I don't know bruh, that seems heavy right. Speak your truth and it is all bad no question but very little of that rises to the level of exploitation beyond the institutional levels, where it really counts- FOR EVERYBODY. Prison Industrial complex, overreaching law enforcement, Political stances on crime and housing discrimination weigh the heaviest on our community as a whole imo.
As far as the 'entertainment' part of it goes, I'm not trying to come off as a semantics-ist, prolly not even a word but details count. I can't say bringing a light to socioeconomic circumstances is a detriment. NO QUESTION there is a sizeable component of complete BULLSHIT in Hip-Hop (not unlike music from Rock) but same time, it has been an excellent educator over it's damn near 45 years as a genre (not like Rock). I'm not talking about a single entity or a corny act but the bones of it and it's circumstances, depending on mileage for sho, the good far outweighs the bad and its not easy by any stretch. I know you rail against 'hood movies' but really, is there that much of it to even quantify it as something that profits off of actual lives? I hope I'm not being a macroist about this.
A great parallel is how Italian people and Organized Crime is presented, there is your exploitation. Mob **** is a huge money maker and how much of that is rooted in blood? 85%? Higher? Like Grandma Everline says, you never wanna compare your situation to the worst but... we ain't that, on some 'that' **** amiright.
^ There is a lot here. 1. Atlanta has a very high concentration of black folks and no where near the most deadly city to live in in the country as far as crime. Same goes for many palces, where it gets sad is the concentrations. Also a question is how much of a margin is it where- like in any community there will ALWAYS be predators and 'Shitty Cuz's' which is who the guy who killed Hussle went by in the street.
The hood needs jobs
The hood needs schools with SUSTAINABLE education
BOTH have become increasinlgy scarse in the community since IDK, say the last 50 years, making it generational. White folks get to just be white and we don't need the secret conspiracy **** when it's overt. It's not an excuse by any means but the crime in the most impoverished, DENSE, communities are crimes of opportunity and crimes of survival and it HURTS, so much more the closer you are to it but that is not a situation that created itself. It's a pressue cooker created and fostered and indoctrinated by American Society. Daunting yes but there are steps made, baby steps for sure, to make light of it and to find better outcomes.
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
James Baldwin
My grandmother, who is soon to be 90 and lucid as all get out, her and I have been talking a lot more than we used to about the past. When she was a child that side of my family were sharecroppers and lived on plantation land, there were 8 of them. I'm only 43 and she's not even my oldest relative, in her lifetime, is a direct link to slavery. Not 100 years ago and not some 6 degrees of separation ****. She's from Mississippi and she didn't even know anybody who could sign their own name. They signed for their paychecks with an 'X'. 'We've' came a long way unfortunately it is situationally, like my Grandma, she graduated from college and went through a ton of bs but got it done and came out on the better end than much of her other family who didn't. That's to say we are still in the midst of ****.
Speak your truth my man. I agree with everything above outside of the parts about the cops and that fact the self-hate leading to community harm. Unfortunately that is not the internalized norm. The fact that we are so angry and frustrated about the instances we do have speaks to us as an emphatic people and that's a GOOD thing. Including the dialogue we have here. Far as the police, that was the impetus for the Watts riots in 1965. The neighborhood was as unified as it likely could be and years up to the Los Angeles imported dozens of bigoted, racists police to Los Angeles and Watts and they cracked heads and destroyed that community during the early parts of the Civil Rights era. Years later the drugs and the gangs came and fueled a fire with gasoline.
There will always be poachers among 'us', the indoctrination against people of color is a fine tuned machine and it even works among us. I will say that the contrast is that there are African American's in many, many places and only in the most harsh and concentrated of neighborhoods do these things continue to happen and they most definetley SHOULD NOT. And it hurts, everytime but racism will breath and sleep great at night even when the hood is calm.
I don't fk with Nasheed. I think he stokes fire and has amassed a large following on speaking in circles and using hip-hop vernacular to vibe without having a single solitary plan of any action, other than repeatedly saying 'what you won't do'. Fk him, he has outright lied in a couple of his videos regarding things of public record. He dissuades for the sake of hawking merch imo. He is doing with us the same thing as Trump does with his base excepts he's goofier with it, which says a lot. $.02