Various news outlets have recently touched on an issue at University of California San Diego, in which invitations were sent to students via Facebook for an off-campus "Compton Cookout" party (source: Los Angeles Times). This supposed "Compton Cookoout" required its attendees to take on assumed roles of various members of the Black community, which - according to the suggested attire and personas to be emulated - was so ethnically debasing that we won't print it here. Perhaps we're a more than little affected here at the Hip Hop Think Tank, but the goal of this "cookout" encouraged an air of mockery and insult towards the Black community as a whole, doing nothing to 'show respect' to the ideology of Black History Month (as they so detestably joked).
Whether whether ethnic- or gender-based, terms that debase who we are or who anyone is as people should never be accepted. Sure, there is an understanding in the saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me", but there is definitely no truth in it. The very idea that our women are referred to as "bitches" and ho's", and our men are referredd to "niggas" - it is of no doubt that ancestors are rolling around in their graves. And in some ways, we as a nation or possibly (admittedly?) as a culture have allowed this to happen. Now before you get up in arms, reader, I have a question for you: what have you done to stop it?
Whether whether ethnic- or gender-based, terms that debase who we are or who anyone is as people should never be accepted. Sure, there is an understanding in the saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me", but there is definitely no truth in it. The very idea that our women are referred to as "bitches" and ho's", and our men are referredd to "niggas" - it is of no doubt that ancestors are rolling around in their graves. And in some ways, we as a nation or possibly (admittedly?) as a culture have allowed this to happen. Now before you get up in arms, reader, I have a question for you: what have you done to stop it?
Sadly, some members of the African American community have accepted culturally pejorative terms and supposedly "comedic" cultural exaggerations, having turned them into something "acceptable" in casual use. Where did it all begin? From the minstrels of the 19th century that poked at Blacks with "blackface" make-up to - dare I say it - Tyler Perry's "Meet the Browns", we have to ask ourselves: when is it not funny anymore?
Our future generations are in a lot of trouble if an attitude like the one behind the party organizers of UCSD's Compton Cookout is still the attitude being displayed towards Blacks, towards anyone. While some would think that by now the dust has settled, it hasn't. If such a view towards a people is being perpetuated - with our permission or not - then whoever "they" is better have another think coming.
