“Well what I’m after – it’s simple;
Come on and peep the mental;
The ghetto born kid blowing up on instrumentals;
What’s the matter, Oh I know you can’t peep my pattern;
My style is designed to shed light like a lantern;”
—”What I’m After ” by Lords of the Underground.
Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Dupré Kelly understood how it felt not to be included. Specifically, he witnessed how some people, perhaps based race or financial situation, have the privilege of being “included,” such that their voice feels heard in the cultural, social, legal and economic discourse of the country. And he also experienced firsthand how those without privilege often feel left out of this larger narrative.
“Certain cultures are not being included in the things that are happening in society. When you have privilege, you might not understand what it is to go without,” Kelly told me. “When you’re privileged, you don’t know what it is to struggle to pay a $600 rent or to not have bus fare and have to walk miles just to earn a wage. Or when you have two children and no male figure in the home. Or when only one parent in the home earns minimum wage and is taking care of everybody.
“This is foreign to those who are privileged.”
More, Kelly feels that lack of privilege results in an uneven playing field, whereby people who have racial, economic or any other kind of privilege tend to struggle more to compete. “Any time a person who doesn’t have a lot and goes against somebody who has privilege, the ones that are privileged have a 20-step or 10-step head start,” he said. “We have to work harder than those who are privileged.”
Unfortunately, that privilege may manifest in a lack of empathy for those who do not have privileged status. Studies show that people who are wealthy or of majority racial culture may be less likely to show empathy for those without that privilege. Kelly certainly perceived this effect through his experience.
“When you don’t understand something…depending on what your maturity is, or your age is, you push it away. You shun it, you don’t have belief in it, so it doesn’t matter to you,” Kelly explained. “Human beings—any race, color, or creed—when it doesn’t matter to you, you do not care.”
However, from Kelly’s perspective, there is hope. Kelly feels that different people will react differently to stressors such as poverty. And research suggests that some people are able to demonstrate “resilience” and not only survive but also thrive under difficult circumstances.
“Generally speaking, for the generation that I came up in, it’s a roller coaster of emotion. On one level, it can make you strong, it can give you strength. It can challenge you—deep within yourself, deep within your core, deep within your being—to prove to yourself and others that I am a genius. I am greater than what you claim that I am. I am greater than the situation that I am in,” Kelly described. “Some people on that roller coaster ride can get depressed, can get down on themselves, can believe that they’re not worth it.”
There are several factors that may contribute to someone being able to rise up amidst issues such as poverty and racial injustice. One factor that may help is to be connected to a strong support system, including familial or cultural. Kelly was fortunate that he had both.
Kelly explained how while his mother was a single parent, she was very strong in leading the family and guiding Kelly in some of his behavior. In particular, she focused on how Kelly presented himself and how that was a gateway to being taken seriously.
“I was coming up in Newark as a child in the late 1970s. Children just live their lives, they don’t actually know what’s going on even as they’re going through poverty. Later on in the 80s when I started to become a young teenager…we had a crack epidemic. So I’ve seen family members, people in my neighborhood walking around like zombies and doing anything for this drug,” Kelly recalled. “My mother was good. We weren’t well off. But my mother was good at least at making me look good. Because she had her mindset that if you look good you feel good and if you feel good you can do good. So even though we were poor and didn’t have all that others had, she planted that into my mind, even when we didn’t have.”
“Look good, feel good, and then you will do good.”
And Kelly had something else; he had hip-hop culture. Hip-hop, which emerged from the South Bronx of New York in the mid-1970s, was a culture that contained “The Five Elements;” including emceeing, deejaying, b-boying, graffiti art, and knowledge. Each element provided an opportunity to explore oneself and one’s creativity. And beyond that, hip-hop also offered something more; it gave a voice to those who, previously, had not had a voice.
“You have to take it back to the 1970s where hip-hop started, which was the South Bronx. And it looked like a war zone in those days…If you go back to see how the people who created hip-hop were living then, you can get a better understanding of the social injustices,” Kelly explained. “That’s the only way that you can understand what this culture was talking about. And the injustices of the 70s in the South Bronx, we’re talking about poverty, extreme poverty. We’re talking about gang violence, not necessarily gun violence, but gang violence. We’re talking about a drug epidemic…and later you get into the Ronald Reagan era and the crack era.”
“Hip-hop has always talked about the poverty and injustices that are happening to people actually living the culture of hip-hop.”
Kelly discussed three Elements that were particularly influential on him. First was graffiti. Despite feeling that he was not a particularly good artist, Kelly was struck by how graffiti could be used to unite different parts of the city.
“I tried graffiti. Through graffiti, people used to pass messages. The art was really meant to communicate with people from the culture who lived in different areas of the five boroughs of New York City. So they would do graffiti on buildings, walls and on trains that would actually move throughout each of the boroughs to pass messages,” he recalled. “Because when hip-hop first started there still was a gang element. And hip-hop culture was actually reducing the gang violence. So the graffiti artists would pass messages through the boroughs to places where the gangs couldn’t necessarily go without permission.”
