Donnell Alexander

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of free and the home of the brave

— “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Verse 3

It's difficult to watch “Stand” — Jocelyn Rose Lyons’ new documentary on a blacklisted NBA star — and not conclude that an ability to ignore the woes of crack-era Black America was as much a prerequisite for player participation as height and dribbling ability.

The subject of “Stand,” Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, was a first-wave three-point shooting star, the 6' 1" prequel to Steph Curry. But on March 12, 1996, the 27-year-old phenom stopped rising with arena crowds for the singing of America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” What he expressed as religious piety was received as a political act.

In that one move, Abdul-Rauf kick-started a culture battle that would find him failed by NBA coaches and administrators, the league’s players and fans, and the mainstream media, as well.

“We should have had his back,” admits former Nuggets teammate Jalen Rose, “and we didn’t.”

At this point in time, two decades before it would lead all major sports leagues in wokeness, the National Basketball Association was all too willing to destroy one man’s career as a small price to pay for stoking its exploding international popularity and keeping ticket buyers happy.

The New York-based sports consortium disappeared Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf like De La Soul had long been in the era of streaming.

Probably the first Black basketball player whose politics were openly rebellious was John Brisker. In his days with an American Basketball Association locker room, Brisker gained infamy by ripping the underwear off a teammate, offended that the guy was wearing cotton. In 1985, Brisker was declared dead after disappearing into Uganda and, according to rumor, being killed for running afoul of then-President Idi Amin.

Abdul-Rauf’s actual ostracism precursor is Craig Hodges. During the Chicago Bulls' 1991 visit to the White House, having won the NBA championship months before, Hodges, another dead-eye point guard, handed President George H.W. Bush a letter outlining what he found racist about the Bush administration. (At the time, Hodges was wearing a dashiki, a shirt popular in West Africa.)

Later that year, Hodges nagged Michael Jordan to become more involved in America’s struggling urban areas and his fellow players to protest the Rodney King police assault by boycotting Game 1 of that year’s finals. The Bulls cut him after the 1991-1992 season. Despite Hodges being a more than serviceable player, not even the league’s bad teams picked him up.

To begin to understand why Hodges and Abdul-Rauf lost their exclusive and hard-earned privilege, it’s important to comprehend the condition of Black America in the 1990s. The AIDS epidemic was peaking. Rodney King-style beatings were still the nation’s hidden icebergs of amorality — cell phone cameras weren’t yet a thing. The crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging cities, and prisons filled up with dealers and sellers alike.

Before Abdul-Rauf became a test case for how Americans might treat a Muslim in conflict, he was Mississippi youth basketball phenom Chris Jackson. Arguably the greatest prep player the state ever produced, Jackson was also widely recognized for having Tourette Syndrome, a disease poorly understood in the 1980s. And his poverty was of the sort that only Mississippi can deliver. It featured an unacknowledging father whose absence haunted the boy.

In “Stand,” we see the ballplayer star at Louisiana State University, his disorder as much a help as a hindrance. Jackson’s erratic movements made him difficult to guard; Tourette’s obsessive-compulsive aspects made him what in sport is called a perfectionist. The heckling that Jackson received wasn’t limited to Tourette’s. When LSU traveled to play Mississippi State, the overwhelmingly white crowd in his home state chanted “Who’s Your Daddy?” — a reference to Jackson’s open psychological wound.

Shaquille O’Neal joined the Tigers for season two. At 21, Jackson had a starring (though unpaid) role in the multimillion dollar show that was Louisiana State University hoops. On a visit to his family’s Mississippi home, Abdul-Rauf says, the ramshackle shack with a brokedown bathroom overwhelmed him. He tells Rose Lyons’ camera that, in that moment, he decided to swap college for the NBA draft. He was the third player chosen.

Jackson discovered Islam in his rookie year with the Denver Nuggets. By his own accounts, he overdid it, thinking that traditional garb and mistaking hardline adherence for living as an authenticity, “thinking all of those things made you more of a Muslim, because I was going through changes.”

It wasn’t until 1993 that the name change came. He had read Malcolm X’s autobiography and Howard Zinn’s history. In 1996 — a full two decades before NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests — Abdul-Rauf decided that standing for the National Anthem was active support of oppression. Denver sports talk radio began scoring drive-time points based on the young star’s defying the league’s mandate that players stand. Boos began raining down on the Nuggets harder than I have ever seen Americans boo a home team. That’s when national media figures such as CBS News anchor Dan Rather began serving audiences stories on “the highly paid athlete who won’t stand for the national anthem.”

At first, Abdul-Rauf prayed during the anthem, shielded from booing fans by much taller players. The NBA suspended him and he says he asked if he could support the team in dress clothes. Bernie Bickerstaff — the league institution who was both head coach and GM at the time — told Abdul-Rauf, “they don’t even want you in the building.”

He was tainted. Next season, Denver shipped him out to the then-sorry Sacramento Kings. Abdul-Rauf says he recognized the beginning of his deletion from history while watching a sports television piece on the NBA’s best three-point shooters. He wasn’t mentioned, in spite of having elevated that avenue of scoring. Abdul-Rauf soon gained weight, played poorly, and bopped from franchise to franchise overseas before returning to the NBA during the 2000-2001 season for a final, unmemorable stint with the Vancouver Grizzlies — a Canadian franchise.

