In a June 29 guest commentary “Stop Snitchin On Yourself” reprinted from Hip Hop DX, Andreas Hale inveighed against the foolishness of gangstas and wannabes who advertise their real and imaginary criminal behavior, as exemplified by the severely misguided young folks you might see wearing “Stop Snitchin'” T-shirts, snowman jerseys or bragging about getting their pimp on.  This editor expected a reader response, and there was one.  Debra Garbell had this email exchange with the author of the article:

I just read your article.  I almost have no comment.  Is it just me or is there more than one black world out there?  In my lifetime I have rarely encountered anyone involved in crime.  I sure don't know any pimps.  I have to wonder what world you belong to? And are we both black.

I see the word pimp is bubbling up on every mouth, especially white mouths.  Is this just a matter of using a fun word?  Pimping is sick, serious stuff and shouldn't be written about or spoken about lightly.  I don't want to come down too hard on you, BUT I despised the off handed way in which you evoked this term which means horror and nightmare for so many woman and children around the world.  I resent the term pimping being foisted on me and my people, even if it is a black person who is doing the foisting.

Mr. Hale responded thusly:

I appreciate the email but don't understand what you're telling me. Pimping is a very real part of people's lives (maybe not yours) and yes, the term is quite derogatory. The point of my guest commentary was to encourage folks to watch what you say and take personal responsibility for yourself and others around you.  I certainly agree that acclaiming criminal activity is NOT something we should teach our children nor should it be something that is projected as a part of African American lifestyle. I'm glad you have not had to encounter this but it does exist. In what off handed way did I use the term?

To which Ms. Garbell answered:

The fact that it exists does not mean that it should be spoken of lightly.  You admit that you are trying to transmit some "knowledge" in your article. Well, why not charge the word pimp with its full sociological weight.  It is considered a war crime, a form of torture and exploitation perpetrated around the world on the helpless, woman children and vulnerable men.  Your treatment of the term implies that it is just another lifestyle or choice of profession, albeit criminal. Perhaps you yourself are not repulsed by pimping.

and Mr. Hale replied:

I have to disagree with you once again. The fact that people take the term lightly is what bothers me. The idea that pimping is just another occupation does offend me.  But it is because the faces of rap and hip hop on TV (not all hip hop, strangely enough the most positive hip hop is not on MTV and BET) use the word so lightly that they have made it "cool" to be a pimp. We have our young children saying that they are "pimpin’ these hoes" when obviously they have no idea what it means (they think that it just means having many women).

But if a young man says they are "pimpin’" (not really pimpin’ but their own meaning of having many women) in front of the wrong people can you imagine what will happen? Hence the term "Snitchin’ On Yourself." By saying things that you obviously have no clue what they mean (like wearing Young Jeezy's Snowman T-shirt because it looks cool when it actually means to be a distributor of cocaine) you are in turn "Snitchin’ On Yourself." It is irresponsible for our esteemed hip hop artists to say things that they don't do themselves and in turn have our impressionable youth make an attempt to be cool like their favorite rap artist.

Thank you again for your comments and hopefully I cleared up what this article was about.

Ms. Garbell concluded her exchange with the author, thusly:

Of course you have to disagree with me.  I am diametrically opposed to those sort of black men who blithely throw out words like pimping and prostituting without peeking the ocean of blood from which these words emerge.  Contrary to your comments in your last letter, you never ONCE denounced pimping or prostitution in your article.  You never evoked the larger issues at hand.  You merely denounced snitching on yourself as  inappropriate behavior.  You are not being responsible.  But let's leave it at that.

With that, Ms. Garbell forwarded the above exchange to us at BC.  This is what we told her, and copied our guest commentator Mr. Hale:

Ms. Garbell,

I believe I understand what you are saying, and what Mr. Hale is saying, too. I am pretty certain that Mr. Hale does not fully appreciate where you're coming from, or in the event that he does, that he knows how to say it.  So I can't speak for him, or for my publisher Mr. Glen Ford. I'll speak for myself.

