I really just wanted an excuse to use that smiley
Now I like to fukk with blackslash and all but i'll give some real input on the thread, even though it's such an old topic and i'll basically be repeating some shyt I've said before, i'll go ahead and chime in in regards to the OP.
I think in general once this became a "thing", regardless of how quick his PR team tried to sweep it under the rug it really boiled down to do you think Eminem is or still is a racist? However you called it was justified, but once you made up your mind people answered that accordingly and kinda moved on. It didn't help that Benzino was the one breaking the story, whether you believed they were righteous or selfish, the messenger and the motives definitely played a part in how it was received.
For me personally it was about being able to empathize with doing/saying dumb shyt that I'm thankful that nobody was around to record. Due to some of my own experiences with racism I was in and out of the school system for doing things that really went against my true nature.
Now this is the main reason why this should have been talked about more at the time in a much larger context than Eminem the artist.
I'm sure he loved proof, he obviously loves denanun and other cats too. That doesn't mean that he hasn't been able to avoid the subconscious conditioning that we have all grown up with and around.
Even the words "black" and "white" are extremely polarizing but ingrained into our psyche, there is nothing BLACK about my skin, there is nothing WHITE about eminem's skin but the language suggest inherent positive/negative qualities, and I don't think this is an accident.
The father is an @sshole...but in his @ssholery he accidentally pointed out how easy it is for our children to have these subconscious negative associations with the word BLACK, and the concept of darkness in and of itself.
The child clearly was afraid of being black like "midnight" but had no problem with being "chocolate" colored, if we framed race relations in "browns tans and peach" (silly right?) there is less of a tendency to mentally associate these colors with inherent negativity or positive qualities. All children are afraid of the dark, of the unknown. I think that some of the misguided people trying to be on some "post racial" society see this problem but see it/go about it in an immature, un-grounded way.
Even the darkest African is still a rich dark brown, there are no BLACK people, but this child will probably grow up without an overtly racist upbringing, she may even have a diverse group of friends and have a surface level respect for human beings in general, but in the background of her mind these associations still exist.
Eminem is not exempt from this, and i'm sure with his experiences with being beat to the point of having to re-learn basic functions by a black kid conflict with his some of his best friends and influences being black themselves. As a "black" man I have the same kind of conflict within me.
To me, the lost opportunity to delve into THAT aspect of HIP HOP and it's ability to bridge racial gaps in ways that even the civil rights movement couldn't is the biggest disappointment to me.
