. Rather than passively accept being reduced to objects of derision and butts of jokes, these transgressive griots grabbed mics and dropped multiplatinum albums that penetrated pop culture with their own violent-black-offender narrative, the “narrative of a Nigga,” if you will, complete with that narrative’s own moral and political lenses. In style (lyrics liberally sprinkled with the disreputable N-word and other profane utterances), these songs rejected respectability politics; in substance, these performers rejected the “lovable Black People”/“condemnable Nigga” moral dichotomy. It’s wrong to tar reflective and critical gansta rappers with the same brush as shallow and rudderless hacks.

      In 2007, at USC’s Bovard Auditorium before over 1,000 students, faculty, and alumni, Joanne Morris produced a play I wrote called Race, Rap, and Redemption, which was designed to explore issues of racial and social justice, oppression, unity, theology, and redemption through rap and hip-hop music, dance, song, and poetry. I will discuss this example of what Clifford Geertz calls “metaphysical theater” in some detail below, but for now will just mention that it deployed gansta rap in support of an iconic violent black criminal—a death row inmate named Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a convicted murderer and one of the people who helped flood the streets of our own South Central neighborhoods with crack and violence, a co-founder of the notorious street gang called the Crips. Because USC is located in South Central Los Angeles, crime is of more than academic interest to our scholarly community—on a first-hand basis, we pay the price of proximity to poor and crime-ridden neighborhoods and must continuously strike a balance between fear and compassion. Just before the event, Mr. Williams had been executed by the state of California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had denied his 11th-hour petition for a reprieve. Incorporated into our reflections on whether we should “pour liquor for Tookie,” (that is, express solidarity with him in the form of a libations ritual) were live performances of gangsta rap and gangsta rap-inspired song, dance, drama, cinema, sermon, and spoken word. As the video of the event shows,33 on that night most of the Trojan community in attendance accepted the invitation to bond with even the “wickedest” black criminal by rising to their feet in empathy for and solidarity with other Tookies still sitting on death row.

      Transgressive words and symbols and performances can change hearts and minds, but they can also cost those who take part in them their personal freedom or professional ambitions when, in the eyes of authorities or higher ups, edgy utterances cross from the cutting edge to the bleeding edge. For instance, my play included live performances by Ice Cube, whom police have repeatedly arrested for going on stage and uttering these provocative but unmistakably political lyrics:

      Fuck tha police, coming straight from the underground

      A young nigga got it bad ‘cause I’m brown

      And not the other color, so police think

      They have the authority to kill a minority

      Cube also performed that anthem—N-word-laden, profanely oppositional—in my Bovard production, triggering severe negative consequences for the interim law school dean, whose programming support made Cube’s defiant performance possible. That dean suffered the wrath of our then-president and then-provost for aiding and abetting such an inflammatory performance in what they called “the tinderbox ready to ignite that is South Central L.A.”34 Nigga Theory traffics in transgressive utterances precisely because it is a way to examine the relationship between freedom of expression, academic freedom, transgressive art, unsayable words, words that wound, hate speech, racial justice, and social change. Nigga Theory necessarily stands against hate speech codes and against finding secret satisfaction in seeing someone “punch a Nazi” on viral videos, not because I have any particular sympathy for racists or Nazis, but because down that road lies destruction for black dissidents and dissenters whose oppositional words and symbols offend people with privilege and power.

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      Racialized mass incarceration has been a river fed by many streams, but by far its biggest tributaries have been the moral, legal, and political lenses through which ordinary people both inside and outside the black community look at black criminals, especially serious or violent ones. Accordingly, Nigga Theory weaves together critical reflections on morality, law, and language in the form of political communication.

      It’s the absence of doubt—the moral certainty that one is righteously doing the right thing—that deliberately kills people, by strapping on a bomb and walking into a crowd of tourists, for instance, or by strapping down a man in a chair and injecting, gassing, shocking, or shooting him to death. Nigga Theory argues for less certainty and for more epistemic humility in our moral discourse, and criminal condemnations of black wrongdoers on five different, interlocking levels.

      First, drawing on Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform and its Rawlsian critique of America’s unjust basic social structure35 (John Rawls insisted on reciprocity in his theory of justice), Nigga Theory asks whether or not denizens of dark ghettos owe a duty to obey the laws of an intolerably unjust social system. Those who justify punishing desperately poor black criminals on “paying a debt to society” grounds assume a social system in which the burdens and benefits of social cooperation are fairly (or at least not intolerably unfairly) distributed, and that laws benefit everyone. So, as a kind of debt for the benefits gained, everybody owes obedience to those laws; someone who breaks the law owes something to those who do not, because he has acquired an unfair advantage. Punishing him takes from him what he owes, exacts that debt, and thereby restores the equilibrium of benefits and burdens. Nigga Theory debunks this “Gentlemen’s Club” picture of the relation between black folk and society, exposing the emptiness of the claim that the state—as The People’s representative in criminal prosecutions—is morally justified in punishing truly disadvantaged black criminals to make them pay their “debt” to society.

      Second, even if, under a Rawlsian analysis, the state retains the moral right to punish morally condemnable (albeit unjustly oppressed) black offenders, anti-black bias—buried, or not, in the cognitive unconscious of ordinary judges and jurors—undermines the reliability, impartiality, and fairness of such moral condemnations.

      Third, the moral condemnations of any wrongdoer of any race cannot be trusted at a philosophical level because the phenomenon of moral luck—the radically counterintuitive findings of moral philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams that all praise, blame, and moral responsibility hinge on fortuity—undermines the rationality and legitimacy of all moral condemnation.36 The “self” is a tissue of contingencies and one’s moral status a crapshoot, and this provides a fresh framework and vocabulary for thinking about ancient questions of free will and blameworthiness.

      Fourth, Nigga Theory considers the moral responsibility of the United States itself (again, We the People) for the criminal behavior of many violent black wrongdoers. It identifies two grounds for such responsibility: the general criminogenic social conditions (like extreme social disadvantage that the state fosters or lets fester), and federal and state policies that helped jumpstart the crack plague of the 1980s and 1990s. Federal and state governments bear major responsibility for crime caused by chronic unemployment, grinding poverty, crumbling schools, inadequate health care, food and shelter insecurity, hunger and homelessness, and the foreseeable carceral consequences. A violent offender’s bad choice or criminal intent does not break the causal chain between racial oppression and criminal wrongdoing in black communities—it is a foreseeable link in that causal chain for which those who maintain our unjust social order bear responsibility.

      Fifth, according to conventional legal theory, violent black СКАЧАТЬ