No more CD and video disrespect

IT'S bigger than Nelly and Fat Joe--combined. It's badder than 50 Cent. It's more important than The Game. In fact, some would say it's downright Ludacris. It's the blatant "dissing" of Black mothers, daughters and sisters by some elements of the music industry. It's unprecedented. And it has to stop. Now!

A brave remnant of Black daughters at Spelman College is leading the charge to challenge the music industry's negative portrayal and treatment of Black women. In several standing-room-only town hall meetings and demonstrations over the last two years, the Sistahs at the institution renowned for its academic excellence and outstanding leadership continued its tradition by challenging the music industry status quo. Now they are turning up the heat. Black women, they say, will no longer be the industry's cash cow, with profits gleaned from songs and videos that disrespect Black women. One of the leaders of the movement, Asha Jennings, says their movement is bigger than any one artist. "It's about empowering our Sisters who think this is the only way to make it."

In a finely crafted statement, the Spelman College Student Government Association and Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance decried degrading and "hypersexual" images of Black women in hip-hop music and videos. "We challenge hip-hop producers and superstars to use the power of their lyrics to communicate more positive, affirming, empowering, and socially-conscious messages, for we know that popular songs today are just as important as civil rights bills of the 1960s."

A challenge also has to go out to young Sisters who appear in videos and shows, scantily clad, gyrating, and who are the immediate objects of this national disrespect of Black women. They have to understand that there is something greater--and dearer--than the fleeting fame that comes with these appearances--it's spelled R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

These young women--and the fathers, mothers, and sons and daughters who buy the CDs and watch the videos--need to join other women who are also putting themselves on the line for our freedom from stereotyping in 2005. At one campus protest the students carried signs that read: "We love hip-hop! Does hip-hop love us?" They have initiated a "Take Back the Music" campaign to focus on an industry that they say profit from the degradation of Black women.

The issue isn't whether or not these artists have the legal right to call our mothers, sisters and daughters "bitches and 'ho's," but as Moya Bailey, another Spelman student leader on this project, says the issue is whether we as consumers continue to collaborate in our own annihilation. "It's important that you only use your buying power to support artists who do not present misogynistic views of Black women," she says.

And not only our buying power, for as mothers and sisters we should begin to control what goes on in our homes. We should be aware of the music listened to by our 'tweens and teens, and we should make it unmistakably clear that no music that degrades our mothers, sisters and daughters can be played in our homes. Period!

If we fail now to stem this rising tide of hip-hop's bashing of Black women, we co-sign our own destruction. This is a life-or-death matter for the Black community, and in an October 2002 article, "Sex and Music: Has It Gone Too Far?" EBONY prophetically noted: "We also need a new understanding--in the media, in the entertainment industry, in our churches, schools and organizations--that popular songs are as important as civil rights bills and that a society that pays pipers to corrupt its young and to defame its women and mothers will soon discover that it has no civil rights to defend and no songs to sing."

COPYRIGHT 2005 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group