What Lil Wayne and Malcolm Little Both Have in Common
by Dr. Boyce Watkins March 17th, 2013 @ 1:15pm
I love and respect the creative ability of Lil Wayne, even if I am concerned about the content of his music. The brother is going through some difficult times, and as someone who saw the early deaths of Eazy-E and Tupac Shakur, it’s hard for me to see chickens coming home to roost in the life of a man whose talent has changed the world.
I mentioned Weezy during a three hour private conversation I had with Min. Louis Farrakhan and I’ll probably bring him up again when Farrakhan and I gather for a forum on the state of the black community in Chicago on March 30. I’ve listened to enough of Wayne’s music to know the lyrics by heart and I am not afraid to say that I both love the verses and detest them, all at the same time.
It’s hard, as a black man who’s studied psychology, to know that repeating lyrics that glorify violence, promiscuity and drug use are being pounded into the heads of little black boys before they even have a chance to choose what they are going to become. I’ve studied Wayne’s life carefully to try to understand where his message is coming from, and what kind of internal pain might lead a person to become so determined to destroy his own people. You might wonder why I am obsessed with Wayne’s genius, and the answer is quite simple: Wayne reminds me of Malcolm Little.
Both Lil Wayne and Malcolm Little were brilliant, brave, creative, charismatic, resourceful and ambitious. They were natural born leaders with the spiritual energy to tear through any obstacle that lay in their path. But they were also both disturbed products of the poison dropped on the brains of little black babies in hoods all across America. After seeing nearly every man in his family murdered by whites, Malcolm grew up with the kind of anger that led him to destroy himself and those around him. His tremendous power was being used for evil rather than good, and had he continued down that path, he would have wreaked untold amounts of havoc on the world.
Lil Wayne, like Malcolm Little, is a product of American racial oppression. Everything about Wayne, from his gang affiliations to his s*xual promiscuity and numerous drug addictions, came from the “I don’t give a f*ck” attitude necessary for him to climb out of the depths of ghetto hell that defined his circumstances. Unfortunately, the recording industry has given Wayne a massive platform through which to spread his life philosophy onto the world, and it’s leading millions of black boys right to the penitentiary.
Wayne could have been another Malcolm X, but Malcolm X is what the caterpillar becomes when he’s grown into a butterfly. Being spoiled by money and power at an early age is enough to make any man arrogant, and I don’t think there’s anyone in Wayne’s camp who cares about him or the black community enough to do a serious intervention. As a result, one of the greatest black men in the history of the world lies in a hospital where he will either die or return to a lifestyle that is inherently suicidal. Just like there’s a prison cell built for every black boy in America, there is another hospital bed waiting for Lil Wayne, since it’s only a matter of time before he’s six feet underground.
I hope Wayne gets at least some of what I’m saying and that his friends care enough about him to intervene in his life. I hope he understands why you can’t go around comparing the face of Emmett Till to a woman’s ******. I hope he realizes that rather than passing messages encouraging young black kids to engage in criminal behavior, he could do a whole lot more for the people he loves by fighting against the prison industrial complex. In other words, I remain hopeful that Lil Wayne can go through the same transition that made Malcolm Little into Malcolm X. His genius is too great to be wasted.
For more on Dr. Boyce, go to
http://www.yourblackworld.net.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Thursday, March 21st 2013 at 11:29AM
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