How Is Rap Music Harmful To African American Communities

This article is titled “Rap music is harmful to African American communities” and is written by E. Faye Williams. Williams is a chairwoman of the National Congress of Black Women (NCBW). The national congress of black women is a non-profit organization dedicated to the educational, political, economic, and cultural development of African American women and their families. Williams’s article “Rap music is harmful to African American communities” makes her qualified and a credible source to be writing on this question: If rap music and other media is harming the African American community? In her article, she states her side of the argument of how rap music and media are indeed harming the African American community, using the context, and reasoning,

In the beginning of the article, Williams makes the point that African Americans and the community are generally treated and viewed as thugs, pimps, etc. Why is this issue or argument important to Williams? African American women are constantly being objectified and discriminated, the men grow up and taught to be angry with everything, and children’s schools are poorly funded. Media portrays the community poorly and hardly ever mentions the achievements made by African Americans. Overall, the media do not reflect the communities true value of respect.
One of Williams main topics of concerns is the wrong messages that “public airwaves” are sending to their listeners and followers. Williams claims rap and other medias are representing and sending the wrong message about African American communities. She mentions that rap music once held a positive message but now rap music is bombarding the public with the use of profanity, violence, and obscenity throughout their lyrics and music

Williams targets rap music, the “public airwaves”, and the mass who listens and watches. To narrow the public, she targets mostly male African Americans. Williams paraphrases Isiah Thomas on how it is offensive for a white man to call black women a demeaning name but it was okay for a black man to do so. Taking into consideration Isiah’s comment, using profanity against women, he understands using such a word to name women is unacceptable. Although he has not fully developed the idea that it is unacceptable no matter who says it but the thought was there. In an interview of sorts with the comment Isiah Thomas made, it can be reasoned that calling a person by an offensive name if it is “within the family” it is okay. For example, it is normal for an older sibling to pick or tease on the little sibling, however, when an “outsider” does the same action the older sibling will become defendant of the little one. The interviewer asks Thomas “a male calling a woman a b---- you find to be offensive?” to which he responds, “most definitely, black or white, but a white male calling a black female is highly offensive”. This could be what Isiah Thomas’s thought process when it comes the offensive name calling towards African American