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Banning Saggy Pants
is the Wrong Conversation
Low Power
Community Radio is the Right Conversation
By Bruce Dixon
In case you missed
it, local lawmakers around the country have come up with
a brand new answer to
corporate youth culture and its glorification of
prison, booty-shakin' drug slinging, and nihilism. It's
also a proven way to get their names in the news for
taking a stand. Their new approach to these problems
has found its way to the legislative dockets of dozens
of communities. Their solution? A legal ban on sagging
pants that expose underwear, with fines and/or jail time
for those caught wearing their pants too low.
The bans are on the legislative dockets of
Atlanta and
Dallas and have already passed in
several Georgia and Louisiana cities.
"It's a profoundly backward idea," according to
Dr. Jared Ball, a professor of journalism at the
University of Maryland, and a candidate for the
presidential nomination of the Green Party. "It's
really legislative malpractice, that targets and
criminalizes young black males who consume a cultural
message conveyed to them by BET, by MTV, by black
commercial radio and other corporate for-profit media.
Local lawmakers who want to address the nihilism, the
self-hatred and the disrespect spread by corporate media
should instead zero in on the corporate media that make
billions of dollars every year spreading those messages,
instead of aiming the police, fines and jail at those
who consume the messages."
Atlanta city
councilman C. T. Martin, local sponsor of that city's
sagging pants law, claims that his intention is not to
target black youth, or to jail offenders, but rather to
start public conversation, to as he put it in a public
meeting on September 5, "...continue the work [TV actor
Bill] Cosby started."
"Then it's the
wrong conversation to start and the wrong work to
continue," says Dr. Ball. "The public conversation we
need from lawmakers is not more of this tired noise
about 'what's wrong with these young folks?' The
correct conversation starts when we ask how come these
destructive but highly profitable messages of
self-hatred are practically the only ones our media
regime allows to reach the ears of young people over the
public airwaves --- the public airwaves which are owned
by the people and regulated by their lawmakers.
Legislators should be targeting the profitable pipeline,
not the consumers at the end of it."
Dr. Ball is on to
something here. Media mediate public consciousness.
The song "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" didn't win the
Hip-Hop Award—it won the Academy Award in 2005. Instead
of regulating the clothes young black people wear,
lawmakers should be regulating the media, ensuring that
more positive and constructive messages are allowed the
chance to compete for the ears of our young people.
There's bipartisan
legislation in Congress right now that would do exactly
that.
The
Local Community Radio Act of 2007 (HR 2802/S. 1675)
sponsored by Reps. Mike Doyle and Lee Terry and Sens.
John McCain and Maria Cantwell will open up licensing
for hundreds, perhaps thousands of not for profit,
locally owned FM low-power radio stations in rural,
urban and suburban locations across the United States.
This legislation will enable thousands of community
groups across the country to start their own FM radio
stations.
If the recent history of not for profit community radio
is any guide, those stations, will be only too eager to
provide the programming Americans want but cannot get
from the owners of commercial radio and TV. They'll
cover local news, which is altogether absent from
broadcast commercial radio. And they will broadcast
the work of local and other artists who cannot get
airplay on for-profit commercial radio either because
their music isn't commercial or "gangsta" enough or
because they can't afford the payola (bribes) required
at commercial radio stations.
The
Local Community Radio Act and the low-power FM
station licenses it would provide, each with a three to
five mile broadcast footprint, are real legislative and
regulatory answers to the problem of negative and
degrading imagery in the media. Local community radio is
a real and substantive answer to payola too.
The
black stake in low-power FM radio is particularly
stark. In the real world there are thousands of hip hop
artists with intelligent, positive messages who can't
reach young audiences because the lawmakers and
regulators haven't done their jobs and constructed a
media regime which allows the public to make choices in
its own interest. As Davey D pointed out in
Black Agenda Report earlier this year
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while 58 percent of
blacks between ages 15 and 25 listen to
hip-hop daily, most are dissatisfied with
it. They find the subject matter is too
violent, and women too often portrayed in
offensive ways... Blacks are used largely to
validate musical themes being marketed to
the white mainstream. In other words, while
90 percent of commercial rap artists on TV
and radio are black, the target audience
lies outside the black community...
commercial hip-hop has become the ultimate
minstrel show, and rap artists are pushed by
the industry to remain perpetual adolescents |
We should not
expect to hear much about this legislation or about the
revolutionary prospect of locally owned low-power FM
radio on the corporate TV or radio news, or in the
newspapers. The private owners of newspapers, of radio
and TV station licenses decided long ago that the less
thought public gave to questions of media ownership and
regulation, the better off we would all be
When the FCC considered lifting the few remaining
limitations on how many radio stations a giant
corporation could own in a single market or nationwide,
you scarcely find a newspaper story on it. TV and radio
coverage were entirely absent. Still, more than a
million people offered comments opposing further
consolidation of radio station ownership. The 2006
federal legislative push by phone and cable companies to
kill network neutrality on the internet and remove from
local jurisdictions the power to regulate their own
broadband futures has received next to no coverage in
the corporate press either, but
FreePress and others generated a million petition
signatures against it anyway. Sadly, the campaign to do
the same thing state by state has been covered even
less.
So Atlanta's Mr.
Martin and the other lawmakers who insist legal
sanctions on youthful clothing choices are the answer
may be smarter than they sound. While their approach is
guaranteed not to solve any problems, and their
"conversations" are all about regulating or blaming the
consumers of bad messages instead of regulating the
messages and those who profit from delivering them, they
seem to understand one thing very well.
They know what will get picked up in the corporate
evening news and talk shows. They know what the topics
of the corporate-funded "brain trust" panels at the
Congressional Black Caucus's Legislative Conference
later this month will be. They understand that big
media would rather limit the conversation to "what's
wrong with those kids?" and steer public attention away
from how we can achieve a fair and equitable media
system that meets the public needs. They seem to
understand that it's easier to flow with the owners of
media than with their nominal constituents.
"If these lawmakers had any sense of responsibility"
according to Dr. Ball, "they wouldn't be coming up with
more excuses to target, to further criminalize and
profile black youth based on the way they look. They
would be promoting the Local Community Radio Act. They
would be boosting and popularizing constructive
non-profit media, which provide voices and choices
opposing the destructive ones put out there by privately
owned media like Radio One, Clear Channel, MTV and BET.
They'd be chasing real solutions instead of the same old
stuff."
Again, we think Dr. Ball has it right. If you're
disgusted with the choices some of our young people seem
to be making, it makes sense to aim our ire at the media
regime and the message it conveys, instead of
concentrating exclusively on the consumers of that
message. It's time to call your representative in
Congress. Demand that they sign on to and support the
Local Community Radio Act, HB 2802 in the House of
Representatives, and SB 1675 in the Senate.
What members of the
CBC are actually for more voices and choices on the
radio, and which ones are fine with the way it is now?
How many of them will be at the FCC hearing in Chicago
on September 20? These are some of the questions those
of us who will be attending the Congressional Black
Caucus's Legislative Weekend this month will put it to
some of our African American members of Congress in
person.
Bruce Dixon is the Managing Editor at Black Agenda
Report, and can be reached at
bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com
Source:
Black Agenda Report
posted 13 September 2007
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 1 July 2008
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