What Nipsey Hussle’s Death Says about Black Hypocrisy and Fake Hashtag Activism

It is indeed a very sad day when any black person is taken from this world before the age of 35 for any reason. It is even worse for those under 25 and 15 years of age. To acknowledge this in our community means sending prayers to the victim’s family and love ones.  It means extending a support that they may need honestly and sincerely. If one is a celebrity, then it means blessings in the age of twitter in the form of tweets lauding them as if they were the greatest and kindest person ever. Simple it means virtue signaling to the herd mentality.

This morning, as I sat on the toilet reading the multiple news feeds on my phone, I read that LA rapper Nipsey Hussle was murdered in a hail of gun fire in front of one of his businesses. As the word spread, virtue signaling in the form of 280 characters or less began pouring in. John Legend said “RIP Nipsey.  I just spent Thursday with him filming a video for a beautiful new song we created with Khaled.  We filmed in Inglewood, close to where he grew up. He was so gifted, so proud of his home, so invested in his community.  Utterly stunned that he's gone so soon.” “My spirit is shaken by this! Dear God, may His spirit Rest in Peace and May You grant divine comfort to all his loved ones” Rihanna tweeted. Meek Mill added: “we really fighting for our lives against our own kind and really have to take risk and match the level of hatred that we are born in I’m tired prayers for my brother and his family.” I could continue but you get the message. Any additional listing would only be nauseating but take it from me, everyone from LeBron James to Jada Pinkett Smith had something to say. My good friend and former colleague Rodney Carmichael at NPR described him as a “Grammy-Nominated Rapper and Philanthropist.”

It is true that Nipsey had turned his life around and had become a change for good. But I asked myself as I read the inundation of tweets, let us suppose he had been killed by a white policeman, what would the tweets may have said then, instead of an alleged African-American fellow gang banger? What virtue should be signaled then? I’m certain anyone wish prayers in the first scenario would be vilified.  Wishes of prayers for cops killing black men are useless and pathetic, but when we kill each other they are the right thing to do. Not to mention since he has changed his life for the better what he did before doesn’t matter and isn’t important in explaining who he is as a person, but if it was some other person, who may have dressed like Bruce Lee twenty years ago, or touched a woman on their booty, especially being non-black, it would synthetic hashtag outrage.

Now I am not bashing Nipsey and as a man feel for his family, but the thinker in me is attracted to hypocrisy. Think about it, no mass protest will be arranged for this man, but if he had been killed by a cop I am sure it would. Moreover, let us not forget that he was a member of the Rollin' 60s Crips (a life time membership) and openly demonstrated this on the cover of his Bullets Ain't Got No Name series in 2008. His new album continued his preoccupation with calling folk N*****, the drug game, materialism, street life and yes – set tripping. Take the lyrics from the song Succa Proof from his latest album Victory Lap: Look, I don't fuck what you niggas done, I don't give a fuck where you niggas from, For you and your mouth go and get a gun, Leave you slumped on the scene, that's a hit and run, Oh y'all Bloods, oh y'all Crips now, Fuck it, I'm big draws, I'm J. Prince now.”

Again, I repeat this is a sad lose. He was doing big things in the community and holding down his family like men should do, both being the images we as men should incessantly present to our communities. However, we have problems that only we can address. However, this requires us be honest with ourselves, leaving hypocrisy behind and acknowledging that they exist. Yes, racism exist, but it isn’t our biggest obstacle or problem, that would be us. We know that homes with two parents and fathers in them are likely not to be in poverty, have kids drop out of high school, less likely to have a daughter pregnant before graduation, are more likely to go to college and male children are less likely to get caught up in the criminal justice system. WE KNOW THIS, yet we act as if this is because of systemic racism.  Last I looked systemic racism had nothing to do with using a condom, keeping your legs closed, saying no to having unprotected sex, doing homework with your children and not using the television set as a baby sitter. We know that African American males represent about 6 percent of the U.S. population but commit almost 40% of murders and comprise nearly 60% of all murder victims (Another reason why our homicide rate is four times the U.S. average).

There was NO reason we as a community and nation should have lost such a prosperous soul as Nipsey Hussle. But if we do not address why this type of senseless outcome keeps occurring, whether rich or poor or famous or joe citizen, we will never make any progress.  We should be equally upset for Nipsey as we do Darion Strong. We should be equally upset for HeavenSutton as we are Oscar Grant. But none of this will ever change if we put out in the universe that the death of a black by a white person is more valuable, interesting and important than a death of a black person by another black person. The more these liberals hypnotize blacks to keep on virtue signaling (the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue), the less likely we will have the desire and power to acknowledge and solve our own problems, and the more we live in areas like Baltimore where only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient in In fourth and eighth grade reading and one-third of High Schools in Baltimore, last year, had zero students proficient in math. RIP NIP, we will make something good out of this.

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Puzzy Lemonade Outrage or Do Blacks Care About Anything Besides Beyoncé?

