PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2002) ISSN: 1543-0855 PLANTATION RHYMES : HIP HOP AS WRITING AGAINST THE EMPIRE OF NEO-SLAVERY

Quincy T. Norwood

The great James Baldwin once remarked, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.” ² The story of people of African descent in the United States is one that disputes the idea of the United States being “the home of the free and the land of the brave.” It is the articulation of a perpetual struggle to be recognized and respected as human beings. James Baldwin reminds us that music has always narrated the experiences of people of African descent in the United States. The varying forms of music in the Black musical tradition are linked by common recurring themes that are communicated rhythmically and lyrically.

In historical Black musical genres such as the spiritual, gospel, blues, soul, jazz, and funk, themes such as coping with the strife of social inequity and the constant presence of racism, political organization, self (re)definition and subversion are commonplace in the music of Black folks. The aforementioned themes have been constants in Black music primarily because people of African descent in the United States have always had to confront the same primary obstacle: a continuum of oppression backed by physical and psychic violence, which has its genesis in slavery.

Chattel slavery is said to have ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, but the United States, and other imperialist countries remain in the business of profiting off of the blood, sweat, and misery of Black folks and other “minorities.” Unfortunately, the continuing agenda that relegates people of African descent to second (or third) class citizenship is for the most part unacknowledged, and the voices that attempt to convey this idea are systematically silenced through a number of methods, i.e. bullets, deportation, incarceration, general blackballing, etc. Over 30 years after James Baldwin made the statement that I used to open this essay, his contention that it is through music that the trials of Black folks are brought to public consciousness still resonates in the 21 ^st century.

Hip hop music, the latest and arguably the most candid and aggressive addition to the Black musical tradition, is imbued with the same spirit as the music that preceded it. At a hip hop conference that I attended in the winter of 2000, long-time Public Enemy comrade, journalist, and “media assassin” Harry Allen defined hip hop music as a response to white supremacy. Granted, I didn’t quite fully grasp what he meant by this statement, but after he explained that without the conditions created by a white supremacist and exploitive regime hip hop would not exist, the reality of Harry Allen’s assessment became clear to me, the atmosphere produces the context for the art. Here, I want to look at hip hop as a dissident strain of text that writes against an oppressive empire. I am aware that this analysis does not apply to a lot of today’s market-driven or “commercial” hip hop music, and for this reason I will be examining lyrics of performers that, in my humble opinion, have not been created for, or manipulated solely by, the potential for capital gain. In essence, my aim is to examine hip hop as a form of Black expression that has many parallels, as far as its social and cultural functions, to the slave narrative. Though the slave narrative and hip hop music are temporally separated, the permanence of the conditions from which they emerged serves as a constant inspiration. From chattel slavery, to sharecropping, to peonage, to neo-slavery, writing against the empire of white supremacy links many seemingly different forms of Black expression.

Mainstream historical accounts often commit the lives of slaves to the distant past, or forget them altogether. The irony of this “historical amnesia” lies in the fact that the exploited labor of enslaved Blacks, not some mythic “Protestant work ethic,” is largely responsible for Europe’s and eventually the United States’ ascendancy to economic superpower. While it is true that Black slaves possessed knowledge of such facts, some were not quite willing to vocally assert their voice and presence. As we witness in the words of Jupiter Hammon, an 18 ^th century poet and “activist,” the words spoken by slaves have not always been conducive to resistance:

Respecting obedience to masters. Now whether it is right, and lawful, in the sight of God, for them to make slaves of us or not, I am certain that while we are slaves, it is our duty to obey our masters, in all their lawful commands, and mind them unless we are bid to do that which we know to be—sin, or forbidden in God’s word. The apostle Paul says, “Servants be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling singleness in your heart as unto christ: Not with eye service, not as men pleasers, but as servants of Christ doing the will of God from the heart: With good will doing service to the Lord, not to men: Knowing that whatever a man doeth the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.”—Here is a plain command of God of us to obey our masters. It may seem hard for us, if we think our masters wrong in holding us slaves, to obey in all things, but who of us dare to dispute with God! He has commanded us to obey, and we ought to do it chearfully, and freely. ³

