It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (22 page)

I thought about the family of Artrell Dickerson, the eighteen-year-old boy who was gunned down by Detroit police during a funeral, just a few weeks after Bell’s murder. Dickerson’s family, in a passionate statement that is a challenge to all of us, wrote:

I decided that unlike Bailey, Diallo, Louima, Bell, Dickerson, and countless others too numerous to name, I would not be unarmed, and that if they shot at me, I would shoot back with everything I had. The logic: If white police officers love their families as much as we love our Black units, then knowing we are armed as well, perhaps they will think twice before they shoot at us. “As the racist police escalate
the war in our communities against black people, we reserve the right to self-defense and maximum retaliation,” former Black Panther leader Huey Newton said while incarcerated on bogus charges. And this wasn’t just rhetoric, Newton saved his own life by firing back at Oakland police officers when they attempted to assassinate him in 1967. Similarly, Tupac Shakur, in 1993, shot two off-duty police officers who were harassing him and a Black motorist. When it was discovered that the cops were drunk and in possession of stolen weapons, all charges against Tupac were dismissed.

We must never mistake the self-defense of the victim for the violence of the attacker. Self-defense is not an act of violence, but rather an act of self-love and self-preservation. In 1919, when a thick brush of race riots swept across the country like wildfire, Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay responded with “If We Must Die,” a poem urging Blacks to fight back. McKay’s poem, written nearly a century ago, spoke to me now:

M.K.A.: Do you believe your experience was an isolated incident or symbolic of a larger national problem?

Dead Prez: New York is no different than Florida, no different than California, no different than Cincinnati, no different than Philadelphia. So that shows you what we’re dealing with. It’s the same pigs, the same pig mentality, and the same enforcement that’s going down, the only thing that is changing is the people that they’re arresting. They’re arresting more and more of us and they’re getting to the babies now. It’s the same blue steel ring around our community, which attempts only in criminalizing us with no social justice, we get no justice at all. At the end of the day we are still locked out economically, so it’s the same war around the hood. You know the only thing they leave us with is dope to sell and a basic demoralization in the hood. We’re here to provide, to say that we won’t be demoralized and that we’re gonna stand up and that there’s something that you can do, you can organize to fight for your damn rights and don’t punk out. Let’s do it for the babies so the babies don’t have to come up and live in terror ’cause that’s what it is: it’s police terror inside our communities. It’s terrorism and it’s been long before that. I really believe that there’s a syndrome that we need to be aware of that happens inside of our community. It happens to me all the time where I don’t even drive a car because I know if the police pull up behind me, chances are I probably will go to jail. It’s not because I’m doing anything illegal, it’s because we are made criminal just by where we live and the profiling that happens when we’re doing what we do. Once again, the U.S. law, you know, that’s Amerikkkan justice with a triple “k.”

The officer didn’t ask me why I had a gun; he had something else in mind.

“You don’t mind if I take a look around,
do ya?”
The officer slurred as he opened my door.

“Actually, officer, I don’t consent to a search of my private property,” I informed him, myself informed by a fairly good understanding of my Fourth Amendment rights, which state:

“You hiding something?” the officer pried.

“No,” I said flatly, “I’m exercising my Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.” I knew that according to the Plain View Doctrine, he could only initiate a search if an illegal item was in plain view and that the only reason he was asking me to consent to a warrantless search was because he didn’t have enough evidence to search without my consent. I also knew, from both common sense and previous experiences, that just because a law is on the books, its application is much less clear, especially where race is concerned. After all, in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
Dred Scott vs. Sandford
that Blacks “had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.” But this didn’t deter me from asserting my rights because in that same year, Frederick Douglass warned:

So, in an attempt to limit his tyrannical oppression, I refused to submit. As Ras Baraka explained on The Fugees sophomore album
The Score
, “Cuz if you let a mothafucka kick you five times, they gonna kick you five times. But if you break off da mothafucka’s foot, won’t be no more kickin’.”

M.K.A.: Can you speak on the importance of knowing your rights?

Dead Prez: Coming out into these U.S. streets, prison streets, prison states, police states without knowing your rights is like a soldier without a weapon. You almost have no defense for the bullshit. And believe me they come at you with X amount of it. A lot of times if we knew our rights a lot of things that happen with the police wouldn’t have happened. Illegal searches and even some arrests wouldn’t even go down the same way. Knowing your rights is almost like turning your lights on with the roaches because they scatter and with the lights on there is your protection. I also believe that our protection is with the people because the people define what rights are you know what I mean. Getting pulled over for making an illegal right turn is grounds for being murdered in St. Petersburg, Florida. Tyrone Lewis was murdered for being a motorist. Often it happens to us, we’re tried and delivered a sentence of death so many times in our community by these terrorist police officers, so knowing your rights is one of the chief ways that you can defend yourself. But the struggle continues, the resistance is hot. The resistance is still hot.

