Kendrick Lamar: The Voice of a generation

We often talk about someone being the "voice of a generation". Kendrick Lamar is a rapper that has recently risen to be the voice of the newest generation of adults to come from the inner city. When we typically think of the voice of this group, I am sure most minds will immediately jump to gangsta rap artists like Eazy-E. However, Kendrick is anything but your straightforward gangsta rapper. Born and bred in Compton, he is an interesting hybrid of backpack nostalgia and unadulterated style, blending typical tropes of street culture with sincere cultural analysis.

Songs like 

 

Last year he released the album Section.80. It itself is a generational piece referencing the Ronald Reagan era of kids to be born in the 80's and grow up in the environment of Compton.

It’s a balancing act of sensitivity and aggression, of consideration and ignorance, of self-seriousness and jest. 

"I’m not on the outside looking in, I’m not on the inside looking out", Lamar bellows on its outro, "I’m in the dead fucking center, looking around."

He is one of the new generation of "conscious" rappers who are expanding their audience beyond the liberal arts college student and moving into the mainstream. Compton's established super stars Dr. Dre and the Game have already tapped him to ascend to superstardom recognizing his talent and progressive agenda. But his demeanor is anything but that of a rapper. In interviews he doesn’t noticeably carry himself like a street dude, he definitely carries the weight of the streets on his shoulders. He has been characterized as a cautious optimist.  He often speaks at length about matters like caring for the children of his incarcerated friends and how his ultimate goal is to make enough money to bring community centers back to Compton. It is his naked and candid honesty that some view as a weakness, but I feel that he could serve as a role model for kids like our Dreamers who look up to people like Rick Ross. 

He is a unique blend of charisma, technical ability, raw enthusiasm and a legitimate desire to make the world better for all people.

Hon 479 in retrospect

Since I myself am more of the academic type, my personal meaning for my life is to grow as an intellectual and attempt to remain a student for the entirety of my life.  It is somewhat of a foreign concept for me to empathize with other people’s pursuits that fall outside of the academic realm. While I have had other experiences tutoring kids from this socio-economic background, it was actually Mr. Jazz that made the broadest impact on my thought process. It was inspiring for me to see an individual fully dedicating their life to the cultivation of others’ lives. I feel that this speaks volumes about the Mr. Jazz’s take on the meaning of life. I have come to reevaluate my take on science. For much of my life I have been interested in knowing, simply for the sake of knowing. I feel that this is a disconnect that exists between the academic world and real world at times. But my reasons for focusing on the natural sciences have been due to my fatalistic worldview. I have felt that we as a species were probably too far gone, and that due to the current state of affairs, there was little that I could do to change the dreary, deterministic outcome.

 Volunteering in the IHAD program has initiated a change in this mindset. Being around Mr. Jazz, Ms. Danielle, and those kids has forced me back down to Earth. Despite the fact that I had tutored before, these kids were able to affect me in a special way. Something about the look of excitement in those kids eyes when you walk in triggers emotions and feelings that else truly can. In a corny way, I feel that I am learning what it means to be human. We are innately social beings and to deny that is to deny your very genetic programming, something that I feel that I may have been doing unconsciously. It was Dr. Hobby said, these kids expect something genuine out of you. It was startling when I attempted to use my typical tutoring demeanor, which has been successful with middle-schoolers to college students, but these kids were not having it. They forced me to loosen up and show them some true character. This has kind of stirred up the approach that I have taken to 1 on 1 interactions. Strangely, when giving a presentation or speaking to a large group I can be more comfortable than in 1 on 1 situation. IHAD will definitely lead to a change in my communication skills, because kids do not hold back feedback the way that adults do! 

Overall, the IHAD experience in conjunction with our class material has forced me to reassess my reasons for pursing knowledge. Rather than understanding the way that nature works for knowledges sake I feel science needs to come down at times to work with layman. But this is a two-way street, a goal of mine that has come into fruition this semester is the enhancement of science literacy in America. A lack of science literacy has plagued minorities for decades, (see Tuskegee Study and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), but I feel that it is a problem across the board, as most americans do not understand fundamentals of scientific research nor do they understand how to interpret its results. For example, I log onto Facebook and I see that a "hippy" friend of mine has used a peer-reviewed source to argue that fluoride in water is truly bad. I find the article and it is only tangentially related to the topic that they were addressing! Additionally, we have fundmental lack of  technological understanding. We are technologically literate, but computers and cell phones are black boxes, more magical items that need to be charged than carefully designed network of microcircuits. SO in summation to my rambling, I feel that increased fluency in scientific and technological concepts will lead to an positive increase in a number of other areas, like public support for research and even general concepts like evolution.

