| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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understand an explosive increase in racial incidents in the San Jose and Santa Clara Valley, California, schools in the past decade. Hundreds of African Americans reported to the coalition incidences of public racial harassment and city authorities’ unwillingness to address the incidents in school and on the streets. Every one of our investigations led back to gangster rappers’ use of the N-word (nigger) as the trigger to these incidents. An undetermined number of young black students have been harassed by white students using the N-word. Teachers and school administrators have told them that they must live with it. If the black students physically strike their harassers, they are suspended, charged, and prosecuted by the police and courts. Why? Because the propagation of the N-word in the music has normalized its use in public. Young white listeners feel free to use it and claim that this is a First Amendment right. In addition, they call black students sellouts if they are good students—again, based upon what they hear in the music. The white harassers will be the first to admit that they listen to and enjoy gangster rap. Coalition members believe that this is a major unaddressed issue not just in Northern California but nationally—and absolutely no attention has been given to it.
Despite multiple obstacles, the coalition successfully pressed the city of San Jose and Santa Clara County to set a new community standard on the N-word to be followed by the schools, police, and courts. Since then, incidents of racial harassment with the N-word have decreased considerably; when they do occur, they are more often now addressed appropriately. Although both the city and the county have additional improvements to make, the coalition’s advocacy and the changes made serve as a model of what can be done nationally on the community level. The coalition asked that this work be written.
Third, I had to be convinced intellectually to arrive at the conclusions outlined earlier. The writing of journalists and new scholars in the academy up to 2011 pointed toward the major premises now in this book. I was shocked to find how little critical analysis exists in print and how many essential questions remain unaddressed—for instance, the effects,