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Hip-hop culture reflects Youth oppression under capitalism
| Message Board > Music Chitchat - General ( Indie, Jazz, World, Electronic etc.) > Hip-hop culture reflects Youth oppression under capitalism |
| Lordpatch User Info... | Hip-hop culture reflects Youth oppression under capitalism By Larry Hales Published Mar 7, 2006 10:22 PM “...Or does it explode?” This ominous question ends Langston Hughes’ poem, “Harlem,” which begins with, “What happens to a dream deferred?” In the mid-to-late 1970s, there was a musical explosion emanating from poor Black and Puerto Rican youth in the South Bronx. To understand hip-hop culture, which encompasses a style of dress, speech, graffiti art, and a certain political orientation towards the capitalist state, it is essential to know exactly what was happening in the United States, especially in the nationally oppressed communities leading up to its inception. During the 1970s, the state of the capitalist economy and the effect it would have on workers was becoming evident. The Vietnamese had emerged victorious from a devastating war in 1975. Thousands of drafted and enlisted U.S. soldiers and marines, many of them people of color in disproportionate numbers, lost their lives. Many thousands more were physically and/or emotionally maimed for life. The U.S. imperialist ruling class’s brutal war against the Vietnamese people had drawn billions of dollars away from the social needs of people in the United States. The soldiers who were forced to fight the war returned home with no safety net. Many had become addicted to drugs and alcohol and wound up homeless. The country was in an economic recession. Major industrial manufacturers were already closing plants around the country especially in the Northeast, which later became known as the Rust Belt. Whites had already begun to move from urban to suburban areas, resulting ‘white flight’. Development in the inner cities virtually ceased, leaving what social services that existed and the public school systems in these areas woefully inadequate. Public hospitals were usurped by privately run facilities creating a sub-standard health care system for the poor and oppressed. The prison system, which housed 200,000 inmates in 1970, had begun its steady climb towards its current level of over 2.1 million prisoners, the largest population worldwide. The racist death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Many Black people who fled the low-paying jobs in the South found higher paying, unionized jobs in the North following the Vietnam War. But a decade later, with massive job losses rooted in the intensified global competition among capitalists for more profits, Black and women workers were among the first fired due to the loss of manufacturing jobs especially in the auto industry. These systemic layoffs began in the mid-1980s as the economy grew more high-tech and computer-driven. full article: http://www.workers.org/2006/us/hip-hop-0316/ - Wed, 9 Aug 2006 6:14am | ||
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