Ultimately, Kelly found his calling as an emcee. Otherwise known as “Doitall,” Kelly became, along with Mr. Funke and DJ Lord Jazz, a part of the hip-hop group Lords of thUnderground. Their debut album Here Come the Lords featured several hit singles, including songs such as “Chief Rocka” and “Funky Child.”
Kelly described how for him, emcee was the ideal role for him. After years of feeling marginalized and unheard, he finally had the opportunity to share his story and report on the culture he experienced.
“The emcee is the one who gave the narrative of the culture. The emcee would relay the knowledge of how he saw or she saw everyone in the culture was living the culture. So they would interpret the culture for people who didn’t necessarily live within the culture,” Kelly described. “And in that narration, in the early days of hip-hop, you would get the knowledge, you would get the understanding.”
“You would get the actuality of how people who are from the communities that birthed hip-hop.”
Interestingly, Kelly actually found that even within hip-hop culture, there was a certain “privilege.” Specifically, as hip-hop originated in New York and New York is a significantly larger city than Newark, there was always a tendency for those in hip-hop to assume that everything that occurred in the New York metro area was in fact from New York City.
“Newark is a special type of town…It’s had jazz legends, blues people, just jiving people. It’s a city of prestige, a city of Renaissance. It’s a gateway city to New York City if you come from the South,” he explained. “But because of New York City, the mecca of hip-hop, we always felt like we were being overlooked. North Jersey—we wanted to be recognized for ourselves. That’s no disrespect to New York City. We loved New York City.
“But we didn’t want people to get it confused that Newarkers are from New York.”
Kelly highlighted a number of prominent hip-hop artists and groups from the North Jersey area, including Queen Latifah, Naughty by Nature, Redman, and Fugees. The effect, according to Kelly, was that the emcees from Northern Jersey,—Newark and the surrounding area—focused their skills on being particularly hard-hitting lyricists, because they had to be in order to be truly heard.
“We became lyricists because of that. We felt that the North Jersey emcees and hip-hop artists had to go harder with the lyrics,” he said. “So when you hear about the North Jersey emcees from Newark and East Orange, and Jersey City; we prided ourselves on being lyricists.
“We prided ourselves on talking about something.”
Known by many as “ the most important youth culture on the planet,” Kelly watched hip-hop become a mechanism by which he and others were able to share their experience and reach others who previously ignored the struggles facing many in the hip-hop community. “One thing about people with privilege who don’t understand the culture…by engaging in hip-hop culture, they learn, they listen, they watch and they figure out,” Kelly explained. “Any time you can galvanize millions of people through words or entertainment, through arts, through culture; you have a voice.”
“You have now become the voice for the voiceless.”
And now, Kelly is hoping to bring some of the lessons he learned from hip-hop culture to his new endeavor – running for Councilman-at-Large for the city of Newark with his “ Doitall for Newark ” campaign. In many ways, he feels that one of Newark’s issues is that the city is divided; perhaps not between people who have privilege and those who don’t, but between the Five Wards or neighborhoods of Newark.
“Newark is the biggest city in New Jersey, but it’s still a small city with big city dreams. We hold our own selves back by being stuck in our own cultural silos. Newark is a city made up of five different wards…So within our city, we have cities,” Kelly described. “You have the East Ward, which is made up predominantly of Brazilian, Portuguese and Ecuadorians. You have the North Ward, which is our Latino Ward, predominantly made up of Latinos from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico…Then you have the South Ward, the biggest ward in our city, which is predominantly black. And the West Ward which is predominantly black. And the Central Ward which is a mixture of transients and is a business ward.”
Kelly sees his goal as Councilman-at-Large to connect the different neighborhoods of Newark so that everyone feels included. “That’s what I mean about being included. Until we are all included as one, our cultural silos will be the thing that holds us back. I will be the voice of the people…the people in every ward,” Kelly said. “If everyone from every ward is involved, guess what that does? Makes people from different wards have conversations. That makes business people have conversations with each other from different parts of the city. That makes residents from different parts of the city engage with each other and interact with each other.
“Then we are creating new possibilities.”
Consistent with his experience in hip-hop, Kelly is hoping that part of the path forward is through arts and culture. “I think you do that by galvanizing the people together with things that make them more alike rather than what makes them different,” Kelly explained. “When you bring people together with arts and culture, with something that makes them more alike than separate, that is what will unite them. It’s about the outreach, it’s about communication…just do the extra work to get the people to get together more.
“Until we vibrate on one frequency, instead of vibrating on individual frequencies, we’ll only be giving part of us.”
Photo credit: BANKS Photography
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Psychology Today on October 25, 2017.
