Rodney King Baby Yeah Beat Her Like A Cop...

…..RODNEY KING BABY… YEAH… BEAT HER LIKE A COP….. Over the years I have focused on the most blatant forms of destruction through Gangsta Rap as means of demonstrating how italicised and underlined the writing appears on our community walls. The sad reality is that the signs are all too often written in code, the detection of our demise mocked openly by Gangsta Rap not as opaque as we might like. This bloodcurdling thought came to me some weeks ago as the belligerent sound of Lil Wayne (the ‘lil’ perhaps the source of his palpable insecurities) poured from the mouth of a teenage boy on the bus. Lil Wayne sneered at me vicariously (laughing as he did so) ‘Rodney King baby yeah beat her like a cop’ his, now fairly old release, ‘Mrs Officer’ a song which, on a surface level, addresses his fantasy of seducing a female police officer. It would seem that the devoted, fervent mood that spiralled after Rodney Kings violent thrashing was caught on an eighty-one second video tape and sparked the controversy regarding police brutality and led to eventual indictments of the officers has packed up and gone to a leisurely luncheon. Let us not forget the unforgettable riots that followed, resulted in the bloody deaths of 9 people injuries to over 138. Before and after this bloody episode, ‘excessive force’, ‘police brutality’ were terms that sent shivers down the spine of the collective. We were once Rodney King. We once squirmed at the mention of Rodney Kings mauling, writhed at the memories of Rodney’s hands raised protectively over his head as he cowered beneath the thrashing batons and brutal shoe soles of the local authorities. We held our heads in our hands as we saw ourselves, our fathers, our sons lying powerlessly on the pavement, shamed, degraded, disgraced, brutalised like a scene from 1940’s Harlem. The very image of a group of white Here To Serve men beating a single unarmed black man too much of a painful reminder within our genetic memory, an emblematic twinge, the symbolism of which thumped us, changed us, moved us. Twenty four years on, however, it would appear that Lil Wayne might openly use Rodney’s experience as part of his perverse sexual daytime chart topping music. He is authorized to explicitly and unreservedly declare Rodney’s name as he fantasizes. He is allowed to and we let him. We let him because we do not hear him as we buy his CD’s and absorb his messaging. I’m sure there is a suited blissfully ignorant Daily Mail reader whom would keenly assure us that we are no longer moved by any disrespectful reference to Rodney King because we have simply ‘moved on’, police brutality is a rarity, we have the benefit of being able to laugh casually because we are part of a modernised, innovative, peaceable society. In 2006, Eunice Barber competed for Sierra Leone and then for France and won the heptathlon at the World Championships in Athletics in 1999, the long jump in 2003 and finished second in heptathlon in 2003 and 2005. Barber, who like many black female athletes symbolised physical female endurance, and success the likes of which we so rarely witness, ‘participated’ in what the news flagrantly termed a ‘Police scuffle’ (notably a term which Wikipedia is reluctant to change). Eunice, a local and national treasure, had on the day of her alleged ‘scuffle’ taken a wrong turn down a road, the consequences of which were devastating. When the police approached her car, Eunice wound down her window, at which point the male officer slapped her around the face. Others arrived, and a full-blown attack ensued. Eunice, who sat at a Parisian Press conference wearing a neck brace and relayed an account which included her hands being stamped on, being kneeled on by five officers, the loss of use of her arm, hair pulling, racist taunts (‘Do you believe you could behave like this in Africa?’) sat in bewilderment relaying her sordid experience, “Mentally, I’m bewildered. I feel as affected psychologically as physically.” A hero abused by the country she championed. And as the police bent over into her ears and sneered ‘You are lucky that there are people looking; otherwise, we would have done much worse. When you get out of here you’ll need crutches ’ somewhere in the distance Lil Wayne drools ‘Rodney King Baby yeah beat her like a cop’ and no one flinches. In his world, Eunice's experience is simply a modern male fantasy. His need to embody the white cop and become the victimiser himself more important than his need to defend his sister.