After the terror attacks of 2001, he told conservative journalist Bernard Goldberg “the war on terrorism is a euphemism for a war on Islam” and that Israel might have been involved in the terror attacks. This ended any chance he’d had of getting signed in America again. He lost so many millions of dollars. The NBA has never apologized.

“I didn’t realize he was being blackballed,” insists former Bulls guard and Warriors Coach Steve Kerr, displaying naivete.

* * *

“Sometimes you have to play the game,” O’Neal says in “Stand”. “It’s about corporations. And the corporate mentality is very strict.”

O’Neal has earned $200 million in endorsements.

People of color with mainstream jobs work at the pleasure of white people.

Generational wealth is critical for Black equality to ever become a thing. On the other hand, the old teammate of Chris Jackson can only permit himself to use “the R-word” in describing those Mississippi State fans who in unison taunted his teammate about his heritage.

“Stand” has a shock ending about a mystery man, which can only be described as poetically apt. Basketball is a game for the young. While Abdul-Rauf spent his young adulthood figuring himself out, Shaq was doing ride-alongs with law enforcement agencies from Miami to Los Angeles and building an image of innocuousness that could push everything from Taco Bell to The General.

One day, Shaquille O’Neal, too, will be free.

Ask the casual-to-enthusiastic fan to name the world’s first political hip hop song and they’re all but bound to mention Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 hit “The Message.” Say the words “a child is born with no state of mind” to any self-respecting Black American between the ages of 40 and 60 and they’ll recite the rest of MC Melle Mel’s verse more faithfully than they can the “The National Anthem.”

Hip hop turns 50 this year. The culture from which it comes is that of the neighborhoods of the Bronx, NY, with freshly-canceled school music programs. Early MCs built on tools developed by fierce critics The Last Poets and Gil-Scott Heron as much as they did slick pimp talk. And hip hop’s first blast of mostly-live content was created on turntables looted during the New York blackout riots of 1977.

From the form’s inception, to make hip hop was to perform a radical political act.

But sometimes over the decades — between gritty urban classics and ubiquitous dance gimmick videos — rap songs got explicitly political. This didn’t happen very often, but the culture would overcome record label interference and music media disjunction to help deliver to the world wokeness.

“The Message” remains so epic and startlingly detailed that fans want to believe it is the mothership of socially-conscious rap. It’s easy to hear the song as the tent pole from which every politically-minded group from Public Enemy to Run the Jewels have draped themselves.

In fact, the first would-be political anthem was “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” The 1980 single on the Clappers label and the only release from Brother D with Collective Effort, “How” featured male and female vocalists rapping over the 1978 Cheryl Lynn hit “To Be Real.” Producer Lister Hewan Lowe got the most radical Black people to jump on the mic.

“We’re fired up! We won’t take no more!” was the chant to this simple song.

Rap about the Jimmy Carter-era gas prices appeared on the Harlem World Crew’s “Rappers Convention” in that same year. But these were essentially local vinyl products. Fully-fledged socially-aware songs were not a thing on a national scale until “The Message.”

The song’s harrowing depiction of ghetto life would prove to be but a warm-up for the horrors to be visited upon American ’hoods. Everyday poverty would degenerate into widespread homelessness in the most challenging time of post-slavery Black American life. In this decade, widespread crack cocaine addiction would combine with the requisite gang warfare and a silent killer called AIDS to give every artist something to rap about.

Those conditions would give birth to the conscious MC. Before there was woke, there was “conscious.” Near the end of the ‘80s, being conscious had become a badge of honor worn by the most admired in hip hop culture.

The era featured a couple of landmark achievements in cooperative music-making on the East Coast and the Left. But by 2000, to be called conscious was to be labeled as limited, someone who couldn’t cross over to mainstream radio or sell music to non-Black fans.

Its first line announced the time, so the world can never forget when “Fight the Power” hit.

The summer of 1989 was when project housing and public parks of America became aware of Public Enemy. The film “Do the Right Thing” had not yet hit theaters, and the Long Island-based group was niche among the rap superstars (LL Cool J, EPMD) on the powerful Def Jam label. Casual watchers recognized the group’s colorful S1W security crew more than they knew what P.E. was rapping about. (It stands for the fact that we’re not third-world people,” explained group leader Chuck D. “We're first-world people.””

But filmmaker Spike Lee was into Public Enemy and he hired them to do a song for his film. In the weeks before “Do the Right Thing” hit theaters, cassette tapes of the film’s recurring sonic theme were circulating around American ‘hoods and banging out of boomboxes like a sustained preamble. Or the warm-up for a hotly anticipated show.

It’s hard to exaggerate the racial tensions in America when that P.E. groundswell began. Beyond the aforementioned social ills, brimming in the national consciousness was the seemingly emblematic Charles Stuart, the white guy who killed his wife and blamed his crime on a generic Black man. A girl named Tawana Brawley’s rape allegations against New York police were roiling the city as American cities hardly roil anymore. Like hip hop itself, the story had grown from a New York concern to a national phenomenon.

