The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama
by Elijah Ward
Following his groundbreaking explorations of the blues and American popular music in Escaping the Delta and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elijah Wald turns his attention to the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game called “the dozens.”At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of “yo’ mama” jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Ice Cube.
Wald explores the depth of the dozens’ roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and most recently in the improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden language beneath the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children’s clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore.In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds fascinating new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, serious literature and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap.
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Open letter from scholars opposed to scientific racism
We are a group of 72 scholars (and counting) opposed to scientific racism - the use of science or social science to argue that a racialized group is inferior. Jason Richwine’s dissertation is an example of scientific racism and this work has no place in twenty-first century academia.
In 2009, Jason Richwine successfully defended a dissertation at Harvard University where he wrote that Hispanic immigrants have a substantially lower I.Q. than the white native-born population and that, because of the hereditary nature of I.Q., this fact should be taken into consideration when designing immigration policy. In May 2013, Richwine’s views came under public scrutiny after he co-authored an immigration policy report for the Heritage Foundation.
Richwine’s dissertation is problematic for three reasons: 1) it is part of a tradition of scientific racism; 2) it is based on discredited ideas of intelligence testing; and 3) it relies on an unscientific relationship between racialized categories and genetic makeup. Ideas of racial inferiority have been used justify slavery, forced sterilizations, the Holocaust, and all forms of contemporary racism and sexism. These ideas have no place in 21st century social science because of their historical use to justify genocide and mass sterilization and their lack of scientific rigor.
Richwine makes a connection between the genetic makeup of Hispanics and their I.Q. However, there is no genetic basis for racialized differences. And, Hispanic is an ethnic category made up of people of every racialized category. A Hispanic is a person with roots in Latin America who lives in the United States. Their ancestry could include people from any continent. The claim that Hispanics share a genetic makeup that could differentiate them from white Americans is not debatable; it is untenable.
Intelligence testing is also deeply flawed. Stephen Jay Gould points out that the primary error in intelligence testing is that of reification – making intelligence into something by measuring it. Intelligence tests attempt to measure a wide range of abilities. The score on these tests is named an “intelligence quotient” or I.Q. Gould contends that these tests are flawed and do not meet their stated goal of measuring innate intellectual ability.
To the extent that it is true that Hispanic immigrants score lower on these tests than white Americans, this is a result of unequal educational opportunities, not genetics. Diego von Vacano, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School, points out that
“the rudimentary statistical analysis of the kind that Richwine carried out ignores the important interface between social realities and genetics. … [I.Q. scores] reflect the intertwining of some aspects of mental capacity with education, life experiences, socioeconomic status, and other contingent contexts.”
Despite the fact that this perspective is widely accepted among scholars, Richwine chose to rely on the scientific racism tradition of his discredited predecessors, such as Charles Murray and J. Philippe Rushton, and attributed the differences to genetics. His argument that I.Q. scores should inform immigration policy hearkens back to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century – during which time about 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States, on the basis of their purported intellectual unfitness.
As academics, we find it appalling that, in 2009, three professors at Harvard University were willing to guide and approve a dissertation in this academic tradition. There are three central problems with Richwine’s work that should not pass muster in any dissertation committee: 1) the argument that I.Q. scores are an indication of innate intelligence; and 2) the assertion that I.Q. is a genetic trait; and 3) the presumption that Hispanics, as a group, share a genetic makeup. All these ideas have been discredited and all are linked to an unfortunate history of scientific racism.
The idea that I.Q. scores could be a reflection of a heritable trait is one of the pernicious ideas that led to the Holocaust as well as eugenics programs and restrictive immigration policies in the United States and elsewhere. Apart from its ugly history, scientists do not have a clear understanding of the extent to which intelligence may be a heritable trait. Even if some aspects of intelligence are based on heritable traits, there is no doubt that environmental factors shape one’s ability to score highly on an intelligence test. Nevertheless, in his dissertation, Richwine eschews this evidence and argues that “the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent.”
It is clear that Richwine’s dissertation is thin – with weak statistical analyses and a literature review that relies too heavily on racist and substandard publications by Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Philippe Rushton. But, this dissertation should never have been written in the first place. Before Jason Richwine began the work that was to be his dissertation, he would have had to consult with scholars in his department to ask them if they would be on his doctoral committee. At that point, they should have explained to him that this work carries on the tradition of scientific racism, and has no place in twenty-first century scholarship. Instead, three scholars - George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jencks - agreed to supervise this scientifically racist dissertation and approved granting him a PhD degree from Harvard University.
Dean Ellwood at Harvard Kennedy School takes the position that this dissertation is part of an academic debate. We are not against academic freedom. However, there is no academic debate on whether or not Hispanics as a group are less intelligent than native-born whites. There are debates on whether or not Hispanic is a pan-ethnic, ethnic, or racialized category. There are debates on how and whether or why we should measure intelligence. There are debates on the extent to which intelligence is a heritable trait. But, there are no debates on whether or not Latino immigrants have the intellectual caliber to be part of the United States. Those kinds of debates happen in nativist and white supremacist circles, which have no place in academia, which prizes arguments and debates based on valid constructs and scientific evidence.
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Conservative commentator Ann Coulter walked out of a screening of
Star Trek: Into Darknesslast night, saying that the science fiction adventure had “too many minorities.”
According to witnesses at Regal Cinemas in New York, the controversial author was seen cursing out the screen and exiting about half an hour into the picture.
In an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show today Coulter defended her actions saying that liberal Hollywood had lost touch with average Americans.
“Apparently in the future the liberals have extinguished all the white people,” Coulter explained, “I mean they got a black girl running the communications, an Asian guy driving the ship and a pointy-eared alien doing pretty much everything else.
“I guess we’re supposed to just accept that minorities will be the new majority. This isn’t an entertainment film - it’s nothing but a pro-Obama, multicultural piece of propaganda.
“And of course its not even realistic. Since when have black people been able to speak foreign languages? And shouldn’t Sulu have crashed the ship into a quasar by now?”
Yesterday’s Enterprise
The Star Trek franchise has a long history of promoting multiculturalism since its inception in the 1960’s. It broke ground with a multi-racial cast and notably featured the first television kiss between a black and a white character.
The current film, which opened yesterday, is a reboot directed by J.J. Abrams featuring the characters from the original series. Critics have praised the film, but rarely mentioned its politics - a point which also confused host Sean Hannity.
“Now Ann, you know I love you,” a puzzled Hannity said, “but I’ve seen the film, and although there were minorities, there were also plenty of whites. So I guess I don’t see your problem.”
“Sean, the only other white people are foreigners,” she retorted, “you got one Communist from Moscow and a lazy, socialist engineer from Scotland. There’s only one red-blooded American white person in the whole movie - and thank god he’s the captain. The ship would fall apart in minutes without him.
“And Spock? The actor’s gay, and the character is ‘Vulcan’ - which is code for Jewish. But its not just the characters. The whole Star Trek thing is a socialist plot to brainwash our children.
“I mean no one actually owns the ship, no one gets paid any money, everybody’s ‘equal’. And they’ve been flying up there for years and still haven’t seen God yet. Karl Marx would have been proud Sean.”
The Daily Current
