A Portrait of the Artist as a Deviant: Turn the switch off on "no Snitching".

Is it possible that the KKK is right? They claim that their job on Blacks are done, because a set of black hip hop artists from the "wormwood" of society are doing a better job at demeaning and abusing Black people, especially Black women. They are the neoclassical poets of the ghetto. The White classical poets put their women on a pedestal, the neoclassical made them approachable and attainable; but these worms that infest the earth and furniture of ghetto life drag women down, Black women, and transform them into bitches, whores, and used up chattel. But maybe this disease has spread deeper than that. And the KKK has missed the point. Novel Thomas in his article, "Of Dogs and humans, who do you love more?" (Community Contact 29 August 2007) strongly suggests that the human race has become participants in a pit bull fight to the death for no other reason than that they have become loveless creatures that have forfeited the benefit of redemption that comes with the capacity to love. David Banner is a screwed up hip hop "artist", a graduate from uncle Screw tapes' correspondence school (se C. S. Lewis Screw tape Letters: from a senior devil to a junior devil). He has lost love and its conscience. He is somewhere in the valley of the dead looking for it, before he passes into another life. Will it be a hell where eternally he chokes on the bile of hate which he can never completely vomit? Or will he discover self respect, hope and purpose beyond the damnation of self-destructive hate. Uncle Screw tape has got David Banner in his grip, locked in the bottomless pit of denial, beyond the unconscious. Is David Banner and his wormwood pals by nature depraved, as the KKK might claim? No. But they have become so. Is their history one of victims of abuse, disadvantaged, enslaved, valued only for their physical properties, equated to chattel, abandoned and left fatherless? Yes. They are clearly not blessed with the patience of Job; and Uncle Screw tape has got them trapped in the brutal brilliance of his deception. For they believe that they are artists and that that gives them the right to say whatever they want, an illusion of democracy without responsibility. I will not question their claims to being artists for art has never stopped anyone from being vile, nor nations from looting, pillaging raping and destroying other nations. Art has not stopped the White man from turning the White woman into sex objects and bribing her to play the role. The issue then is not whether they are artists but whether their artistic expressions destroy theirs and others souls.

We are told by Black hip hop corporate apologists that we must understand the environments from which these artists come and why they use language the way they do; that their violent butchering of Black women is creative manifestations of their life experiences. Yes, we know that life could be a living hell. But why should we excuse and tolerate their persistent teachings of self hate, disrespect for life, rape and abuse of women, the protection of murderers, pimping and prostitution by brute force and psychological enslavement, the poisoning of the bodies of our children with drugs? Why should we allow them to imprison us in a hell created for their profit under the distraction of the noise of their angry rage (their music) and their skilful exploitation of our mistrust of mainstream society and racial profiling? Why should we allow them to trick us into creating "no snitch" enclaves where they and their uncle Screw tape can abuse and terrorize us? White society in the USA is now waking up to the dangers of these "no snitch" sub-communities they have helped these self-despising personalities to create. Also Black leaders like Reverent Sharpton have come to understand that simplistic rhetoric will not protect us from the enemy within and the enemy without. There is a symbiosis between these two poles of evil. I think logo-psychology has got it right: a society without love is a hell on earth for all of us. In such societies we are the terrorists and the terrorist us. It is uncle Screw tape at work, the brilliant illusionist.

We must avoid in Montreal and across Canada models of community building that replicate the "no snitch" communities that have emerged in the USA; and have raised their ugly heads in the Jane and Finch region in Toronto. A society that tolerates and is seen to be ineffective in eradicating racial discrimination, police and judicial profiling; that supports various forms of assimilation, and enacts regulations that exclude minorities from its economic and political processes is not an equitable society. It is an experiment in the criminalization of communities. I do not believe that the retention of cultural identifiers inhibits the creation of national unity, no more than accepting and respecting the differences between men and women divides the nation. But on the other hand, the accommodation of criminal behaviours and internal abuse systems as if they are acceptable and sacred cultural properties of minority groups also encourages criminality and loss of personal rights and freedoms in those communities. It isn't cool or as we say these day, "Awesome!" The music of this rap is boringly, brains-rinsingly repetitive and dangerous! It so cool, so real cool, that according to Gwendolyn Brooks, "We sing sin.... We jazz June, We die soon." Neither of the two extreme types of models above is consistent with the kind of reasonable accommodation that leads to a socially cohesive society for all of us and for the sustainability of a physical environment essential to all life. Nor will a system based on racial and country specific immigration quotas and deportations protect us, for we live in a world village and the winds come from everywhere and they blow everywhere. Uncle Screw tape is everywhere. Every time we refuse to take responsibility and demand responsibility, uncle Screw tape has got us screwed and wriggling on the wail, tagged for the conscienceless wasteland. Everybody has got to take responsibility and act to create a just society, each group of settlers, the politicians, the police, the judges, parents, employers, the inheritors of wealth, the talented, the spokespersons in all communities: "tout monde bagi la" must begin the search for a set of common ethics that link us as deciding human beings. I know that the first impulse of the individual is to protect him and seek his/her freedom. But we are kinship and social creatures. No man, no woman is the universe of all. We see ourselves only by seeing others. We need to be and are capable of responsibility beyond ourselves. We are capable of caring and love. So we say "bull shit" to those low esteem rappers trapped in their anger, that feed us lethal doses of poisoned poesy, and to those that tell us three times or more each month that a Black community does not exist in Montreal. We say it exists, here as in other places, because we will its existence by our history of hope and trying, and because we reject uncle Screw tape's deceptions.