BOOK EXCERPT

ALL ABOUT THE BEAT: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America

By John McWhorter

(Gotham, June 19, 2008)

The Words I Manifest: Is Conscious Rap Different?

And you will find that this perspective is best –-check it out/ These are the words that I manifest.

Gang Starr, "Manifest," No More Mr. Nice Guy

A typical take on rap is that whatever Paul Wall and Busta Rhymes are pulling, there is a whole body of "conscious" rap, also termed "underground," "alternative," "grassroots" or less formally "digging in the crates" rap, that steps away from the gunplay and misogyny and takes on serious issues. This, we might think, is what will spark a revolution.

Because The Roots have a particularly iconic status as conscious rappers, I'll start with them. It's not that I don't like what they do: For starters, they're from my hometown of Philadelphia – I get to hear things like hoagies and Mount Airy mentioned and street names I know from my childhood. And as far as I'm concerned, their lyrics are poetry, pure and simple – they barely even need the beats behind them. The Roots write dense straight-up poetry, such that it's no surprise that, as they say on Things Fall Apart, they have a big fan base among the coffee house set ("coffee house girls and white boys").

However, in terms of what kind of "politics" this poetry puts across, it seems to me that what it ultimately has to tell us is "Sheeee-it!!!!!!" -- and that's not enough. I will make my case with two of the "fiercer" songs from their masterpiece of 2006, Game Theory.

"False Media" seems to be the one everybody finds especially significant. The message? "If I can't work to make it, I'll rob and take it." Because I am "a monster y'all done created." Now, there's no point in droning on that this "glorifies violence." What emcee Black Thought means, what you are meant to glean, is that society is so set against black men that poor ones can barely get jobs, and that it's therefore inevitable and justifiable, that so many of them go "thug." But that's a questionable proposition. Why did so many fewer black men go "thug" after Reconstruction or during the Great Depression?

Nevertheless, Black Thought is tapping a widely-held conviction about poor blacks and employment. Writers like Bakari Kitwana concur with insights like Black Thought's, such that Kitwana includes in his list of items on a hip-hop political agenda "the retention and creation of jobs for working-class Americans." Robin Kelley rhapsodizes over Ice Cube's "A Bird in the Hand" on Death Certificate, where a black man just out of high school keeps being turned down for service jobs and, as Kelley puts it, "It does not take much reflection for him to realize that the drug dealers are the only people in his neighborhood making decent money."

The problem is that the unemployment of poor black men does not correlate meaningfully with availability of jobs. A black man without a diploma who wants a job can get one. I state that not as a moral point, but as an empirical one. Here are some reasons why: The beat from "A Bird in the Hand" is now fading away ... and now gone. Please consider the following:

An influential argument is that the relocation of low-skill factory jobs from city centers to suburbs or abroad created an unemployment crisis for black men. However, Indianapolis' black community saw the same rise in unemployment among black men despite the fact that factories there did not relocate in significant numbers. Meanwhile, New York saw just as many black men drift into chronic unemployment despite the fact that manufacturing jobs were never a major mainstay of black employment in New York. Two academic studies have shown that factory relocation was responsible for at most a third of the unemployment among poor black men.

Poor blacks themselves in surveys do not support the idea that jobs are unavailable to them. In 1987, only 13 percent of unemployed poor blacks surveyed said they were out of work because they couldn't find a job. In 1980, half of the unemployed black teens surveyed in Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston said decently paying work was easy to find; 71 percent said minimum wage work was easy to find.

Tim Boyle / Getty Images

In the late 1980s, employment grew faster than the labor force. There were fewer factory jobs, but more non-union ones. Immigrants arriving in this very era thrived driving cabs, cleaning offices and doing kitchen work.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that three quarters of the new jobs over the next decade will very often not require a college degree and will pay good salaries. These jobs include machinists, sound technicians, electronics repairers, mechanics, building and transportation inspectors, plant operators, equipment installation and repair, mail carriers and sorters, sailors, fishers and others. In other words, the kinds of jobs we already see so many black people without college degrees in.

Black sociologist Alford Young, writing in full sympathy with the problems faced by uneducated black men, notes that an unfortunate contributor to the black unemployment problem lies in the behavior of many black men:

"They often say they will take whatever they can get, but a sentence or two later say that certain wages are wholly unacceptable. This seemingly contradictory talk is consistent with their statements about problems with certain past work experiences, such as the fast food industry, where some men eventually find jobs but abandon them (if not be dismissed) as soon as problems or tensions arise."

Other studies have reached similar conclusions, none written by conservatives.

And now we can turn the beat of "A Bird in the Hand" back up because it actually could be a handy backdrop to a final point about black unemployment. A great deal of research has shown that one of the black community's problems is that too many young black men do not seek work which is available. Even in ordinary real-life experience, anyone familiar with inner city life among black youth knows that there is a tragic tendency to ridicule black teens who take jobs at fast food restaurants, such that many who do make sure to do it on the sly.

Many think that it is understandable that black men refuse low-level jobs. There is a sense that native-born Americans, especially black ones on the wrong side of history, should not have to settle for "chump change," even temporarily (one can become a manager at a fast food restaurant). I disagree with that position but understand its appeal to many. However, it must also be considered in a historical perspective. Notice that almost no one was going around turning down "chump change" until the 70s. Think about how hard it is to imagine a black man in 1932, even with an eighth grade education and no real prospects for anything but menial labor, insisting that he won't work for "chump change" – much less being applauded by friends and the academy. If you are black, can you recall your grandparents ever mentioning this as a regular choice for black men when they were growing up?

What was different? Well, we wonder how the guy in 1932 thought he was going to feed himself if he turned down the "chump change." Today, of course, what the guy turning down wage work means is that he is going to sell drugs instead. That is a different problem than the one Ice Cube implies, of black men watching one door slam after another and finally taking drug selling as a frantic last resort. Rather, many men in this position could be legally employed, starting at the bottom and making their way from there. The drug trade provides a short cut, and unsurprisingly more than a few take it.

Yes, most of them do not get rich working as low-level drones. In fact, they usually make less than minimum wage – i.e. less than "chump change" – as was recently observed in the best-seller Freakonomics. But they do this hoping for promotion later. Drug sale is a hierarchy. The white guy takes "chump change" as a low-level exec, hoping to become the boss living large. The low-level "thug" is not thinking that being one of the drones is the end-all-be-all, but that maybe he will wind up on top. He thinks he might be like Al Pacino in Scarface – a movie people like him thrill to – than a workaday cable installer making a mere decent living.