Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhyme & More...

This film honestly revealed a huge area in which the Black community needs to raise the standard and make a change.  I get it - music is a powerful tool and hip hop is just a style of music that many people like.  Hip hip once carried messages that challenged societal norms - living conditions for those in the inner cities, violence, crime and police brutality, oppression, etc.  Nowadays it's about drugs, acts of violence against other black people, material gain, and of course over-sexualized degradation of women.  The ways in which Black men degrade Black women through the medium of hip hop is sickening.  Somewhere along the way, our people internalized the negative images people reflected upon us and began to reflect them on each other.  Many have no self respect/ low self esteem and in turn have no respect for others.  Watching the men in this video just go up and grab on women and the sense of entitlement they felt they had to do so was just mind blowing.  They seemed to think the women's dress warranted their sexual advances, but they really just need to learn to respect women and their bodies, regardless of how they dress or carry their bodies.  In all reality, they should stop and consider - what if this were my mother, what if this were my sister/cousin, what if this were my daughter?  They honestly need to learn to respect women and do everything in their power to ensure their dignity.  After all, what is the difference in them coming up and grabbing a black woman's body and a slave owner just coming and taking what he thought he was entitled to?  There is none.  It is ignorant to perpetuate the same type of violence against Black women.