We have always been resistant towards police brutality and treatment in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where these secret underground teams basically crawl the streets at night and abrogate brothers’ and sisters’ rights, patting us down looking for the gun knowing we got the gun, looking for everything else—you know all kind of unjust treatment in our community. We’ve always been resistant to it. It’s nothing new. We know that our first job is to be soldiers and be defenders of our
rights so we began organizing ourselves. We organize with many community organizations and structures including people like the December 12th Movement or The National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, student organizations like Fisk.

“Step out of the car,” the officer ordered as he opened my door.

“You
still
haven’t told me what I was pulled over for? What was I pulled over for?” I insisted.

Completely ignoring my question, he says, “What are you hiding, boy?”

“Boy?”

“Fuckin’ nigger,” he vomited.

At that moment, I was faced with two distinct choices: life or death.

This is exactly his plan
, I chuckled to myself as I chose life.
He wants me to flip. He wants me to flip. Nope, I’m not givin’ in. Not givin’ in
, I told myself, attempting to prevent my blood from bubbling, desperately trying to prevent the death, which was waiting above the scene like a vulture, from occurring.

“I know my rights,” I insisted, to which he threw my license and registration into my car and stalked off, frustrated at his impotence.

In France, the Black and Arab youth scream
“Police partout, justice nulle part!”
meaning “Police everywhere, justice nowhere.” So long as officers like L. Clark patrol neighborhoods in a predatory manner, there will be no justice—can be no justice.

M.K.A.: So, what does this experience prove or confirm to Dead Prez?

Dead Prez: More than anything it confirms, it supports the fact that we’re at war. And to me that was the most glaring thing that I probably learned out of that experience is that three years later we still
don’t have an apparatus in place that can truly defend the people’s rights. We need some courageous soldiers, some really courageous soldiers to step up. Those of us who don’t have a whole lot of records, who ain’t gon’ face three strikes, those of us who feel like we know we have nothing to lose but our chains, just step up and take leadership. And I got to say if you see it you go get it, RBG means be “revolutionary but gangsta” but it also means “reading ‘bout Garvey” and “ready to bust gats.”

M.K.A.: Do events like this one shape your lyrics?

Dead Prez: Let me tell you something, as an emcee you know, is only one part of the person that is M-1, I’m not just a rapper. Now it’s time for me to use the propagandist in me to be able to put it into our culture as part of our resistance. You need that experience because people will ask what will you do when somebody robs your house or when the big bad wolf comes. But in these situations we need to know not to advocate the police at any point. And only in that experience do you learn the treachery of dealing with that man’s arm of his protection of capitalism, which is his army: the pigs. So that experience helped me know exactly what to do. It informed me as to what to say to people in my rhymes and in my life. We’re in a war and people automatically put your agenda up for you when you’re a rapper, like you get a car and a mansion and you’re good, you’re pretty much good, you go to jail for having a vest or some weed or hope that you don’t get caught up with a weed charge but that’s the life of a rapper. Now we put a new face on a rapper, we say to the members of the community when you fuck with me now I know how to organize, I know how to activate my community with the words that we say instead of a lot of times walking into the agenda that was put here before us and just doing the normal thing and cop a plea, which is what rappers normally
do. So that’s what helps inform me, to act from experience to make it be part of our culture to be resistant. I don’t want to preach and Dead Prez doesn’t want to preach; I mean I can’t tell anyone right from wrong and what to do. All I can talk about is based off of my experience and I can tell you how to avoid traps, some of those traps. And I think with hip hop the general problem that we have, besides the fact that we don’t own hip hop as a property, is that we don’t even own it as an intellectual property. We don’t provide the agenda by which success is gained and most of the time we don’t achieve it. Zero percent of rappers don’t even got what rappers are supposed to have. So with that agenda being caught up in that way we find ourselves being caught up in a lot of meaningless discussions. At Morehouse a brother stood up and said, “What are we gonna do with all the twenty-four-inch rims and what are we gonna do with all the women with the tight-ass clothes?” I said, “Well brother, what are you gonna do?” I said you should “ignore it, you should organize in your community so that when people have the choice between twenty-inch rims and some semblance of freedom or justice they will choose justice.” So it’s my job to bring it back ’cause don’t forget that our biggest enemy is the red, white, and blue. George Bush is laying down more laws than any brotha that ever dissed you, I understand the game and so this is what I’m here to do.