Can’t Knock the Hustle; MAN Unplugged with MED

I been getting my hustle on. Though I had been largely silent about the Michael Jackson drama, I jumped at the opportunity to join the fray when the Los Angeles Times asked a bother to write an op-ed piece about the role of race in MJ’s trial. Of course an op-ed piece is perhaps the worse forum to really get your flow on—anything that runs at a length at 700 words is gonna lose all sense of nuance. Nevertheless folk came at me from all sides, from the usual folk accusing me of playing “the race card” to the “black” folk who thought I was too critical of MJ. While I’m willing to give anybody the room to argue that on face value (no pun intended), MJ has transcended race, I am adamant that the “race” of the children who were his accusers does matter.

In my mind there’s simply no way, there is a media frenzy about MJ’s case had the accusers been black. The national mainstream media has little interest in the travails of little black girls and boys—they are not a bankable commodity in the battle for news ratings. Eugene Kane , for instance, has written at length about the case Of Alexis Patterson, who was abducted in May of 2002—a full month before the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, who became a national obsessions after her disappearance. It would be still two weeks AFTER Smart’s adduction that the national mainstream media finally interviewed Patterson’s mother. Three years later, she is still missing.

In another example, do we really think that R. Kelly would have time to be “In the Closet” had he been caught on tape with a 13-year-old white girl? More like he’d be singing “in a jail cell”.

But back to the hustle. The same day that my LA Times Op-Ed hit, part two of my three-part examination of R&B ran at Popmatters. Folk who I deeply respect, like O-Dub and Jeff Chang, have recently commented on my prolific output and damn if there ain’t folk out there in the field who think that I don’t write my own shit or that the shit I write ain’t all that good. Cool. I function in the marketplace of ideas, be it on-line journals like Seeingblack.com or the world of scholarly publishing, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also promoting the “newblackman” behind those ideas. I am simply committed to getting my flow on.

It is of course the lesson that I have taken from my man MED—who with his new book on Cosby, has been like the “king of all media”. Some of the old-heads in the field—and quite a few young ones--are critical of MED cause he ain’t really writing for them—he ain’t really furthering the cause of “true” black scholarly production. And they might be right, but that’s never been MED’s calling. This is a cat that’s writing for the public—a public intellectual in the best sense of the word, this side of Ariel Dorfman. And true indeed MED is a straight hustla—promoting the man behind the ideas—but his work is not a hustle, and there is a difference.

The thing that ultimately sold me on the cat’s importance was his Tupac book which is , in my mind, somewhere in the middle of the MED oeuvre, in terms of quality—His King book is the real gem. But the chapter in the ‘Pac book on 'Pac's reading list was a revelation, especially when I started to run into younger cats and students, who began to read the books that Tupac read after reading Dyson’s book. Now I love me some hard-core theorists like Hortense Spillers and Paul Gilroy and love even more some passionate and politically committed scholars like Robin D.G. Kelley, Joy James and my Duke homie Charles M. Payne, but the shortie on the block ain’t checking them out. We need to give cats like MED, The Notorious Ph.D. (Todd Boyd), bell hooks, Kristal Brent Zook some credit for reaching cats, who don’t give a damn about the Ph.D.s at the end of our names.

Anyway, I got unplugged with MED for AOL BlackVoices, which given the venue, meant we really couldn’t get all that unplugged--in terms of length and quite frankly, depth. Can’t Knock the Hustle.