Rapper 50 Cent's Gay Problem

From AlterNet:

From cradle to grave, much of America has drilled into black men the notion that they are less than men. This has made many black men believe and accept the gender propaganda that the only real men in American society are white men.

In a vain attempt to recapture their denied masculinity, many black men, mirror America's traditional fear and hatred of homosexuality. They swallow whole the phony and perverse John Wayne definition of manhood, that real men talk and act tough, shed no tears, and never show their emotions.

These are still the prized strengths of manhood for many black men. Whether it's Rapper 50 cent, and his other rap buddies, grabbing their crotch on stage, or the mindless male testosterone driven gang violence that wreaks havoc in black communities, the hunt is on to wave their prized tough guy male virtue to the world. When men break the prescribed male code of conduct and show their feelings they are harangued as weaklings, and their manhood questioned. Many blacks in an attempt to distance themselves from gays and avoid confronting their own biases dismiss homosexuality as "Their thing." Translated: Homosexuality is a perverse contrivance of white males and females that reflected the decadence of white America. They make no distinction between white gays and other whites. To them whites are whites are whites. That's evident in the vehement opposition of many black ministers and black conservatives to any comparison of the fight for gay marriage to the civil rights movement.

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Homophobia, or simply, if you prefer, discrimination toward homosexuals, is quite a sophisticated problem. It taps deeply into individual identity, threatening cherished beliefs, upending subjective understandings of reality. It comes as no surprise, then, that homophobia is also intertwined with notions of race and ethnicity. All reports indicate that it's not easy being gay. Apparently it's even harder to be a gay African-American, and this culturally specific form of homophobia is being broadcast to the rest of America via hip-hop. From my perspective as a high school teacher, this is not a good thing: anti-gay slurs, and even violence, are commonplace in American schools; hip-hop's wild popularity makes it inevitable that such attitudes are reinforced by the one thing that truly influences teenagers, popular music.

I recognize that most hip-hop music is not seething with anti-gay venom; indeed, some groups and performers are downright progressive in their ideology and attitudes. However, homophobic rap is big business, and that means it's not just a black thing: it's an American thing, and, therefore, an American problem.

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