Does Black Mothers' Brutality Toward Little Black Boys Explain Why Gangsta Rappers Call Black Women (or their Mothers) Bitches and Hoes?

HOS, BITCHES, AND THE SEARCH FOR AN ENLIGHTENED WITNESS:

GANGSTA RAP LYRICS AND THE REAL TRUTH OF BLACK MOTHER-SON LOVE

By Reginald Leamon Robinson1

You stankin’ funky nasty trifling bitch You!2

It is now de rigueur to deny that the antimaternal verbal content of the dozens of other black tropes [like bitches] bears any relation to problems in the actual mother-son relationship. I find this politically correct denial simply preposterous.3

I. INTRODUCTION

In Nasty Bitch, Bust Down,who’d been a practicing psychologist,4refers to women as nasty bitches, hot twats, and hoes. In dealing with these women, black men like Down must dicksmith,5 which undergirds hyper-masculinity. Black men who get played just have sex. Dicksmithers must über fuck. They must reduce women or black women to hoes, bitches, and cum guzzlers: “cum was drippin’ out of her nose all ova her clothes,” and “when I shot my nut . . . she went a slurpin it.” They must demean them: “Her pussy hole smelled like sour cream and onion.” With black men, sex must distort, wound, or cripple: “She was limpin, her pussy was stretched out of shape.” Bust must exploit, and so he refuses the common courtesy of giving her oral sex, too. He’d gotten his. For him, man-fucking requires domination, perhaps a way of garnering love, respect, control, or power: “While I was fuckin her I said you gon’ respect me bitch!” And dicksmithing perhaps gives black men a license to “kill” black women: “she went to choke, she couldn’t take this dick/But I didn’t give a fuck I tried to kill that bitch.” In the end, Nasty Bitch concludes with Bust, having been sucked off by a women for drugs (i.e., rocks), called her: “You stankin’ funky nasty trifling bitch You!”

Nasty Bitch’s lyrics move us well beyond tropes, as Orlando Patterson argued in Blacklash.6 For Patterson, tropes like bitch confess nearly the unspeakable: black mothers and their son do not share the much declared and oft professed special love bond. Blacklash argues that black mothers emasculate their little black boys, leaving them in doubt about their identity, and requiring them at least unconsciously to expurgate any toxics that may have destroyed their natural impulses. How do black mothers emasculate their little black boys? Beyond slavery, Patterson can’t quite answer this question. Yet, since slavery, black mothers have broken little black boys through brutal violence, obedience training, and morality that cause what Alice Miller calls “emotional blindness.” By “emotional blindness,” Alice Miller means repressed “feelings and memories that renders a person unable to see certain sets of circumstances.”7 One result, which Kenneth Clark discussed, was hyper- masculinity.8 The other was the bad nigger, the street character who everyone feared because he unconsciously did violence to proxies and surrogates that he’d suffered. Did that include black women? Perhaps intimate partner violence flows from this soul-murdering or existential death caused by black mothers’ parenting style. If asked, mothers will say: “Of course, I love him. As mothers, we always love our children.”9 Likewise, of his mother, Dr. Mahalia Ann Hines, Common says: “she is a mother, a grandmother, my best friend.”10

Given the foregoing, is the black mother-son bond real? Likewise, are Bust Down’s lyrics in Nasty Bitch symbolically humiliating, a form of violence, black women? Without generalizing, if black mothers-sons love bond is more fact than myth, does that bond reveal serious fissures when rappers like Bizzar say: “we will smack a bitch and smack a ho”? Scholars, commentators, and bloggers who have critiqued tropes like bitch and who have generally denounced vilifying lyrics have examined the historical roots of rap and its leftist politics,11 which deployed the counterhegemonic perspectives of marginalized minorities, especially black men.12 They’ve critiqued derogatory lyrics from a gender perspective,13 even though some have argued that female rap artists say “bitch”, too.14 Still others argue that words like bitch can establish at the very least an artist as masculine and misogynistic.15 In the end, none of these perspectives answers these questions.

Let’s recast these questions, so that they dovetail into the central focus of this chapter. Why do little black boys who are arguably raised by black mothers with love, nurturing, and a deep respect for their authenticity, spontaneity, and vitality grow into adults who call black women “unproper bitch[es],”16 or nasty hoes? Few scholars venture into this forbidden territory, when they address why rappers are preoccupied by “gunplay, killing other men, being tough and invulnerable,”17 or as the Geto Boys say: “I, bitch I just want to fuck you.”18 For example, Michael Eric Dyson waxed on about our  collective “American social imagination, the violent man using the gun to defend his family . . . becomes a suitable metaphor for the notion of manhood.”19 What’s forbidden? Within the black community, it’s verboten to fault parents, especially black mothers. Nevertheless, I argue that black mothers, who rely on cruelty as love as a parenting style, brutally beat and break their little black boys because black parents required absolute obedience, loyalty, and respect from their children,20 and in order to survive and to hopefully get loved, these children repressed their cruel sufferings and thus become emotionally blind to their traumatic childhood history, which gets revealed to us in part by their perhaps near autobiographic lyrics and by their deep rage and anger toward black women who are by proxy their brutal mothers.

