Problematic Teaching from NCFIC Hip Hop Panelists

I just had my attention brought to problematic teachings made by members of the NCFIC panel I blogged about last week.

Dan Horn has suggested that, in the antebellum period, slaves “were treated as part of a family.” He says so in this video. (UPDATE: link fixed.) This is highly problematic in historical terms. Many slaves were treated terribly, regardless of how their owners thought about them.

Joseph Morecraft, according to this website, has argued that “there is a place for slavery in godly cultures.” He does not say, in the excerpt, that he is referring to ethnic slavery, but this is at the very least a disturbing teaching. According to the site (which voices views I reject), Morecraft made this argument in a YouTube video that is no longer online:

There is a place for slavery, then, in godly cultures. It’s the only place you can keep a fool under wraps. It’s the only way you can keep a man from ruining other people’s families. He has a slave mentality, doesn’t want to live for the future, doesn’t care for the past, doesn’t have any commitment to family, lives only for the present, wants to be a dependent, doesn’t want the responsibilities and freedom of maturity. Put him in somebody else’s service where they can watch over him and make him do right work even though he doesn’t want to do it. I didn’t say that. Says it here [in the Bible].

Geoffrey Botkin, the man who said reformed rappers are “disobedient cowards,” has previously said the following, according to one source:

He dismissed jazz and ragtime as “discordant, unplanned collisions of harmony”, calling them “sloppy” forms of “covert protest” against older European music traditions. Jazz in particular was “infantile”, he argued, as it allegedly celebrated moral dissipation and misbehavior.

Botkin does not come out and say that those who practiced jazz were inferior, but this is nonetheless not a healthy way to begin approaching other cultures. There is at minimum a major sense of cultural superiority here. If an art form is “infantile,” what does that make its practitioners?

I’m looking into these matters further; one handles Internet sources with care. These arguments are troubling.