Niggas Is Doing They Homework, Yo
Jay-Z, Cornel West, and Harry Belafonte before Decoded Talk
I had the pleasure and misfortune of running into videos my former students get involved with, and one of them featured a gang from one of the neighborhoods my school represents. I watched a bit of it, annoyed that these pseudo-gangsters would put their videos on YouTube (“Real gangsters move in silence …” – Biggie), but more perturbed because they paraded in a coterie down a set of project buildings. I watched as the faces I once knew, who I never taught but I saw promise to their teachers they would do better, yelled in defiance to the camera about another pseudo-gang and how “pussy” they were and how this set of misguided youth is more malignant than the other.
One even observed that their rival group never gets out and made this quip: “Niggas is doing they homework, yo!” and laughed heartily.
Inside, I sat there and boiled. On a day like today, remembering the types of struggles a small but powerful group went through to extract consent from the majority rule to do the things “niggas” like these take for granted. If they had been that loud in their projects during the time Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a