Last week, actress Ashley Judd was put under fire after an excerpt of her new book, All That is Bitter, and Sweet referenced hip-hop as a ‘rape culture.’
“As far as I’m concerned, most Rap and Hip Hop music–with its rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as ‘ho’s’–is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny. I believe that the social construction of gender–the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interest of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women–is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world,” Judd writes in All That is Bitter, and Sweet.
The actress expressed her disapproval of Aids organizations hiring Diddy and Snoop to perform at events. Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, 9th Wonder, and Questlove among others spoke out via Twitter and questioned Judd’s actual knowledge of Hip-Hop culture.
However, late last night, Ashely retracted her statements and apologized for badmouthing an entire community.
“The outcry regarding my remarks, 2 paragraphs out of my 400+ page book, regarding hip hop and rap, has been astounding as it is out of context…The general theme [now] is to express my gratitude for a chance to learn, to be corrected where I was wrong, to make amends, and hold firm and strong on the original intention and context of points I made, with a commitment to try to do so less clumsily and with more sensitivity in the future.” She added, “I so regret that my indictment of rape culture as a whole has been interpreted as me blaming rap and hip hop exclusively. That was absolutely not my intention, and I so regret it has had that effect on some people. “
Read the rest of Judd’s blog entry here.
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