Hammon, an ex-slave himself, says nothing of rebellion and resistance. He tells his sistren and brethren to gleefully serve their masters in the name of God. Clearly, Jupiter Hammon’s edict does little to advance my thesis, but it does reveal the depths of the colonial process. Enslaving the mind was equally as important as enslaving the body in the colonial situation. European Christianity established a base of suffering and subservience among Black masses by associating rebellion with sin. As Hammon declares, to rebel against the master was essentially to rebel against God, which guaranteed the slave a spot in Hell. Hammon’s words, akin to those of Phyllis Wheatley, are shaped by a genre of Black poetry influenced by Protestant religious ethics, rather than an agenda of resistance. Hammon counterproductively asks that his enslaved sisters and brothers accept their lot in the name of God with the hope that they will receive their just due in the afterlife. Meanwhile, they suffer and the master gets wealthy, enjoying the fruits of slave labor here on earth. After Hammon and Wheatley have passed, less subordinate creative endeavors emerge, specifically in the slave narratives. As exhibited in Oludah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, narratives of resistance begin realizing the discrepancy between Christianity and the institution of slavery. In the first slave narrative written by a woman of West Indian descent, we begin to notice a different agenda surfacing in Black words and texts.

Slave narratives regularly approach the ideas of “progress” and “modernity” from a perspective that reveals the exclusivity and the violence tied to these concepts. The slave narrative provides a voice to the frequently neglected struggle of the slave, and in doing so belies the myth of the “happy slave.” In addition, the slave narrative serves as the platform from which slaves inform the world of what actually takes place in the lives of those on the underbelly of that iniquitous “peculiar institution” of human bondage.

The slave narrative allows enslaved peoples to become agents of social change by bringing the experience of slavery to those who evaluate slavery from the outside. For example, in The History of Mary Prince, Prince exclaims:

Oh the horrors of slavery!—How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave—I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people of England know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free (italics mine). ⁴

Prince’s words, less attentive to the precepts of European Christianity, manage to succeed where Hammon’s fail. She proposes a direct critique of the institution of slavery. It is clear that recalling and reporting the dreadfulness of bondage is agonizing for Prince, but it is a necessity if she wishes to accomplish her goal, which is attaining freedom for her people. The oral articulation of her story, in her own words allows Mary Prince to empower herself and her community. Rather than just telling her story for sentimental value, Prince politicizes her narrative by embracing the collective struggle of her people, “In telling my own sorrows, I cannot pass by those of my fellow-slaves—for when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs.” ⁵ Prince uses her narrative to instigate a social change, and it begins with the remembrance and retelling of the terror that she, and her “fellow-slaves” experienced. Mary Prince understood that it was her duty to speak for those that had been silenced. In doing so, she not only resists her personal situation, but the entire institution of slavery. With an intimate knowledge of slavery that only comes from being forced to live through it, and bear witness to its ferocity, Mary Prince creates an anti-slavery document that forces her oppressors to become cognizant of the baseness of slavery. Through relating her story, and the story of her “fellow slaves,” Mary Prince commits an act of defiance directed at the avaricious empire that is responsible for her people’s enslavement. Subsequently, given the issue of authorial control ⁶ , it comes as no surprise that Black music will be the most revolutionary offspring of the slave narrative.

Preoccupied with an agenda analogous to Mary Prince’s, some hip hop artists commit acts of defiance against the current empire that perpetuates neo-slavery. Differing from chattel slavery only in appearance, neo-slavery is the system of subjugation based on the economic exploitation of Black folks and other “minorities.” In a prison letter, written April 17, 1971, George Jackson ⁷ outlines the anatomy of neo-slavery:

Slavery is an economic condition. The classic chattel slavery and today’s slavery must be defined in terms of economics…Neo-slavery is an economic condition, a small knot of men exercising the property rights of their established economic order, organizing and controlling the life style of the slave as if he were in fact property. Succinctly: an economic condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determination. ⁸

Violence and Ideological State Apparatuses, such as the media, religion, education, etc., all serve to secure the hegemony of the ruling class (i.e. wealthy white males) in the neo-slaveocracy. Jackson notes that the purpose of militaristic police, a repressive state apparatus, in “the new Black colonies” is not to protect the citizens, but to reinforce the conditions of neo-slavery by serving as agents of the dominant class: “The pigs [police officer] are not protecting you, your home, and its contents. Recall they never found that T.V. set you lost in that burglary. The pig is protecting the right of a few private individuals to own public property!!” ⁹ The laws of a neo-slaveocracy, created for the people by politicians, are designed to maintain a social order that severely restricts the progress and freedoms of Black folks and other “minorities.”

