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IS LIZZO AND THE IMAGE OF BLACK WOMEN A CAUSE FOR ALARM?
By Legrand H. Clegg II
Nationwide -- On June 28, of this year, Melissa Johnson, known professionally as "Lizzo," won BET's Best Female R&B/Pop Artist Award for 2020. This is of grave concern to me. However, since Lizzo cannot be viewed in a vacuum, let me pause for a moment to provide a little background.
In 1993, I attended a workshop at the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C. that featured young African American rappers. It was a very revealing experience. Many of the older Black adults who set the agenda for the conference, felt that rap, as an art form, had taken an ominous turn. The language had become vile, raunchy, sexist, and self-destructive. Women were maligned, violence promoted and the N-word had reached an unprecedented level of distinction and repetition.
The largely middle-class professionals in attendance wanted an explanation for why our young people had adopted this shocking mode of expression. Of all of the answers given that day, only one sticks out in my mind: a popular young rapper stated that Hollywood executives and producers had informed the rappers that positive, constructive rap, focusing on social issues of concern to Black people, would no longer be financed by the industry.
Only "gangsta rap" would be promoted. Of course, the rest is history. In spite of the fact that courageous Black people, such as the late C. Delores Tucker, and a few others have protested the now prevalent "gangsta rap," most of us have grown immune to it.
We hear the N-word spewing forth from the mouths of our youths and watch them degrade Black women -- all with pathetic impunity. It's gotten so bad here in California that youths of all races now routinely address each other with the rap-endorsed and promoted N-word.