Nas, race and America

on June 11, 2008 at 4:15 PM, updated June 11, 2008 at 5:45 PM

I can't remember ever feeling excited about the discussion of race in America the way I do now. A lot of this is about Barack Obama, of course, the biracial presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. But I think as much as Obama is shaping the time, the time has shaped Obama, as well as a new generation of Americans who've grown up with the conviction that race is ultimately a farce.

Take, for example, Nas, part of that generation and one of the world's best rappers, and his new single. I've been thinking a lot about this since seeing the video a couple days ago (reposted below). The song title unambiguously refers to race and racism -- I can't even quote the full title here, per Oregonian rules about racial epithets, but a censored version could be written "Be a N-word Too," off his forthcoming self-titled album (itself originally slated to be titled with that same racial epithet). The song is a searing indictment of, well, everyone. The construction of race in America, all its sharp confining corners and clawing hierarchy, comes from everyone in America. We are America, and so we are race in America, all of us, the good and the bad of it. "We are the slave and the master," Nas raps in the video (which includes an extended version of the song). And everyone, too, can share that epithet in the song's chorus, where he tosses in racially charged epithets for other races and ethnicities, too. "Wouldn't you like to be a (n-word), too?" he asks. There's a pride in being one; it means you stand up for yourself, it means you belong to a group that knows itself, it means you're strong enough to survive being branded that way.

The cover of Nas' new album shows a giant N, in an elaborate system of interlocking scars, on his bare back. It recalls, instantly, Sethe, the scarred heroine of Toni Morrison's book "Beloved." Sethe bears the damage of slavery on her person in a way that will never leave her, the evils of that institution remaining long after it has nominally been abolished. She's haunted by what may or may not be her daughter, her beloved, whom she killed so that the girl would not herself fall into bondage. Slavery has so damaged Sethe that she damages her own flesh and blood to save them. The book gives the psychic wounds to flesh, in Sethe, in the beloved, in a universe of characters. In our own world, those physical scars have faded with the generations, though the psychic ones, the invisible ones, remain. Nas - who's been accused of a messiah complex before - is the word made flesh, an ugly word made shocking flesh.

Race both matters and doesn't matter to Nas at the same time. He's not upset Eminem used the word - Eminem is one, himself. And the intraracial fighting that's seen older and younger generations of blacks arguing over who's at fault for the ills of black America? Why fight amongst ourselves before people who enjoy the discord. But that doesn't mean anyone's off the hook, either: "Most of our elders failed us/How can they judge us." He mentions the Jena 6 and Michael Vick in the same breath, though their legal cases have little in common besides race. Yeah, race unquestionably shapes much of life in America. But if you let it not just shape you but warp you, Nas will come for you: "Nas is bred for the plan/To hold a grand dragon's head in my hand." But Nas berates himself in the video, as well, calling himself a "dumb (epithet)" with a staccato brutality - not long after a stomach-churning depiction of the hanging of a black man.

Sure, he takes some time to brag about his own wealth and to tell his critics to, well, eat some male genitals (not exactly the song's most elegant line). But none of that undermines his message; he can say those things because he's strong enough to, because he'll take your epithets and chew them up and absorb them - even to manifesting that on his own skin - until that epithet is so entirely his no one can take it away from him. And that's when he gets to define it, when it's his, and that's what he does here.

-- Luciana Lopez;