Jay-Z: Rap Scholar
In his new book, Decoded, Jay-Z offers one of the more compelling analyses of class and inequality I’ve read in a while (full excerpt available here; NPR interview and transcript here):
One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don’t like to think of themselves as poor. It’s embarrassing. When you’re a kid, even in the projects, one kid will mercilessly snap on another kid over minor material differences, even though by the American standard, they’re both broke as shit.
The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. As kids we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.
I remember coming back home from doing work out of state with my boys in a caravan of Lexuses that we parked right in the middle of Marcy. I ran up to my mom’s apartment to get something and looked out the window and saw those three new Lexuses gleaming in the sun, and thought, “Man, we doin’ it.” In retrospect, yeah, that was kind of ignorant, but at the time I could just feel that stink and shame of being broke lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.
I like the passage for two reasons. First, for the way it shows the promise and hope that is alive in poor communities, which contrasts sharply with static representations delivered in the academy and media. And, second, for the explanation—more implied than stated—it offers for why poverty continues apace: everyone, even the poor among us, is striving and hustling for a better future, so that hardly anyone bothers to ask about the social and economic conditions that give rise to poverty in the first place.
