damn guess this doesn't allow formatting.. please note some of those paragraphs are quotes from the post i was responding to....

Having racial humility - and this has nothing to do with being post or pre Obama - always struck me as the equally unhelpful flip side of racial pride. IMHO, criticism, pride, praise or opinion based on anything other than what you've accomplished yourself as an individual human being, is pretty useless. I disagree. Feeling connected to, and proud of, things that are bigger than yourself is not only normal and healthy but IMO essential (hopefully no need to note why "white pride" is not among the healthy forms of collective pride). And the racial humility Dan speaks of is equally essential in relationships built upon such a dense history of imbalanced power & privilege. The thing is, if you think about where you live right now... Do you care who built that house or apartment building, or do you care about who's living there with you now? The people who built it are still here, you are living with them now. It gets into one of these weird authenticity arguments, about who's "real" or not, or what is even "real" hip hop culture. Cause the thing is, the white folks in the house of hip-hop sure didn't build it... but most of the other folks living here now didn't either. This is misreading the analogy, it's not about direct connections to the particular individuals who built it, it's about being of the group/community/culture that created it (and that, 30+ years later, still produces the vast majority of it, which is pretty remarkable). The general disconnection of many younger hip-hop artists from the form's history is also an issue and in some ways similar, but it's not the same issue.

And I def. don't see why "hurtful" and "clumsy" wouldn't be reasonable grounds for criticism? If being open to that criticism means having to do the work of distinguishing between well-reasoned critiques and poorly reasoned, then we do that work! Surely that inconvenience is far better, and more just, than the alternative of not being open to criticism at all.

Thanks for the detailed response.. My thing is: you seem to be saying that because some grievances are not legitimate, that means there should be no space for legitimate grievances to be heard? I don't follow that logic.. Certainly there are many obstacles to having these conversations constructively, but to me the solution lies in figuring out how to do better at it, not in just giving up on doing it at all, because it doesn't always go as we'd hope.

Yeah, black rappers have been protested far more often and far more loudly than Asher Roth was in this instance.. IMO one of the most notable aspects of this Asher/twitter story was how restrained and limited the reaction was, all in all..which I was happy to see because as I said in the video I didn't think this was worthy of launching protests.. these sorts of celebrity outbursts too easily become distractions from the far more important types of racism that persist silently in institutional/structural form.. (i haven't slept, pardon the run on sentences)

luis, please come do this after all my videos.

Hey now I didn't say that all irony is hipper than thou BS, I described one particular type of irony that is hipper-than-thou BS, namely the Vice-style of ironic hipster racism...of which, just to reiterate, I do not think Asher's tweet was an example, that was a bungled attempt at mocking Imus (which would've been a worthy enough endeavor if successful, he just didn't do it right, and ought not have attempted it so carelessly)

No it isn't that one but going there will get you one step closer :)

That was Tyga of "Lime in the Coconut" fame (if that's the right word)

Quimby: Yeah I'm thinking about hitting the corner in Times Square with a "will vlog for food" sign...will stand there frozen like one of those mimes, then jump up and start ranting about racism whenever someone drops money in the bucket

Still just commenting up a storm.

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