The premise of Mr. Hale's article is that some black youth, and some not so young, as well as some “celebrities” – whatever is meant by that term – are not only pursuing hurtful and criminal activities, they are dumb enough to brag about it.

What got your goat, and what gave me a twinge, too, as I read Mr. Hale's article is that it did not seem to condemn the criminal conduct as strongly as it did the ignorant boasting about it. It wasn't the words Mr. Hale spoke.  It was what was left unspoken.  The title after all was not stop drugging and pimping, but stop snitchin' on yourself. Even worse, Mr. Hale's piece failed to shed any useful light on the ubiquity, the centrality and the downright evil of gender-based oppression – the practice of which some of the ignoramuses in his article were snitching on themselves by bragging about – to the way we think and act and live.

This is very much akin to condemning that cracker in Texas for bringing the chain he used to drag a black man to his death with home as a keepsake rather than disposing of it as a reasonably smart criminal would do to incriminating evidence, all the while forgetting to condemn the crime of murder itself. Is wearing the gear and making the boasts Mr. Hale talks about idiotic or what?  Sure it is.  But the crime being boasted about or alluded to does not deserve to be less visible than the criminal's or the wannabe's boast of it.

But what about condemning the crimes? And what is it that renders so many of these crimes relative invisibility? The answer of course, is that they are committed against women, and men are doing more than our share of the talking, and more than our share of the thinking.  When it comes to crimes against women, we exercise the laziness of privilege. We are, after all, men and thus not subject to this sexualized violence and threats of violence ourselves to anything like the extent experienced by women.  It is our privilege within the matrix, which the Morpheus character in the movie “The Matrix” called “...the world which is pulled over your eyes to protect you from the truth...” which keeps us from pointing to the rivers of blood and suffering refreshed each hour by the countless victims of the sex trade, for instance. But after all, they are women and children. We are men.

We know what white skin privilege is.  We learn more and more as time goes by about how it is conferred by racist society. We learn that while it is enjoyed by whites from the lowest to the highest, its existence is widely ignored or denied by its beneficiaries. We know that it has one set of ugly and dehumanizing effects upon the privileged, and inflicts a corresponding but necessarily different set of detrimental indicators on those at whose expense white privilege is deployed.

We have no doubt that there is an analogous male privilege, one that makes us blind to the suffering of our nieces and mothers and aunts and female cousins, our grandmothers, of our own and everybody else's daughters. All of us, but most especially men, need to tune our ears to hear their cries.  We must find ways to eliminate not just the exploitation of man by man, but the exploitation of children and women by men. When we learn to be as impatient with those forms of injustice as we are with those meted out on the basis of race and class, we will all be stronger, and more human, and able to build a better world.

I am certain that Mr. Hale enthusiastically condemns the druggin' and crimes against women and children.   Hale did after all say that "pimpin'" is an occupation that is downright wrongheaded, and that something is deeply wrong with hip hop culture, as it is called, which keeps us from putting that truth up front more often.  Unfortunately he said that in a letter responding to your concern, not in the article itself, which sort of makes your point.   These are truths that belong in the foreground, not in the background.

You do us all a service when you point to what Mr. Hale, and what BC to date has left unsaid, and when you ask which is worse: snitching on your contribution to the rivers of blood and suffering, or those contributions themselves. Thank you for taking the time to write us.

Respectfully,

Bruce A. Dixon

Israeli Apartheid

Last week's BC cover story on Israeli apartheid, running the same week as Freedom Rider's Israel's Terror drew a larger volume of email than anything we've run in a long time.

This from Ines Hanna:

What a powerful article.  How refreshing to hear the truth, obvious to anyone who bothers to check the facts rather than the spin.

God bless you for your courage.  By speaking firmly and loudly against this ongoing genocide, though you have earned the wrath of the Zionist Lobby, you have washed your hands of the blood of the innocent victims of the Israeli/US military machine.