That thesis is rather disquieting. Why? Little black boys mortally fear the loss of their mothers’ love, and in the hopes of keeping it, they’ll strongly and blindly identify with their black caregivers’ justifying morality. They’ll believe as follows. If bad, they must be punished. If punished, they must suffer humiliation and shame. If humiliated, they must suppress his physical and emotional pain. If suppressed, they must accept the received morality that relieves mothers of guilt, viz., “If I didn’t love you, I’d not beat you!” If immoral, they must identify with their mothers’ morality, so that they can either be good or earn love. If so identified, they must accept her beliefs, which require them to ignore their body’s pain and to distrust their feelings. Ignored pain and distrusted feelings darken humiliation, thus distorting their existential truth. If so distorted, they must believe that white racism, the principal cause of black mothers’ brutality, caused blacks to suffer constitutionally, to languish economically, to lag educationally, to falter spiritually, or to be denied socially. By keeping little black boys emotionally blind, by requiring them to fault white racism, the dark secret of parental brutality causes blacks to experience existentially genocidal, and despite their black mothers’ distorting morality, these little black boys’ pain, anger, rage, and humiliation, although repressed, still reside in their bodies, where all trauma exists. Within gangsta rap, that trauma resurfaces, carrying an unconscious compulsion to repeat,21 and getting symbolically expressed as vilifying, disrespectful, humiliating, and violent lyrics.

In this chapter, I advance this thesis by analyzing gangsta rap lyrics, and in so doing, I’ll read such lyrics through Alice Miller’s framework to illustrate analytically why black men actually and unconsciously hate and rage against their mothers, which means that a real mother-son love bond is part of the dark secrets that negatively impact and perennially destabilize the so-called black community.

Endnotes

1.  Copyright © 2012 by Reginald Leamon Robinson. Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law , Washington, D .C. B.A., (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Howard (1981); M.A., The University of Chicago (1983); Exchange Scholar, Political Science and Economics, Yale University (1984-1985); J.D., The University of Pennsylvania (1989). I initially presented that essay at the Hip-Hop and the Law Symposium, which was held at West Virginia University College of Law, Spring 2009. I wish to Professor andré douglas pond cummings for not only organizing the symposium and for inviting me to present, but also for him, Professor Pamela Bridgewater, and Professor Donald Tibbs, Ph.D., extending me the offer to contribute that presentation to this book, which is path breaking and paradigm shifting. In addition to the editors who showed infinite patience with my creative process, I also owe great thanks to Professor Crisarla Houston (UDC) who read and commented on my drafts. Last, but not least, I’d also like to thank my research assistant, Ms. Erin Medeiros (class of 2013), for her consistent attention to detail and excellent research. Of course, the politics and errata belong exclusively to me.

2.  Bust Down, Nasty Bitch, in NASTY BITCH (Original Release Date Dec. 13, 1991, Lil Joe Records, Inc.).

3.  Orlando Patterson, Blacklash: The Crisis of Gender Relations Among African Americans, 62 TRANSITION 4 (1993).

4.  See Bust Down, http://www .soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=233325 (last visited: March 25, 2013). According to this promotional page:

Bust Down was the first New Orleans Rapper to achieve national recognition! . . . . After going platinum and not receiving a penny from his record label, he became disenchanted with the music industry, enrolled in college and earned a degree in psychology! After years practicing psychology, he could no longer quell his burning desire to create and perform, so he has re-entered the music arena and is currently working on his new album! Bust Down is the quintessential lyricist; his music is a magical blend of old school style with cutting edge tracks topped with a flawless delivery of catchy melodies and ingenious rhyme schemes!

5.  See T . DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING, PIMPS UP, HO’S DOWN: HIP HOP’S HOLD ON YOUNG BLACK WOMEN 88 (2007) (“In this space, the mythic dominance of black men and their perfected craft of ‘dicksmithing’ appear uncontested by all, irrespective of race, class, and gender.”).

6.  Patterson, supra note 3, at 15.

7.  Id. at 14.

8.  See KENNETH B. CLARK, DARK GHETTO 70-74 (1968).

9.  COMMON WITH ADAM BRADLEY, ONE DA Y IT’LL ALL MAKE SENSE x (2011).

10.  Id. at 5.

11.  See generally Sebastien Elkouby, Is Hip Hop Destroying Black America?, www .raprehab.com/is-hip-hop-destroying-black-america/ (last visited: March 14, 2013).

12.  See Ronald J. Stephens & Earl Wright II, Beyond Bitches, Niggers, and Ho’s: Some Suggestions for Including Rap Music as a Qualitative Data Source, 3 RACE & SOCIETY 23-40 (2001). 

13.  See Sherryl Kleinman, Matthew B. Ezzell, & A. Corey Frost, Reclaiming Critical Analysis: The Social Harms of “Bitch”, 3 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS 47 (2009).

14.  See Elizabeth Monk-Turner & D’Ontae Sylvertooth, Rap Music: Gender Difference in Derogatory W ord Use, 10 AM. COMM. J. *2 (2008).

15.  See DANIEL CLAPS, “FUCK BITCHES, GET MONEY”: DISCURSIVE ASSERTIONS OF MASCULINITY AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION IN HIP-HOP LYRICS 2 (Höstterminen 2010).

16.  Ying Yang Twins, Hoes, UNITED STATES OF ATLANTA (Year).

17.  Byron Hurt, Hip-Hop (Abridged): Beyond Beats and Rhymes 3 (2006), www.mediaed.org. 

18.  Geto Boys, This Dick’s For You, TILL DEATH DO US PART (year).

19.  Hurt, supra note 17, at 3.

20.  See Reginald Leamon Robinson, Dark Secrets: Obedience Training, Rigid Physical Violence, Black Parenting, and Reassessing the Origins of Instability in the Black Family Through a Re-Reading of Fox Butterfield’s ALL GOD’S CHIL DREN, 55 HOWARD L.J. 393 (2012).

21.  ALICE MILLER, BANISHED KNOWLEDGE: FACING CHILDHOOD INJURIES (Leila Vennewitz trans., 1990).