The economic underdevelopment (bloodsucking) of many “minority” communities has numerous by-products that play a significant role in sustaining the neo-slaveocracy. One of the foremost of these by-products is “crime,” which leads to a disproportionate number of Blacks being incarcerated for committing acts of survival. For example, the disparity between the laws concerning sentencing for possession of powder cocaine and crack cocaine ¹⁰ , which is cheaper and made more readily available in Black communities contributes to the ever expanding “minority” prison population. As more people get incarcerated, more prisons are constructed which creates a source of cheap labor to perform menial tasks. William Upski Wimsatt notes, “Prisons are a $100 billion dollar industry. A lot of money is being made. The beds must be filled.” ¹¹ Like the Jim Crow Laws of the South, and other statutes designed to control slaves and free populations of Black folks in the early twentieth century, the crack cocaine mandatory sentencing law acts as one of the many laws that are specifically engendered to extract bodies from economically underdeveloped communities to become “wage” slaves in prison. In an exploration of the United States’ prison industry Howard Zinn explains:

The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between the rich and the poor, the racism, the use of the victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless “reforms” that changed little…the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow the jails ended up full of poor black people. ¹²

The police have a historical record of brutality against Black folks. More often than not, the police officers responsible for incidents of brutality and outright murder never receive any formal punishment outside of minor slaps on their wrists. Meanwhile Blacks remain targets. Concerning the hostile and licentious behavior of the police Jackson remarks, “They murder us and call it justified homicide. A brother who had a smoking pipe in his belt was shot in the back of the head.” ¹³ In 1999, a brother who had a wallet in his hand was shot at forty-one times and hit nineteen times. ¹⁴ Prior to this incident, a brother was abducted outside of a Brooklyn nightclub, beaten inside of a police car, taken to a police station where he was beaten some more, and then had a plunger forced in his rectum in a truly sadomasochistic fashion reminiscent of the way masters would torture their slaves on a plantation. ¹⁵ These incidents are far from being isolated incidents. In the minds of many officers of the law, who are foot soldiers for, and reflect the collective sentiment of a larger establishment, the value of Black life has really not increased since the days of chattel slavery. While slaves and post-emancipation Blacks had spirituals and the blues to accompany them in the struggle against the detriments of chattel slavery and the sharecropping that followed, late 20 ^th century Black men and women have hip hop music to oppose the economic exploitation and the physical and psychic violence of neo-slavery. In the song “Sound of da Police,” Boogie Down Bronx native KRS-One expresses a similar opinion:

Now here’s a likkle truth, open up your eye
While you’re checkin’ out the boom-bap, check the exercise
Take the word “overseer,” like a sample
Repeat it very quickly in a crew for example
Overseer, overseer, overseer, overseer
Officer, officer, officer, officer! Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity? Check the similarity?
The overseer rode around the plantation
The officer is out patrollin’ all the nation…
The overseer had the right to get ill
And if you fought back the overseer had the right to kill
The officer has the right to arrest
And if you fight back they put a hole in ya chest
(Woop!) They both ride horses, after 400 years I’ve got no choices
Police them have a little gun
So when I walk the streets, I walk around with a bigger one! ¹⁶

KRS-One, keeping in line with George Jackson’s definition of the “new colonies” of neo-slavery, compares the police that patrol “the new colonies,” places where Blacks and Latinos live, to overseers on the plantation. He begins with the phonetic similarities of the words ¹⁷ , officer and overseer, but the parallels do not end there. Not only are the words officer and overseer similar in sound, but also the title has analogous implications. The overseer on the plantation kept a watchful eye over his slaves in attempts to sustain total control over their lives. Today, police surveillance is commonplace in many Black neighborhoods that get branded “high crime areas.” Throughout history Black folks have had to deal with the constant pressure that comes from being “the watched” primarily due to the dominant regime’s fear that any organization among Blacks may lead to mobilization, which would eventually jeopardize their sovereignty.