My good friend told me two days ago that the Israelis smashed into her husband's home with a tank in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, on Monday July 17.  They trashed the house, using it as a base to indiscriminately shoot anyone they saw on the street.  Although they threw the women and girls into the street, in the crossfire, they used her husband's two nephews, 14 and 15 years old, as human shields, so that retaliatory shots from neighborhood resistance fighters would be likely to hit the blindfolded, traumatized boys.  They took some men away, including her husband's cousin and a news cameraman working for the Ramattan news agency, of which her husband, Qassem Ali, is CEO.  Several people were killed, more were wounded, and even more were left homeless.

This is only part of the horrible reality lived by the besieged Palestinian and now, Lebanese populations.  Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, on a daily basis.  The silence of the so-called 'free world' is deafening.

Thank you for doing your bit to break that silence.

And A. Chami sent us this:

I would like to thank you for your honesty and courage.  I am an American of Arab origins and we are very frustrated and hurt by what the racist Israeli regime is doing to our people.  It seems when push comes to shove all these so-called 'progressives' here in the U.S. show their true colors.  It is obvious they operate from a racist and condescending place.

As terror reigns on my native South Lebanon, from my perspective here in the U.S. all of us feel abandoned.  It is very difficult to see what is happening, and it is compounded by the callous disregard the Western World shows for the value of colored people's lives.  If one ever had any doubt, just listen to the comments of John Bolton and Condi Rice.

If there is any ray of hope, I see it coming from people like you.  The same racist attitude the white man had, that allowed him to bring African people here in bondage, is still around today, allowing him to kill and destroy without hesitation.  We find friends and strength in the African-American community.  A community that stands with us against injustice, not for any material or political gain, but simply out of purity of heart and demand for equality.

Thank You

This editor appreciates the freedom we do still enjoy in the US to publish ideas and opinions like those you find each week in Black Commentator.  In this context we don't think it takes a whole lot of courage to come out against US backed Israeli apartheid.  Nobody has kicked down our door in the middle of the night (not in decades, anyway), or given us twenty minutes to evacuate the house before demolishing it, as routinely happens in Israel and its occupied territories.  So while we appreciate reader compliments, the word “courage” may be overstating it.  It takes courage to be an activist in the Occupied Territories.  We here just do what we can.

Giving credit where it's due, the range of debate over Israel's policies of occupation and terror is actually broader in Israel than it is in the US.  Hop on over to the Israeli paper of record Haaretz a few times a week and see for yourself.  Israeli Jews demonstrate against the occupation regularly and in large numbers.  Also significant numbers of Israelis are refusing to serve in the occupation and refused to bomb defenseless Palestinians or take part in the invasions of Gaza and the West Bank.  Interested readers should Google the word “refusenik” to learn more about this phenomenon.

And the motives of US citizens, especially blacks, in opposing Israeli apartheid are not entirely disinterested.  Martin Luther King did say, after all, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  The permanent so-called “War On Terror” threatens us all, on either side of the ocean.

As the UN Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa affirmed, Zionism, the notion that Jews have a god-given right to expel Arabs from their lands, and privilege themselves over them, is racism.  The current Israeli regime is the moral successor to apartheid South Africa.  But just as that long nightmare ended, this one will too someday.  As we stated last week.

“Apartheid in South Africa eventually bite the dust mostly because the inhabitants of that country, black, brown and white resisted it, putting their bodies and lives on the line. Their resistance was aided and abetted materially, financially, politically and spiritually by people of good will the world over. Someday the sun will rise on a post-apartheid Jerusalem, one that belongs to all the people who live there of whatever origin. This is bound to happen because Palestinians as well as substantial numbers of Israeli Jews do and will continue to resist the regime.  They will do what they can.  What will we do?”

We thank you for reading and hope you will indeed consider what we will do.

Bruce Dixon can be contact at [email protected].