Held to answer

As Kenny Rogers might have put it: A hammer fell down on a 44-primer, now there’s one less problem in Southwest Portland tonight.

If a recent officer-involved shooting in Portland had occurred in the city’s north end, specifically the scrappy St. John’s area, it would’ve been ripe for a rapper.

But it happened in comfortable Hillsdale, right near a branch of the Multnomah County library. And the man who was shot and killed by police was white, armed and had an extensive criminal history. In other words, like I used to hear some Southern California cops say, NGL. No Great Loss.

Think of the artistic possibilities had the police killed a black ex-felon or a black drug dealer in a downtrodden Portland neighborhood.

One of the peculiarities of living in Portland – where local media love to obsess that it’s America’s whitest city – is this strange need for urban ugliness.

What else can a rapper rap about except his terrible childhood – how he has no future except his music, how all the white people live in the hills. (Or, if he’s a white rapper, how all the rich people live in the hills). The male pronoun is usually operative; like everywhere else, few hip-hop artists in Portland are female.

What if Portland’s worst neighborhoods really aren’t that bad? What if life in America’s whitest city isn’t so terrible – even for its black residents?

There is nothing here to rival L.A’s Jordan Downs or Brooklyn’s Brownsville or Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects. How many black families in these neighborhoods would eagerly trade places with the disgruntled hip-hop artists featured recently in Willamette Week and The Oregonian?

Perhaps guys like Mikey Vegaz, Hanif “Luck-One” Collins, Illmaculate and Glenn Waco need police harassment to give them something to write about in Portland.

Waco was apparently so hard up for inspiration he tried to glorify Parrish Bennette Jr. with these lines: “Parrish was a product of the system we in. We never cared ‘til it was too late.”

Oh, please. Parrish was just another young man who thought his girl friend, Yashanee Vaughn, was his personal property. Now he’s doing 18 years for killing her.

Those lines about Parrish Bennette were singled out by The Oregonian in a feature this month “Straight Outta St. John.”

Reporter Casey Parks said she pursued the story when she noticed that so many young men in St. Johns were chasing hip-hop dreams.

The striking black-and-white photos by Beth Nakamura, which accompany the story, are a reminder of what real photography looks like in an age when everyone thinks they can be a photographer – just like anybody thinks he can take a bad childhood and turn it into art.

In the intro to her story, Parks made a point of stating, “Portland may not have a Compton or a Bedford-Stuyvesant, but for the young people who live there, St. Johns is hard enough.”

Actually Bed-Stuy is undergoing gentrification (it’s OK, though, since one of those helping gentrify it is Spike Lee).

And after Compton became well-known from “Straight Outta Compton,” the media turned the place into a caricature of itself – seldom acknowledging the real suffering of anonymous residents victimized by gangs and ignoring the fact that Compton also had a black middle-class.

Perhaps hip-hop artists here don’t appreciate the raw material available to them.

Portland cops are justifiably suspicious of rap artists and their gang affiliations because for decades – in places like Compton, Brooklyn and Detroit – nobody cared that drugs and gangs were destroying neighborhoods until the thugs were entrenched and in charge.

In Portland, people want to preserve what they’ve got. At the same time, a noisy segment in this liberal city has to go through the expected motions of protest, attributing all police aggression to racism.

What would Snoop Dogg (aka Calvin Broadus) counsel? One of the most successful rap artists, Snoop survived when many of his counterparts were getting shot perhaps because he made his home in Claremont, Calif., a college town and white suburb of L.A.

When I lived in Southern California, I went by Snoop’s place with a friend of mine who lived in Claremont. Out front there was a small security guard station. On the driveway gate there was a silhouette of a pit bull. Those were the only distinctive features in an otherwise nondescript neighborhood of McMansions.

Later Snoop moved to a gated community in Diamond Bar, a predominantly Asian and white suburb, where his two sons enrolled at the local high school.

Did he apologize for living with white people – or enjoy the security?

Snoop might silently understand why Portland police turn out in force when audiences exceed capacity at places like the Blue Monk. For PR purposes, he would likely pretend outrage.

It’s naïve to ignore the connection between hip-hop and violence since many rap artists like to play the role of thug or gang-banger even if that’s not who they are. They do it as a career move, a search for a purposeful livelihood. In other words, money.

Yes, hip-hop can be a way to make a living. But a true artist looks around, observes, takes note of the world. He doesn’t just stare in the mirror.

One of the first hip-hop hits to come out of the Pacific Northwest, by a black performer in a city almost as white as Portland, was “Baby Got Back” by Seattle’s Sir Mix-a-Lot.

It was the first rap song I really noticed. Driving to work in Southern California one day, skipping from radio station to radio station, I caught a few lines:

“Fonda ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda
     My anaconda don’t want none
     Unless you’ve got buns, hon.”

How could anybody not be intrigued by that? It was playful poetry but contained social commentary. With discipline and talent, Sir Mix-a-Lot wrote a classic about man’s obsession with, and objectification of, the female anatomy.

Perhaps St. Johns’ hip-hop artists need to explore a larger world. They could jump on a Tri-Met bus and head to Hillsdale.

Imagine being a high school girl walking home and being followed by a man in a van. A man wanted for pistol-whipping and kidnapping a woman in another neighborhood two months earlier. A man, armed with a gun, shot dead by police and in the man’s coat pocket, two ropes.

Imagine what he planned on doing with that rope. You never know who’s going to be dealt a hand of harder cards.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Celebrating a Red Coffin

Portland: Weird and White