Why Ice T says Rap Music Improved Race Relations
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Ice-T, the bombastic and bodacious gangsta rapper-turned-TV star who once released the ultra-inflammatory anti-police anthem “Cop Killer,” says that rap and hip-hop permanently changed the way white people viewed urban blacks.
Ice-T opined that on the way to becoming the world’s most influential music form – altering the way people speak, dress and walk around the world – rap helped to improve race relations in the country because young suburbanites could identify with urbanites’ angst, youthful exuberance and rebellious spirit. Young whites therefore spurned their parents’ antiquated beliefs about blacks being an inherently inferior strain of the human species.
“We started to break barriers in music. They would come to my concerts and Public Enemy’s concerts and it was all white kids. I was like, ‘what’s really going on?’” he told reporters at the 23rd Annual Philadelphia International Art Expo, sponsored by October Gallery. Ice-T, an African American, is famously married to a white woman, the voluptuous vixen CoCo, a woman whose flamboyant attributes make her as much an attraction as the rapper himself.
“Now they were finally for the first time hearing black people speak and it wasn’t edited,” Ice-T continues, adding that the young white fans of rap of the early 1990s later formed a major slice of the electorate that helped catapult President-elect Barack Obama into the White House. “They were finally getting a chance to finally meet us. And at the end of the day, they realized that ‘wow, black people are pretty cool. I like Ice-T. I like Snoop Dogg’. And at the end of the day, those [young white people] who listened to hip-hop 15 years ago, that’s who voted in the election last week.”
Ice-T declared that, despite the fact that gangsta rap was assailed by the establishment and lampooned by irate conservative blacks who disdained rap’s misogyny, misguided machismo and allegiance to illicit activities, rap provided a powerful prism to which whites were able to view inner city blacks in ways they had never been able to before.
“As much as some older black folk don’t like the music, we broke the barriers. We were the ones who made it okay to be hip and be down with Obama. So we gonna take a little credit, too,” says Ice-T proclaimed as a horde of fans roared its approval. “Because I was there and I saw it and I knew that [Obama] could win, just because I knew that climate was out there.” – terry shropshire