Years ago there was a little girl, she operated a lemonade and candy stand, her name was Heaven Sutton. She isn’t with us anymore because she was gunned down in her front yard.  Now years later the names of children killed by senseless gangland (or any form) violence in places like Chicago are too numerous to name.  Acen King, Ja'Quail Mansaw, Cylie and Caden McCullum, Payton Benson

Antonio Smith Jr., Tiana Ricks and Londyn Samuels are just a few, but you don’t know their names or even know who they are.  They were never romanticized with hashtags like #remeberhername or #sayhisname or #bringbackourgirls because although they were black there death's were not sensational enough for the retro chic political narrative of the day.

If they were killed by police or an idiotic white lunatic, they would be known and remembered and we would cite their names with the likes of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown.  But they have no value in the eyes and minds of social justice warriors because mentioning or remembering their names does not help to enable their goals of getting rich off of racial and identity politics and obtain fake fame by receiving television air time for pretending to be “woke.”

The artificial pretense of the so-called woke culture is metastasizing like a cancer, especially with the election of Donald Trump.  It is as if black folk can only attend to complaining about him and police shootings and nothing more.  Not the pathetic state of our inner cities. Or our failing government public schools or increasing rates of poverty (all of which by they have been happening in places that have been run by democrats since the 1940s in most cases and problems Trump had nothing to do with). The fake outrage at the election of Donald Trump that I have written about before will never manifest into true honest civic outrage for real problems that confront us daily like the deaths of the little children or the economic constraints I mentioned previously. 

These same folk, especially the black ones will protest against Trump and his ban on seven specific nations but were silent when Obama was bombing families of the same innocent women and children in the same nations with his drone wars which he dramatically increased when compared to George W. Bush after giving his 2009 Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech: wars that the former president conducted with impunity in places like Somalia, Libya, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria that created his current migrant-refugee crisis to begin with. They are loud when they are not allowed within the U.S. proper but were quiet when they were being slaughtered religiously on the orders of America’s first black president. It is as if they say it is cool to kill them, I can get with that but it is a problem when we try to improve criterion for entry to the U.S.

For the life of me I cannot figure this out – being open to individual and personal acquiesce to murder but opposed to none murderous acts to an option of personal choice.  Likewise, there was no outrage when Obama stopped Iraqis from immigrating to the U.S. for 120 days.  Clearly politics and not protest in the name of basic dignity is hey problem or issue.

At Berkeley we saw this in action. Incantations of divide and conquer. Destroying property and setting vehicles on fire has nothing to do with protest based on what is called for to stand on the side of righteousness regarding human dignity or else they would affirm the nonviolent approaches of Gandhi, King and Mandela.  This is all show and mechanically contrived vexation.  They do not really care, they just want attention; and they do not seek change, rather they only want to define what is acceptable or should be tolerated as meaning you have to agree with me or else you are wrong and my speech is more important than your speech. What I am paying attention too is more important than anything else. But where were they before this?

For example, cities and states all around the nation have been finding funds available to deal with litigious actions that may be pending for illegal aliens under asserted or proposed Trump planes to deal with the issue.  You got black folk even out on the front lines of this fictitious battle.  Mind you that for decades we have been trying to get the same cities and states to hire more public defenders for the many of our fellow men and women locked behind bars but the response was always “we do not have the money for such.” Yet there were none of these adamant protestors standing next to us when we made this request but we stand with them. And all of a sudden places like LA can magically come up with $10 million for this but no funds for additional public defenders to defend people born in America.

It is as if we are living in an alternate reality where all injustices are equal when evidence dictates they are not.  There were only one specific people designated as slaves in America who did not have a choice to come him but rather was forced to by a combination of the Bible and the barrel of a gun. Still opaquely innocent and manipulated we go along with the flow when it makes no logical senses and supersedes our own collective interest.  We hail the arrival of Muslim immigrants without out the consideration of the fact that if they are terrorist, they will kill us too, and want to kill us too.  Liberal or conservative they do not care, they will set you on fire and chop your head off with the quickness for things we call liberties (sexual orientation, wearing revealing clothing if you are a woman, drinking alcohol, being a Christian or having an abortion).

That they do like beating women and condemning homosexuals to death don’t outrage us, nor what they believe.  It is this myopia that believes we are justified not to speak up on behalf of the children I mentioned earlier because they do not meet our narrative.  But don’t let it be an award show, or you will have protest and outrage out the azz.  There would be #oscarssowhite or the recent #grammyssowhite because Beyoncé didn’t win album of the year.  This is an issue although WORLDWIDE the woman she lost too sold waaaaaaaay more albums than she did. Now let that sink in, cats are so mad that a millionaire didn’t win an award while sitting in a room filled with other millionaires outfitted in $5,000 or more worth of sartorial splendor, that they are willing to express emotional disdain.  But let a two-year get shot in the head the result of a gangland hit, and they won’t say jack. But it makes sense, after all these rich Hollywood cats are oppressed too, with their body guards with automatic weapons, drivers and walled-in mansions.

Have we lost our way? Are we so caught up in self-absorbed mindless celebrity twaddle that we can be eaisly paraded about like a puppet by presentations of what Juvenal called “bread and circuses?” Do we even know what we are upset by, angered by or protesting against?  I don’t think so and I don’t think for those who are black, really have have any interest in improving our conditions collectively as a people, if they were, they would know of Lavontay White, Takiya Holmes or Kanari Gentry Bowers. Unfortunately they don’t, they just know Beyoncé didn’t win a Grammy for Album of the year and that it takes precedence above all else.

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