The Proper and the Questionable

By DON ROLLINS

It was September 1955 when fledgling Black-oriented Jet magazine published the grizzly photo of 14-year-old Emmet Till, lying in state after being tortured, shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. The magazine faced withering criticism — some Black, mostly White — for pulling back the veil of White barbarism as practiced nearly 100 years after Emancipation.

In retrospect, the polite (read overwhelmingly White) America of the mid-1950s could not hold both the reality of Black suffering and social propriety: Such graphic images (and accompanying commentaries) could only further “inflame” an already caustic situation.

Jet’s great sin against the order of things was declaring — on the record — for a growing civil rights movement that could no longer be predicted, let alone controlled. A heinous racial targeting was now there for all to see. Little wonder for years thereafter segregationists and other racists used Jet’s decision as proof the magazine was “questionable,” and should be censored then taken to court.

To our collective shame this same willingness to establish Black culpability by twisting the past has survived the decades, extending to individuals and just about any other Black entity with a “questionable” history. (George Floyd had a criminal history and a counterfeit bill, Breonna Taylor’s ex-partner was suspected of trafficking drugs from her apartment.)

Add to the list of questionables Black rappers and hip hoppers whose own lyrics are used by prosecutors to establish guilt before the law, effectively imposing a form of censorship for fear of indictment. Legal in both federal and most state courts, the strategy is to link original lyrics with the accused’s alleged crime — a sweeping tack estimated to have occurred in over 500 cases over the past two year, and overwhelmingly applied to Black artists.

While there is bipartisan congressional support to pass the Restoring Artistic Protection Act (RAP Act) outlawing the practice, New York and California have already moved to eliminate any use of an artist’s past work to prove their current guilt or innocence. Making the case for that state’s final adoption, California Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer stated “Under current law, rap artists can feel as though they are being read their Miranda Rights before they even begin to write music ...”

In the end the vote was unanimous. In both houses.

Ultimately, there’s a legal connection that runs through American racism as manifested in the court of public opinion (Jet magazine) and a court of law (RAP Act) — a connection having something to do with White sensibilities of what’s proper when confronted with the visceral, afflicted, marginalized side of the Black experience in America. There’s no returning Emmet Till to his family, no wishing away the deep racism embedded in the legal system that can’t distinguish rap lyrics from rap sheets. What remains is the ever present capacity for White folk to show up in both courts.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2023

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