Racism W/out Racists

I can't remember if we mentioned this book in class, but "Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a interesting piece that confronts the modern problem of racism. We live in a country were all but a few actually deem themselves as racist, but yet the inequalities that we have confronted in class still exist! 


See this NY Times column for an interesting discussion of this topic 



Following the many social movements of the 20^th century like the Feminist, Civil Rights, and LBGTQ, we have entered an unprecedented era of tolerance. I use the word tolerance because this is different than actual acceptance. This policy of simple tolerance has indicative of abstract liberalism. We respect the rights of a cause by abstractly applying the tenets of liberalism to rationalize our support. Our country was founded on the classic principles of liberalism, those being individualism, universalism, egalitarianism, and meliorism; the concepts we are all individuals, equal and through our combined effort can effect positive change. 


 Bonilla-Silva takes this problem head on tackling it from a number of angles. I particularly enjoyed abstract liberalism turned abstract racism or color-blindness. Bonilla-Silva characterizes abstract racism as “framing race-related issues in the language of liberalism…”. This general is interesting in that it that can be applied beyond the scope racism and be applicable to just about any cause outside of race like gender and sexual orientation discussions. 

Even Colbert has picked up on this color blindness:

"Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them because police officers call me "sir"."


Psychology Today also addresses this issue.


Problems with the colorblind approach


"Racism? Strong words, yes, but let's look the issue straight in its partially unseeing eye. In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives."


They go on to add that the solution if Multiculturalism and what they describe does manage to pass as cosmopolitanism!

Concerted Cultivation: Thanks Mom and Dad!

Larueau posits that there are two prevailing modes of understanding in equality in society

1) Society is fundamentally open. Personal attributes dictate outcomes. We are a society of individuals

2) Disparities exist, yet are a matter of “degrees” of difference

“the communal aspects of class, class subcultures and milieu, have long since disappeared

Larueae seeks to dispel these notions and show that class truly matters in her study. And from the books that we have read, this is not a farfetched case to make. We have shown in Marked, there is correlation with the incarceration rates as well as finding a job after incarceration. Additionally we have seen the disparities the distribution of industrial waste and the correlation to socio-economic status, which generally correlates to race.

While her sample size was small for the study, I found her qualitative analysis of different parenting styles, their relationship to social class, and the resulting differential transmission of benefits to be fascinating. It reconfirmed my own appreciate for my parents, because despite all of the praise I have received I have always truly felt that my parents were responsible for my success. They definitely took the cultivated approach and when I compare childhoods with friends I am often left thankful for the amount of dedication that my parents poured into my upbringing. They worked extremely hard to get me to do things outside of my comfort zone, a work ethic that I hated at the time, but I now appreciate. I am glad that my parents realized the benefits of the concerted cultivation, because the positive outcomes that Laruea attributes to CC, I have definitely feel that I have received those very same benefits. I definitely entered college with a sense of entitlement and some practice at making social institutions work me. I honestly got along better with adults than peers growing up, a trait that has led to great relationships with professors at UNCA.

It has been a shock to see that not everyone was as naturally comfortable with figures of authority as myself. Most of all this course has been an eye opener to the world of others. My parents always told me I was in a world of my own, and college allowed me to finally make a connection with world of others, particularly this class, as it was of course intended to do.

The Qatsi's: Great Films, Foolish Maker.

As a trilogy the Qatsi's offer an interestingly framed perspective of mankind. Koyaanisqatsi in particular interests me. The juxtaposition of the natural world with the "artificial" is fascinating and from a purely aesthetic perspective, its preservation by the US National Film Registry is a no-brainer. 


In a video filmed as a "Making of" for Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio maintains that the Qatsi films are meant to create an experience and that "it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means." But the statements that he makes in the interviews (that we watched as a class), it is hard to believe that this is true. He is rather aggressive in condemning technology, and constantly compares it to art. His comments honestly suggest ignorance in his understanding of both art and technology.


I feel that he misses that technology is part of being human, since he is so quick to condem its ubiquitous nature. Parsing the word "technology" we see that it simply means the study of art, skill, or craft. This and culture is all that really set us apart from the rest mammals. He dreams of a post-technology future, but that is utterly ridiculous. Viewing human history through the lens of "Guns, Germs, and Steel", technology is the sole reason that culture has been able to move from a virtual afterthought to one of the centers of human establishment. Advances in food production freed up individuals pursue endeavors outside of securing nourishment. It was this surplus from which cultural specialists like religious leaders, thinkers, scientistes, etc. sprung from. So from simply examining the mechanisms by which human society evolved, the idea of a world without this support system seems unfeasible. No, I have no wish to be a hunter-gatherer, and I do not think many other people in our society (First World) wish to be so either. Technology is requisite for our survival as a species, since we are lacking in many other areas with respect to other living organisms.


