The Tanning of America (37 page)

Hip-hop, let us then acknowledge, came about to serve a higher purpose, to be a cultural bridge to the promised land of what America's founders dreamed. I believe it did as much for civil rights as any other force since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And the bridge wasn't just for people of color, for the impoverished and the oppressed. As DJ Kool Herc said about his first party and the mix of music that was played, “It wasn't a black thing. It was a ‘we' thing.” Truly, hip-hop was marked as a color-blind space.

Tanning is also a “we” thing—the same “we” that could look back and say, “Yes We Did,” when it came to electing a president. For that reason, I like to think of all the groundbreaking done in the early years and of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as both the birthplace of hip-hop and where the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for our forty-fourth president of the United States took an auspicious turn.

While much has been said and written about the historic campaign that helped put Barack Obama in the White House, a few lessons from a cultural perspective are worth revisiting—for both their marketing insights and, hopefully, their most cherished American values.

On the evening of November 7, 2000, at 9:04 P.M. Eastern Time, Reuters News Service published the headline BLACK VOTERS KEY TO GORE WIN IN FLORIDA. Al Gore had earned a stunning 94 percent of the African-American vote in Florida, as well as a majority of the Hispanic vote. For the nearly 60 million Americans who would be counted as having voted for Al Gore (48.38 percent of the popular vote versus 47.87 percent for George W. Bush), triumph was short-lived.

Strange and sinister things suddenly began to happen—including the denial of requests for legal recounts amid evidence of as many as eighty-five thousand black and minority names being scrubbed from voter rolls for alleged felony convictions (95 percent of which turned out to be speeding tickets or fabrications). Thirty-six thousand newly registered Democratic voters who had signed up at the DMV never made it onto the rolls. And when a recount was attempted, the GOP hired busloads (as confirmed by ABC News) of young operatives to stop the process.

In a later legal review of the facts by Spencer Overton of Florida State University, who addressed the issue of race in the election, these points were established:

Later studies conducted by the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as to how these patterns manifested in other states around the country suggested that extreme irregularities produced as many as two to six million uncounted votes.

While many of these details were lost in the shuffle, most everyone got the memo as to what happened on December 12 when, by a five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court of the United States of America found in favor of George W. Bush's argument that a complete recount would violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A vast majority of legal scholars protested the decision and its tortured logic, as well as political bias. But the Florida recount was immediately stopped—an act without precedent in American justice—and the presidency was effectively given to George W. Bush.

Whatever this meant politically was yet to come. But culturally the ground shifted immediately. On that December day when the verdict was handed down, it caused an instantaneous mental tanning moment for a significant percentage of the sixty million Americans who had just been disenfranchised by having their votes not counted. For a lot of white nonminority voters, the feeling that I heard being expressed was
Oh yeah, now I get it, now I know what discrimination is.

Who was going to right this wrong? For urban youth culture and leading hip-hop voices, that question was a call to action. In the past, part of what had defined the movement was less about political activism and more about using lyrics to speak “truth to power.” There were exceptions. Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan organization founded in the early nineties, had been reaching out through artists from across the musical spectrum, who had helped add significant numbers of young voters for both parties. Russell Simmons, an early activist who believed in the importance of young people engaging in the political process, had organized Rap the Vote prior to the 2000 election.

At colleges and universities in the early nineties there were on-campus hip-hop communities and student organizations that had, in fact, been instrumental in helping bring South African apartheid to an end by working to mobilize unions, municipal pension funds, and American corporations to pull out their investments in the regime—until political change was accomplished.

Yet for all its influence culturally and in the marketplace, hip-hop's countercultural stance—and its innate distrust of political institutions—made the idea of organizing around a system that appeared to be unjust anyway, more or less, a fool's errand. Why not seek power in the boardroom and through economic means rather than the community-organizing route, as some might say? Others, like Russell Simmons, again, and Sean “Puffy” Combs, didn't agree. What's more, the dissatisfaction with George W. Bush was coming up in a lot of the rap songs that reflected what was going on in people's lives. Rather than giving in and letting 2000 happen all over again, 2004 became a landmark election in terms of rallying the youth vote. Between Russell's Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and concerts headlined by Kanye West and 50 Cent, a viral video about the importance of registering to vote with Eminem, along with Puffy's “Vote or Die” efforts with Citizen Change, voters between the ages of twenty-one and thirty went to the polls close to twenty-one million strong. The increase was 4.6 million additional young voters—up 18.4 percent.

In 2000 young voters had broken 48 percent for Gore and 46 percent for Bush. By 2004 the gap was 55 percent of millennial voters casting their ballots for John Kerry versus 45 percent for George W. Bush. In terms of tanning, this was proof that the cultural shift was having political reverberations. More than half of the new young voters, as a matter of fact, were African-American and Hispanic.

To the dismay of Puffy and Russell, a lot of the mainstream media used John Kerry's loss in the '04 election as proof that youth in general weren't showing up and that hip-hop was not the rallying force it was supposed to have been. Both were quoted in the press crying foul. Puffy was accused of being defensive and claiming there was a conspiracy in the media. It bothered him so much that there was no applause for the increase in young voter turnout that he was quoted as saying, “This generation gets knocked down so much for being irresponsible, that this generation doesn't care, that this generation isn't interested in things that are serious. Then, something like this happens—four million or so more votes! Young black and Latino kids are voting for the first time, and what are folks saying? I'm not being defensive. I know the truth.”