America’s roster of overwhelmingly white newspaper columnists predicted riots for the movie. They were wrong. The only fight in its wake is the debate over whether Spike Lee had created one of American cinema’s greatest 20th-century works. And, aside from bolstering the narrative power of “Do the Right Thing,” the Public Enemy song ushered in the greatest period of conscious rap in the hip hop era.

I began the dicey gambit of trying to sell articles about hip hop artists and its culture in 1992. It’s fair to say the majority of editors in the music department of editorial outlets didn’t believe the stuff was even music. To say that these decision-makers didn’t get rap — politically or otherwise — is aggressive understatement.

They tended to miss the culture’s political statements when not overt. Because it was made by the underclass, rap’s most effective political material came from street-level crews like Houston’s Geto Boys. Crass, contradictory and funky AF, the trio didn’t make outright political songs; Geto Boys’ politics, admirable or reprehensible, were woven through the lines of their Texas ’hood yarns.

Political content from female MCs, too, was regularly overlooked. By even being a female MC – or a world-class DJ – a woman practitioner was dripping political action. Queen Latifah earned leadership status by not overtly trading on her sexuality, recognizing her diasporic forebears and, on her album cover, posing before a flag with the colors of Africa. More explicit content from women who rhymed were likely to be one-offs such as “Janet Reno,” the 1988 child support anthem from Anquette.

The period may have been political rap’s heyday, but few artists were naive enough to think they could base their careers on selling to the young, and often ignorant, the complex politics of race in America.

Which takes us to the San Francisco Bay Area – wildly overrepresented in the genre. Some of the most august makers of rap music based on rhyming political observation and urging – Paris, Boots Riley and of The Coup – hail from the famously progressive region. In retrospect, the most ambitious of all was Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.

The most remarkable fact about the S.F.-based group will always be that one of the world’s greatest guitarists played on Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury, the group’s sole album. Charlie Hunter does, arguably, the least that a massive talent has ever contributed to an important musical document. But after that, the group’s immortality comes on the basis of politics that were more specifically progressive unlike no nothing else in rap. On the “Television: Drug of A Nation,” MC Michael Franti rhymes, “The only COLA that I support would be a union C-O-L-A – Cost of Living Allowance.” Awesome and practical as the line is, I laugh as much today as I did upon its 1992 release:

Pandering to the union crowd isn’t going to get you anywhere, Michael, I continue to say.

In 2023, “Financial Leprosy” proves to be the most resonant of Disposable Heroes tracks and perhaps all political rap. Consumerism and the prison industrial complex snake around the inhabitants of the song’s world, with “all means to attract and distract” dragging one character into homelessness: “Well I used to own this street. And now I’m living on Market Street.”

The most magnificent of socially conscious or political rap anticipated events, blended anger with a undeniable sadness and carried just enough of hyperbole’s whiff to function as entertainment. Consider one of the decade’s most woke classics, courtesy of the Geto boys.

They call my neighborhood a jungle

And me an animal, like they do the people of Rwanda
Fools fleeing their countries to come here Black

But see the same bullshit and head right back

They know what niggas already know

The world is a ghetto.

— Bushwick Bill, “The World is a Ghetto,” 1996

Since the Clinton-era peak of rhymes with politics in them and the rise of rap with decidedly materialistic concerns, there have been many stellar examples of the form’s survival.

The Artist Formerly Known as Mos Def has the indispensable “New World Water”; Digable Planets’ abortion rights’ song “Femme Fetal” is a dynamic example of how the form might have evolved did it not live in a space where mindless boogie had industry privilege. People may view Eminem’s “White America” as that politically key MC’s most potent railing against the system, but only the ones who haven’t heard his cameo on Immortal Technique’s scorching post-911 underground anthem “Tell the Truth.” (“I don’t rap for dead presidents / I’d rather see the President dead”)

Today, B-Real from Cypress Hill can perform a set based entirely on its weed advocacy. And many were inspired by YG’s 2016 track “F-ck” Donald Trump.

Kendrick Lamar is the world’s standout “conscious” rap superstar, largely alone.The bounty of wokeness is in the flesh and bones of hip hop, not contained to a particular song. (The catalog of Dead Prez, once considered the most incendiary pro-Black stuff around, would now fit neatly on the agenda put forth in Congress by A.O.C. and The Squad.) Political content dwindled as real-world influence became tangible.

We got congressmen and news anchors quoting rap songs, out in public.

The legacy of politics in hip hop is best viewed through Jay Z’s video campaign to end the drug war or Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a project rife with symbolism and abstraction. And it’s in international moves, like Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper taking their Black Star Line concert tour to Ghana as a means of returning cultural nourishment.

It’s conceivable that the music sent down by Public Enemy, Melle-Mel, and Brother D with Collective Effort was like a rocket booster or the stuff of a butterfly’s cocoon. There is no political rap that defines America’s landmark summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd. Now this uniquely American invention works best for MCs in strife-ridden contexts overseas, a ripe avenue of expression handed down from the Reagan Era’s earliest days by Brother D and company.