Most definitely not to be ignored in KRS-One’s comparison of overseers and officers is their unbound use of violence as a method to maintain control. From the whip and the noose to the nightstick and the bullet, violence has always been used against Blacks to prevent rebellions against the white supremacist power structure. KRS informs us that if one resisted on the plantation the overseer had the right to kill, and police officers today exercise this same right. Scholar Tricia Rose contends that the police in Black and other “minority” communities are essentially given free reign to commit wholesale murders and other crimes in the name of protecting and serving:

In the Reagan and Bush era’s war on drugs, urban police forces have been soldiers of war, and poor and minority communities are the enemy battleground. The antidrug war metaphor intensifies an already racially fractured urban America and labels poor minority communities as an alien and infested social component and a hot spot for America’s drug problem. The nature and character of this drug effort has collapsed categories of youths, class, and race into one “profile” that that portrays young black males as criminals. What war has no casualties? The public dominant transcript identifies police officers as “our” troops, and young black and Hispanic males as…the primary targets. In this scenario, mistakes made by officers made by officers are combat errors; the victims are casualties of war. ¹⁸

While it is commonly held that the duty of the police is to protect and serve, the lyrics of KRS-One and the explanation provided by Tricia Rose point to another conclusion. Black skin and a certain style of dress often signify criminal intent in the minds of many police officers that have been placed in Black communities. Black youth are criminalized and placed in monolithic categories, so that when the police perpetrate crimes against them, the victim is made to look like the aggressor. For example, in April of 2001, Timothy Thomas, an unarmed 19-year old Black man, was shot in the chest at point blank range by a police officer. Naturally, the officer that committed the crime, Steven Roach, said that he shot Timothy Thomas because he thought Thomas was going for his gun and he feared for his life. Just as in the case of Amadou Diallo and countless others, police officers use the “I thought he had a gun” line to exonerate themselves from any guilt, and to justify their actions in the public domain. In the neo-slaveocracy there is virtually no protection from the police. This is why KRS-One says, “Police them have a little gun/ So when I’m on the streets I walk around with a bigger one!” He is expressing his right to defend himself against police who, like overseers on the plantation, view Black life as valueless.

The Queens, New York group Onyx echoes the same ideas that KRS conveys in “Sound of da Police” in their song “Getto Mentalitee.” The song details the oppression they deal with on a daily basis. In the vein of KRS, Onyx uses slavery as a point of reference to describe their current surroundings. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Sticky Fingaz rhymes:

It’s a conspiracy, I been framed
They call me nigga so much I’m startin to think it’s my name
Light-skinned and ashamed/ Cuz way back in the days
They raped my grandmother’s mother
When they was enslaved
And they hung my grandfather if he misbehaved
But my ancestors was brave and most of ‘em real
Strong, hard, and sweaty slaves workin’ in the field
But 400 years later, I learned about my roots
And how they traded in the white sheets
For badges and blue suits
So I’m takin recruits to set the fuckin’ score right
To start a fight, a fight—a nigga and a white
If the nigga don’t win, we all jump in! ¹⁹[my bold print]

Sticky Fingaz traces his history from the plantation to the ghetto, while simultaneously drawing parallels between the two. The violence that confronted the slave is the same violence that confronts Blacks and other “minorities” in their communities. The RZA, a member of the Wu-Tang Clan ²⁰ and former member of The Gravediggaz ²¹ , attempts to shed some light on the relation between the violence of chattel slavery and the violence of neo-slavery in an explanation of his lyrics, “I saw the torture and brutal murder of my father/ So my brain became stained with the horror/ I realized my ideas had spawned/From 400 years of blood, sweat, and tears”:

