Ashley Judd just released a new book. Who cares, right? Well, in that book, she condemned the YouthAIDS organization for including Hip-Hop performers such as Snoop Dogg and Diddy in their AIDS fundraising and awareness campaigns, calling Hip-Hop “rape culture” and “the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny,” and stating her belief that the “social construction of gender… is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world.” Because this is a Hip-Hop blog, we will forgo our much bigger point of contention that the cultural classifications of gender, while undeniably a huge problem, is a distant second to that of race with respect to poverty and suffering in the world. Instead, we will focus on the seemingly endless scapegoating of Hip-Hop music in the fight for gender equality.
