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Further, rap must be insulated from White supremacist criticism from outside the community. Euro-Americans cannot stand as the moral authority in this country—their hands are too bloody. The moral vanguard of this country has always been the Black, Brown, and Red communities. However, too many in the Black community, their White supremacy intact, simply parrot the Euro-American condemnation of hip-hop. This is baseless, and is reminiscent of the facile criticism of be-bop. This group of White supremacists in Black face simply wait for White sanction of culture before giving their seal of approval. They admonish, inter alia, that rap music causes violence. That makes about as much sense as arguing that "Love Child" by the Supremes caused teen pregnancy. These senseless assertions are not pursued in this article.

The Germinating Context for a More Focused Nationalism
If we move beyond hip-hop's spatial locus (urban centers beginning in New York) and turn to its temporal locus, we begin to understand better it's wedding to Black nationalism. The national emergence of hip-hop is contemporaneous with the rise of reactionary republicanism in the Reagan-Bush years that would persist for no less than 12 years. The multiple recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s were depressionary for Black people and especially Black youth. From 1979 to 1981, the Black community of the United States was transfixed on the Atlanta Child Murders, and few were convinced or assuaged by the conviction of Wayne Williams. In the late 1970s, Louis Farrakahn split with Warith Deen Muhammad's American Muslim Mission and reformed the Nation of Islam (NOI) under the former Black supremacist concepts abandoned by the son of Elijah Muhammad with the death of the self-proclaimed "messenger of Allah" in 1975. Coupled with the rise of the Farrakhan led NOI was the political rise of Jesse Jackson and his presidential runs in 1984 and 1988. Although Jackson has never espoused nationalism beyond its expediency for realizing his integrationist aims, the attacks on Jackson by the White media and his White coaspirants served to galvanize Black nationalist support around him and to result in positive sentiment for his campaign even among those who did not support his populist platform.

(This paper appeared in the Journal of Black Studies/January 1996.)

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Errol A. Henderson received his doctorate (1993) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an assistant professor of political science at the university of Florida.

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