Column: Listen when J. Cole speaks

T he footage from Ferguson stings. Black men raising their hands, yelling, “Don’t shoot!” and confronting their default societal determination of worthless thugs.

It’s tempting to turn off the news when all you see is anguish and pain derivative of civil rights-era America.

I sit and console myself, thinking Chapel Hill or my hometown of Fayetteville could never be Ferguson. My ignorant illusions are quickly shattered by the pride of my city, rapper and producer J. Cole.

“We run from it ‘cause it hurts.” “It” being the truth that racism exists and discrimination is commonplace. This isn’t a line from a rap verse but a quote from J. Cole, standing among the people of Ferguson, Mo., for a brief interview with Complex.

In the interview, Cole talks about how adolescent passion is often squelched by adult apathy. His initial reaction to the murder of Michael Brown parallels my own: the horrifying sense that nothing can be done.

Racial violence seems inevitable in a world where a young black man is the most feared and loathed character.

Brown could have been Cole, or potentially you.

Cole calls for a societal shift in reaction from “Damn, again, this is f—ed up” to “What can we do?”

In the academic realm, we call this the fundamental transition from theory to praxis. It’s easy to wax sympathetic but significantly more difficult to actively pursue a course of action.

Cole released a track through Dreamville Records entitled “Be Free” as a direct response to Brown’s murder. Cole abandons his usual rap tone of lyrical aggression and instead sings in a raspy, obviously emotional vocal, “All we want to do is break the chains off / All we want to do is be free.”

The malevolent products of racism, classism and sexism can be overwhelming to watch unfold on CNN and discuss in a classroom. The tone of academia can be distancing and the curtness of broadcast news disengaging. For me, a song can express anger and sincerity more purely than any scholar or journalist’s words.

When you cut through the sheen of Top 40 radio and discover true artists, you find musicians determined to create for the sake of artistic liberation.

Songs like “Be Free” resonate with listeners who know the artist’s world intensely well or expose it to those who don’t. For me, it was the latter.

Compared to news of political insurgencies and scientific revelations, pop culture may seem vapid or unimportant.

Who cares what some major-label rapper says about community anguish when he’ll retreat home in a private jet? His intentions, which I’ll defend as sincere, are irrelevant so long as his effect is powerful — to raise consciousness, to relate Ferguson to North Carolina and our lives in Chapel Hill as idealistic young people with the skills and motivation to shift culture.