I went through hell…Everything I think comes from 400 years of blood, sweat, and tears. That’s real. That goes back 400 years. Take slavery for instance—where they were constantly beating my people and us beating ourselves. I mean I saw the torture and brutal murder of my father. They used to take the mother and the baby to watch the father get whipped—to do what, to plant fear in the little boy. So my brain became stained with the horror. When I watch T.V., niggas who I see going to death row look just like me. ²²

RZA describes experiences ranging from witnessing “the torture and brutal murder” of his father during slavery and the scores of executions of young Black males in the first person. In RZA’s thinking, there is no distinction between the past and the present because they coalesce in an unrelenting pattern of racial terror. The electric chair and other methods of “lawful” executions represent a change in the method of violence perpetrated against Blacks. Through seeing people on death row that look just like him, RZA relives the experience of slavery by being forced to witness the continuing legacy of the degradation of Black life epitomized by disproportionate number of Black death row inmates. The late Bronx rapper Big Pun (isher) provides the perfect summation of the above ideas in his song “Capital Punishment,” “That’s how the city be/Everybody getting’ they hustle on/Judge singin’ death penalty like it’s his favorite fuckin’ song/Word is bond, takin’ my life you know they lovin’ it/God “F” the government and it’s fuckin’ capital punishment!” ²³

While the lyrics of KRS-One, Onyx, RZA, and a host of other rappers present and protest the physical violence of the institution of neo-slavery, there are others that resist its ideological or psychic violence. Ideological violence and physical violence go hand in hand so neo-slavery is able to sustain itself. In Jupiter Hammon’s address to the Black folks of New York, we saw the effects of mental colonization manifested by his claim that slaves should take delight in serving their masters. George Jackson asserts that the neo-slave receives a similar brand of cerebral seasoning to prevent resistance:

Right behind the expeditionary forces (the pigs) come the missionaries and the colonial effect is complete. The missionaries, with the benefits of Christendom, school us on the value of symbolism, dead presidents, and the rediscount rate. The black colony lost its conscience to these missionaries. Their schools, their churches, their newspapers and other periodicals destroyed the black conscience and made it almost impossible for us to determine our own best interest. ²⁴

Jackson mentions the function of institutionalized white supremacy and the role it has in a neo-slaveocracy. Schools promote conformity as opposed to thinking with the aim of grooming students to assume a specific role in society to maintain the current social order. In many cases indoctrination takes precedence over education. This is why we see the emergence of hip hop lyrics that rebel against white supremacist institutions. Lyrics such as, “Sometimes I sit back with a Buddha sack/Mind’s in another world thinkin’ how can we exist through the facts /Written in school textbooks, bibles, etcetera/Fuck a school lecture/The lies get me vexed up,” ²⁵ convey the feeling of abandonment and exclusion that many “minority” students when they are forced to deal with the curriculums of public schools that are not relevant to their lives. Ideological State Apparatuses serve the hegemonic regime, wealthy white males, by normalizing their culture, beliefs, morals, and general way of life.

White supremacist society recognizes difference only in terms of hierarchy anything outside of a certain set of cultural “norms” is deemed inferior and forced to the margins of society. The logic behind this is reminiscent of the “civilized/savage” binary that was used to justify slavery. In a self-reflective coming-of-age narrative entitled “The Evil That Men Do,” Carson, California based rapper Ras Kass shares the ways in which his self-image was shaped by the conditioning he received early in his life:

In ’81 I remember the night
I covered myself with baby powder
So my Black ass could be light
Cuz God is white/ and Bo Derek is a ten
I hate my Black skin/ It’s just a sin to be a nigga
Then again I’m like a French man
Cuz Granny’s Creole/Therefore we’re Black
French people
So I think it’s best if I go to Catholic School
And study under nuns so I can be a Catholic fool. ²⁶

Ras writes that he grew to resent his Blackness because, historically, whiteness has always been associated with beauty, or even divinity, while blackness has been associated with ugliness and evil. This is why Ras writes that he once believed that “It’s just a sin to be a nigga.” Images portrayed in mass media, textbooks, and other outlets of widely disseminated information push standards of beauty, morality, and intellect created in the white imagination onto the general populace. As a result, these conventions often become internalized among people of color creating a negative self-image, as Ras Kass displays in this lyrics.