He says that technology has a life of its own, but I would make the case that it is more like a virus than a living organism, but even that is a stretch.  The root of the problem for me is not technology, but the creator itself. 


We have created technology to make our lives easier (i.e. get tasks done more efficiently). Why have we done so? 
    
Probably because we exist in a finite state. We have a finite amount of time and finite amount of energy, ergo as a self preserving system, we (as individuals and living systems) usually choose the 
"easiest" path. We evolved the computing power beyond many other organism to perform calculations to optimize our actions under the conditions of our terminal existence. To me, technology is an the product of our execution of this programming.  This fortified by the mentality with which we continue to develop technology to be more efficient on many fronts.


We seem to be programmed to be unsatisfied with past improvements and live on a relative scale. Life in third-world countries is likely better than life of humans tens of thousands of years ago, yet today this is the bottom of the scale. 


At any rate, Reggio sets the stage for introspective activities such as these. Despite maintaining that the film is essentially neutral, it is clear that he selects the images that he does for his film to instigate specific feelings within ourselves (the viewers). He succeeds in invoking the thought that we humans are a cancerous mass in the supra-organism, an mass that is unsustainably, evolving and replicating for the sake of existing. He succeeds in making me question the purpose of our existence as a race, but his apparent motivations for making the films simply do not jive with my perception of the world.

Empire of Illusion

So I have started reading the Empire of Illusion, written by the same guy, Chris Hedges, who wrote Bobos in Paradise. It has the same harsh tone of Bobo's without the same comedy. This consistent borderline rant character of his writing set off some internal alarms, so I have chosen to look at the man speak, as I am expecting another Kozol situation (I find my self nodding to his writing but shaking my head to his speechs-type situation).

This is what I watched.

He is speaking at the New School, and his message that the government has failed us, before the Vietnam war is interesting, seeing how if one looks into the background of the New School (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_School#History), this rhetoric is not surprising considering it was founded, as an offshoot of academics dissatisfied with the American war rhetoric of WWI. But recently many of the head honchos of the school have had close ties with the Clintons, and other high profile political groups. But they also have a tradition of synthesizing leftist intellectual thought with European philosophy.


At any rate, his use of Michael Jackson for a vehicle to demonstrate how the illusions (and their exploitation/creation by corporations) that have become an integral part of our society. The cult of celebrity has taken over our culture and even political arena. Everything has become a brand, the past election was Brand Obama vs. Brand Bush, so he is arguing that the entire system is indeed corrupt.


But what I find most interesting is his ruminations of totalitarianism, he says that we live in an inverted totalitarian society ( a term first used by Sheldon Wolin)


"While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.”"


 -From  Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought by Wolin

According to Wikipedia there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism. In classical totalitarian states, the state dominates economic actors, where as in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the state. Second, while the most regimes aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population with military demonstrations and youth groups, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy, all that is required is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them. Lastly, inverted totalitarianism still feigns democracy.

Wolin again: "Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

The idea being that since the close of WWII and the onset of the Cold War our country/empire has been evolving into this type of state.  Alternatively there is also a Managed Democracy that more closely resembles Nazi type totalitarianism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism#Managed_democracy).


However, the main problem, currently, is the economic slowdown of our empire. Eminent Harvard historian Charles Maier attributes this to a shift from being an Empire of Production to an Empire of Consumption, and from my limited knowledge of history, this seems to be an accurate assessment of why every past empire has fallen from power. I feel that our country is going through what can be seen as a painful growing process, where economically we are realizing what we are still an empire of production in one category, ideas! The reason that we have the best Universities in the world is due to the ingenuity and creativity within the natural sciences that we possess and the ability to translate that to the business world. http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2012/02/01/why-china-cannot-develop-its-own-iphone/ 


Our K-12 education system is realizing that the present is not like past, and radical transformations are being made to curriculum around the country, looking to emphasize critical thinking and technology literacy. While hedges brings up a number of issues that are hard to address in this blog, I think that the answers to maintaing our empire at least exist. Perhaps we can still save our bubble economy and become more politically conscious. Unfortunately, according to Hedges these may be irreconcilable. 

Interesting Amazon Profile

So I was doing some amazon review reading of my book "unequal childhood" and I stumbled across a user that is consistently putting forth some disturbing yet interesting reviews of books on our general topic. Check them out, I am thinking of discussing them in my talk on tuesday.

On Unequal childhoods:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1R7AVCMXUGQJ5/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


On the book "Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide" which sounds like tatum in a nutshell:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2POUHS3OZ2JGW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


Here are all their reviews

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A16IMM180JAOQU?ie=UTF8&display=public&sort_by=MostRecentReview&page=1

Racism in science is now becoming a significant interest of mine!


We should discuss Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and the firestorm that it created. The reactions to it are fascinating, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve