Chuck D Interview Part 2 - Still Black, Still Strong
Here's
part II of our interview with Chuck D from Public
Enemy about useless hip-hop, useful snitches, good and bad cops, self-centered
journalists and how to improve life in the black community.
Stereo Warning: What role does police play in this?
Chuck D: I never collectively looked at police as being the bad guys.
But there is a lot of distrust and they've made some mistakes...
But we've made some mistakes too as a community. I'm a firm believer that officers
who are out there to protect and serve at least they should be able to come
from our neighborhood. If they come from there, there might be some tactics
that might be a little bit rougher to protect us, but at least let it come from
people in our neighborhood that would be able to give people a chance before
running the law on them. Yes, you have bad police, but in the general sense
of the matter, people from our community should be in law enforcement and they
should be able to judge in a courtroom as opposed to us being in front of somebody
else that might not consider us family.
Since the start of your career, how have you seen your community evolve
and are you hopeful that things are getting better?
I've seen the community go from thinking that it should do for itself and demand
things to getting in a comfort zone and thinking that it should be fed through
some kind of virtual umbilical chord of government support. When you rely on
that you have what happened in New Orleans. You have to demand the support and
you have to see the problems before they unfold. You have to aspire to greater
heights as a community even when the odds are against you. Thinking that everybody's
gonna become rich without education, to me is stupid.
A lot of people haven't left their neighborhood, let alone the country.
That's why even when they get locked up it's almost like a suite because you're
amongst your family, your friends. If you were sent out to go to a place where
you could live and support yourself but it's in Utah, a lot of people feel that
that's more jail than being incarcerated in their own area, and that's troubling.
Because that means that you accept slavery and slave-like conditions, which
is not how they treat you, but how they keep you from being a citizen of the
world.
What's needed to change? New leaders?
If you got leaders and people don't recognize them, than what good is that?
Education has to collectively bring it up to make people be able to see the
things that they want to see changed or see the people that can give a collective
ideas to go forward.
But usually the worst schools are in minority neighborhoods.
That's because they have less pressure to keep those schools right. If you have
an ill-sense of structure and working together, then you can't provide the pressure
on institutions to be responsible for you. You don't have the collective movement
to make sure that the schools are clean, that they're properly secured that
the government be on their job to make sure that things are right for children.
If you don't fight to keep it at a normal level, through each generation it
falls further, almost into anarchy and chaos.
Do hip-hop artists who made it have the responsibility to go back and fight
for some of these things in the community?
Only if they have the mentality to understand. One thing that might change for
them is the financial status, but so what. A person who's limited intellectually
at $10, you give them a $1 million and it doesn't make them smarter.
What about the hip-hop press -- most of them are college educated...
They're figuring out ways to maintain their job. There's a lot of deceit in
those ranks because they look at all these people that they're writing about
and to keep their job they have to perpetuate the reality in it. But I tell
people all the time, the reality in much of this is created. You can try to
do the balanced cover of it all. You can't worry about standards that the business
operates on, like sales. If T.I. sells 800,000 records and The Roots sell 300,000
records, you have to talk about the quality of those numbers. Three hundred
thousand Roots CDs are probably worth more than 800,000 T.I. CDs to the society's
uplifting. When they measure art and movements coming from the black community
it's quantified in numbers instead of quality. Such is the case of the Millions
More movement. Who gives a damn if there's a million people in DC or 200,000
people, especially now when people are wired into technology and satellite with
C-SPAN, the Internet and wireless phones. You can't do a quantitaive impact
on the Millions More movement the same way you did in 1995.
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Tags: rap hip hop hip-hop akon public enemy chuck d snitch