Hip hop music provides a creative oppositional space for artists to resist white supremacist ideologies that stand as obstacles in the path of Black empowerment and self-determination. The language of resistance takes a myriad of forms. bell hooks contends that Black self-love is an act of resistance because it undercuts the hegemonic discourse that denigrates all things Black:

Collectively, black people and our allies in a struggle are empowered when we practice self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination. Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death that reclaim black life. ²⁷

hooks argues that breaking from the ideological restraints of white supremacy has to be integral to any progressive liberation movement. Songs such as Brand Nubian’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” ²⁸ Goodie Mob’s “Beautiful Skin,” ²⁹ and a slew of others advance the idea of Black self-love in the face of white supremacist culture that constantly degrades the image of Black folks. Moreover, rappers never hesitate to get to get philosophical with their lyrics. In doing so they construct new standards of intellect that don’t need to be validated by university degrees. Decolonizing the mind is a necessary step in forming a new worldview untainted by the tenets of white supremacy. Shedding imposed identities and redefining self on new terms counters white supremacist discourse that externally shapes the identities of “minorities.”

Songs that promote Black self-love, and other means of resistance are mysteriously absent from the radio and television. We rarely turn on empTV (MTV), BET, or any other music channel and see images of Black folks that challenge white supremacist constructions of Black identities. Usually, the videos and songs that receive financial support reify stereotypes of Black folks. The endless party songs and videos that flood radio and television are prevalent because they are easily digested and marketable images of Blacks. Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely not against partying, dancing, and other things people do to loosen up. However, I also believe in a balanced diet of imagery. As I mentioned in my introduction, James Baldwin suggests that music of Black folks narrates the past while remaining grounded in the conditions of the now, but the powers that be in the music industry ³⁰ only allows for a partial view of the Black experience. Corporate control transforms Black music into to product and the result is censorship for some, and blackballing for those artists not willing to compromise their work. Hip hop music that threatens to disrupt the social order of the neo-slaveocracy by revealing and resisting the physical and psychic violence that Blacks face daily, and attempting to heighten the consciousness of the masses, is strategically kept away from the masses all in an effort to ensure the survival of the dominant discourse that neglects the struggles of Black folks. The slave narrative, when articulated by the mouth of the slave or former slave, aided in the fight for freedom during chattel slavery, and in the 21 ^st century I do believe that hip hop music possesses this same capacity, depending on the artist’s dedication to this cause.

References

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiography 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Baldwin, James. “Many Thousands Gone,” Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Big Pun f/Prospect. *Yeeeah Baby (Loud 2000), and * Endangered Species (Loud 2001).

-----------. “Capital Punishment,” Capital Punishment (Loud Records 1998).

Hammon, Jupiter. An address to the Negroes in the state of New York, by Jupiter Hammon, servant of John Lloyd, Jun, Esq; of the manor of Queen’s Village, Long Island. 1787. < http://etext.lib.Virginia.edu/readex/20400.html >

hooks, bell. “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” Black Looks: race and representation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1992. p. 20.

Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. p.189-91.

KRS-One. “Sound of da Police,” Return of the Boom-Bap (Jive 1993).

Nas. “One Love,” Illmatic (Columbia 1994).

Onyx. “Getto Mentalitee,” All We Got Iz Us. (Def Jam 1995).

Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince,” ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Penguin Press, 1987, p. 200.

Ras Kass. “The Evil That Men Do,” Soul On Ice (Priority Records 1996).

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. New England: Wesleyan Press, 1994. p. 107.

The Ghostwriter. “Entombed,” The Source. October 1994, p. 58.

Wimsatt, William Upski. No More Prisons. New York: Soft Skull Press, 1999. p.8.

Wu-Tang Clan. The W (Loud Records 2000).

----------. Wu-Tang Forever (Loud Records 1996).

----------. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (Loud Records 1993)

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present . New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. pgs. 504-505.

Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

Norwood, Quincy (2002). PLANTATION RHYMES : HIP HOP AS WRITING AGAINST THE EMPIRE OF NEO-SLAVERY. PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness : 1, 1.