According to media analysts, the reason that the youth turnout didn't deliver the vote for John Kerry had to do with the higher-percentage turnouts in all the other demographics as well. Of course, these percentages were based on exit polls and estimates that made certain assumptions. Some of the same voting irregularities that were seen in 2000 were alleged to have happened in 2004—leaving lingering questions.

Even with the disappointment of Kerry's loss and the dispute over the impact of the youth vote, there was one question that had been answered. Over the past two elections, focused efforts in turning out the youth vote were producing meaningful results. And for those youth and younger adult voters who hadn't forgotten the disenfranchisement of 2000, the results were gaining ground on behalf of Democrats.

Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina sent the floodwaters over the levees in New Orleans, submerging most of the city, causing $85 billion in devastation, killing thousands, many of whom were never found, and stranding those who couldn't get out of the city in time, most of them people of color, poor and without resources. The federal government's shockingly delayed response was not only ineffectual, it was criminal.

In spite of the reluctance of the media to initially embrace such an assertion, it would be painfully revealed as events unfolded that were hard to spin. Why? Because a) the public was witnessing them happen in real time with their own eyes and ears, and b) the on-the-ground reporting was based in facts that were incontrovertible. The administration's later claim that they never could have imagined the ultimate devastation that took place, and George W. Bush's statement, “I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees,” were simply lies.

As early as Friday, August 26, when Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana and when governors of all the gulf states convened a joint task force requesting assistance from the Pentagon, every worst case scenario was outlined. At five A.M. Saturday morning when Katrina was upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane and Governor Blanco announced, “I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments,” there was no ambiguity. This was even echoed in the statement from the White House that it was designating FEMA, specifically, as “authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”

On Sunday, August 28, when Katrina was upgraded to Category 4 at two A.M. and then to Category 5 at seven A.M., President Bush was specifically warned of possible levee failure by the National Hurricane Center Director, Dr. Max Mayfield. That afternoon, the National Weather Service's special warning described the nightmare that would follow a dead-on hit from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, saying that most of the area would be uninhabitable for weeks or longer, that homes would be destroyed or severely damaged, that power outages would last weeks, and that “water shortages [would] make human suffering incredible by most modern standards.” Meanwhile, the media ran headlines alerting the entire nation of forecasters' fears that storm waters would top the levees after the hurricane had come through. With a massive evacuation under way, New Orleans Mayor Nagin said, “We're facing the storm most of us have feared.” In no uncertain terms, he emphasized that it would be an unprecedented event.

After the National Guard requested seven hundred buses from FEMA, only one hundred were sent. Of those left behind—most of them people of color, poor, families with children, elderly, and disabled—some stayed in their homes to ride out the storm while the Superdome filled up with thirty thousand evacuees and only a day and a half's worth of food and supplies for all of them.

As a Category 4 hurricane, Katrina made landfall at seven A.M. on Monday, August 29, and though the media exhaled for a second with the news that the city had dodged a bullet, within a half hour that relief was canceled by the announcement that the levees had been breached. The Associated Press reported that the Bush administration was notified of the realization of this worst case scenario; the White House acknowledged it along with twenty-eight various other government agencies. With harrowing stories of floodwaters rapidly rising, pump stations breaking down, and accounts published of concerns voiced to President Bush (then on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas)—by none other than the guy with no experience heading up FEMA, Michael Brown—it seemed the commander-in-chief had other priorities. Announcing that he had put the matter in the hands of Homeland Security, President Bush told reporters that he was getting on Air Force One to go discuss immigration with John McCain. Before noon, he was posing for a photo-op with McCain and his birthday cake. The president's next stops included resorts in Arizona and California to promote the new Medicare prescription bill he had just signed and that night a commitment to go early to bed—without a word about the American city that was in the process of drowning.

Although Brown had ordered one thousand National Guard troops to the region, he had given them two days to get there. In spite of what was seen next through horrific images of people stranded on rooftops, snakes and alligators devouring people, countless missing persons, and the loss of people's pets, plus violence erupting amid the chaos, the response on Tuesday from the Pentagon was that there were adequate units in the gulf region to handle any problems. As for the USS
Bataan
that was sitting offshore ready to serve with the ability to make up to one hundred thousand gallons of water a day, its own hospital operating rooms, doctors, food, and beds for six hundred, it was left at sea and empty. Seemingly oblivious, President Bush on Tuesday afternoon was playing guitar with a popular country-western musician.

On Wednesday, August 31, after FEMA workers warned Brown that people were dying at the Superdome, he was unable to respond because, his press secretary noted, he needed more time for his restaurant meal. The
Los Angeles Times
described conditions that day, with thousands still trapped at the Superdome, as if out of a horror movie. With no sanitation, the smell was said to be “overwhelming.” Walls had bloodstains on them, bathrooms were littered with crack vials, and people had no choice but to urinate on the floor. Among those who had died was a man who had leapt to his death unable to live with what he had seen. Children were reported to be among rape victims.

Eighty thousand men, women, kids, and babies were estimated to be stranded in New Orleans, as Reuters reported. Wednesday afternoon, George W. Bush flew over the city in Air Force One, at the same time that Homeland Security issued a statement praising the federal government's response to the disaster.