Selling Drugs to White People

“The white man love to smoke marijuana
The black man love to cultivate it”
Linval Thompson – I Love Marijuana
Wiz Khalifa – Heart & Soul

Pushing to white people. Not exactly a common hiphop theme, but one that occasionally turns up — usually hand in hand with getting $um, sometimes implied in the logic/lyricism of $elling out. I’m not about to go into the sociology and economics of pushing (got to leave some work for real life grad students) — I’ll stick to the relatively noncontroversial thesis that the occasional displays of self-awareness on the subject are pretty interesting.

“Do I look like I sell drugs?” That’s the refrain of Adam Tensta‘s “Dopeboy,” the song that has enabled me to finish more than one late-night legal memo. Tensta is a straight-edge Swedish rapper who grew up in the Stockholm PJs. The song’s an explicit dig at racial profiling, making the fact that the video is full of gyrating melaninfree hipsters pretty interesting.

[This raises a related point, which is the proliferation of Hipster rap. For some time now, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that certain emcess are strategically integrating looks and sounds that target the young-white-male-demographic of rap music in order to springboard their careers and otherwise Get That Ca$h.  Not Lupe, I think he’s sincere. I’m thinking more of folks like the Cool Kids, Kid Cudi, etc who are provoking reactions like “Fuck that Hipster Shit” by Grip Plyaz, and a string of dis tracks by Mazzi. My friend Nick disagrees strongly with me on this point — he thinks it’s all about appealing to the Kingmaker, who is a big fan of “that hipster shit” as the  Village Voice has observed. And I must concede he has a point . . . It’s unclear what is appropriation, what is reclamation, and what is straight hustle. After all, in many ways, today’s hipster gear is a reformulation of urban streetwear, which has always been kin and kith to hiphop itself, as QTip (himself the so-called original hipster rapper) publicly pronounced on the Mazzi mixtape.]

Call it funny, call it frivolous — irregardless, there’s a razor edge to the reality of our situation. What Mr. Sessions points us to is commonly known as the “100:1” ratio in drug sentencing laws. Codified into law at  21 USC 841 , the Federal Sentencing Guidelines on drug penalties call for a 5-year minimum sentence for mere possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine; the same sentence for cocaine trafficking would require hauling 500g of powdered cocaine — There is no mandatory minimum sentence for mere possession of powder cocaine. (FYI: this sentencing disparity recently went up to the US Supreme Court, which held that it was not mandatory, but permissible, to sentence according to the Federal Guidelines ; Additionally, our Dear President’s administration has pushed for elimination of the disparity.)

Now, not to make any generalized statements about the impact of crack use on the Black community, but 2005 stats report that although 80 percent of those sentenced to federal prison for crack cocaine offenses are Black, two-thirds of crack cocaine users are white or Hispanic. The disparate impact of sentencing laws is pretty well documented in relevant scholarship. I therefore ask you to pardon my dead prez moment when I say I feel compelled to reconsider the tired point that selling drugs to white people, however lucrative, is integrally part of Keeping The People Down. But so long as I’m on the prez tip, let me recall a concert I saw in my early college days — where dead prez passed a hat through a crowd full of white college kids saying “we see a lot of pale faces in the crowd,” and demanding cash reparations (ostensibly for a local native tribe). It seems to me their comments were a brief flash of awareness that they, too, are pushers — revealing the doublesided nature of hawking hipster rap and controlled substances alike: two systems that allow folks to recoup from the system while they simultaneously contribute to their own subjugation. Not exactly a contradiction that has gone unobserved in recent entries into the rap annals either:

Blame Reagan for making me into a monster
Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra
I ran contraband that they sponsored
Before this rhyming shit we was in concert.