Yesterday morning I sat down for my usual hour of Ellen at 11 a.m. and was intrigued to see that Snoop Dogg was on the show with his 8 year olf daughter. Dressed in a sweet quasi-pimp suit of white, he danced with my girl Ellen and talked not about his new album all that much or the "game". He talked about how he can now breath easier now that his Little League Football team won their championship. Snoop Dogg- what a guy.
I was pondering this exchange and was taken aback for a moment- this same man who rapped "Drop it Like it's Hot" is super-dad for his three kids. In the media we hardly ever see these stories- the ones we do hear usually involve a shooting or some sort of brawl between those in the rap world. We don't hear about their families, we don't hear that they are coaching their kids football games- we just hear the negative stereotypes because those are what the media sells. Watching Snoop on Ellen made me think about the ways in which we keep stereotypes in the African American community, and how in Snoop's own life he goes against those. He is not the same guy he was 13 years ago, and he is not the vision of the "ghetto" community we expect from the rap game. He, like African American culture and all people, is not a monolith.
These monoliths, though, are everywhere we go because of categories we create for others. Gordon Allport in his landmark book The Nature of Prejudice discovered that categorization is the "natural propensity for prejudgment"- this is a natural occurence that "helps people to cope with life." We create categories, we put people in stereotypes like we do with Snoop because it's easier for us to brush them aside. Satirists like Paul Beatty subvert these stereotypes to show the falseness of our categories. Snoop is like Tuffy in that way- we expect him to be a certain way, a monolith of the "hip-hop culture" that embodies all the negativity that comes with it. But, Snoop is different, and so is Tuffy.
It is for this reason why Beatty is so powerful in his satire, and he continues to make us think- like Ellen- about the things below the surface that embodies what it means to be African American. The black canon, satire, hip-hop culture, and people all around are not just one thing. They cannot be put into a box, nor can the experience of an African American- or Snoop.
