Here is an email that should bring shame to Jes Staley:

you want to know why we are not São Paolo, watch the TV adds on the Superbowl. Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women.

The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay Z

Written more than a decade ago to Jeffrey Epstein, it is sloppy, ungrammatical, and intellectually thin. Staley, who would go on to become CEO of Barclays before being banned for life from top roles in the financial industry in connection with his Epstein ties, reflects on why poor Americans don’t take to the streets to protest injustice, unlike those in São Paulo, Brazil, where tensions over the World Cup had sparked uprisings. His explanation: look at the Super Bowl ads. Look at the spectacle. People are pacified and lulled into compliance. He then invokes Jay-Z, a man whose music millions of us were raised on, to suggest that the artist has been “bought off”. The people who should be in the streets, he claims, have been neutralized by the records they love.

This is what they think of us.

Let’s start with the hypocrisy. Staley’s reduction of Black Americans is racist. Our motivations are as myriad as we are. But more importantly, Staley was no naive bystander. He flew on Epstein’s plane, visited his island, and maintained a friendship that his own bank’s investigators described as “close” long after Epstein’s first conviction. The man theorizing about cultural pacification was himself pacified by a sick pedophile.

But the email deserves a closer reading. Staley articulated a longstanding racist strategy without shame. The logic is old: absorb the culture, give people enough spectacle and vicarious aspiration, and they will stay still. They won’t organize. They’ll mistake consumption for freedom.

I grew up in the Bronx. Hip-hop was invented in my hood in 1973. The music has never been about pacification. When I was 18 and deep in the streets, Jay-Z’s Moment of Clarity was one of my favorite tracks. In it, he wrestles openly with the cost of building power: “If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli / Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / But I did five mil – I ain’t been rhyming like Common since.” Jay shows us how the system works, what it extracts from you, what you have to decide to give up and what you choose to keep.

Jay-Z’s tapes carried me through a 12-year stint in prison for a Bronx shootout. Inside, I met men serving decades for mistakes made in conditions shaped long before they arrived. For us, hip-hop was journalism filed directly from the gutter. These records bore witness to our lives, named the world we came from. And they inspired us to protest, even when protesting was simply changing our lives.

When I read Staley’s email, I felt something beyond outrage. I felt the specific insult of being reduced, and of having the art that held us together recast as the leash that kept us in place.

I’ve spent the last several years collaborating on a film, The Alabama Solution, documenting conditions inside one of the most brutal constellations of prisons in this country. It cages the poor, the mentally ill, the addicted, subjecting them to relentless violence, rape and neglect while those responsible for far greater harm move through the world, untouched. The Epstein emails are the clearest illustration of that parallel universe: a system where the elite class has never been made to answer for anything. Not the financial crisis. Not the Epstein connections. Not the offshore accounts. Not the regulatory capture. Nothing. While the men I’ve sat with inside Alabama’s prisons receive decades for acts of desperate survival.

Hip-hop was born to document this, to name the people at the top who operate without consequence. I think about Talib Kweli, who has always refused the comfortable lane: “These cats drink champagne to toast death and pain / Like slaves on a ship talking about who got the flyest chain.” That awareness is what the culture was built on – not to distract from that reality, but to make it impossible to unsee. That is what I want back.

Because here is my worry: Staley was wrong about why we weren’t in the streets, but he wasn’t entirely wrong that something in the culture has drifted. The industry learned how to absorb the anger and sell it back to us as aesthetic. Somewhere in that transaction, a generation of young people lost the throughline connecting the music they love to the movements that music was always meant to feed.

This country is on fire right now. Donald Trump is dismantling the institutions that protect the most vulnerable, attacking and deporting immigrants, gutting civil rights enforcement, and erasing Black history. And in that fire, we need artists willing to burn something down. YG and Nipsey Hussle did it on FDT, plainly, without apology. Eminem did it in that parking garage, spending four minutes with nothing but a microphone and something to lose, dismantling Trump bar by bar while the industry held its breath. Think about Emicida, born in São Paulo, the very city Staley pointed to as a place where the people weren’t distracted enough to stay off the streets. Emicida has spent his career doing exactly what Staley feared: using music as a weapon against the right wing, against cruelty, against the idea that artists should stay in their lane and be grateful. “Art is what makes Brazilians dream and believe that reality can be changed.” He looks at the world that could be and refuses to make peace with the one that is. That’s the model.

Jay-Z has accumulated more power than anyone who has ever come from where we come from. And that power is worthless if left unspent. We need him to spend some of the social capital he has accumulated on this struggle because we know that people listen to the man who grew up in Marcy Projects and had the audacity and skill to make it out.

But let’s also be honest: Black excellence is not going to save us. In fact, it may be the very thing Staley argued was pacifying us, the individual triumph held up to make collective struggle seem unnecessary. As Martin Luther King Jr taught us, in a dangerous moment, silence from those with power isn’t neutrality, it’s complicity. That’s why I salute artists like JJ’88 and Richie Reseda, my brothers doing the work that Talib and Common were doing then, refusing the roles assigned to them, staying close to the ground. And I want to see that lineage grow louder. I want hip-hop to do what it did for me the first time I heard Tupac’s White Man’z World in 1996: it gave me a consciousness I never got from any textbook. That’s what the music is supposed to do. Not comfort us. Not distract us. Wake us up.

Staley reveals a worldview: that culture is a lever, the poor are a variable, and accountability is for other people. This summer, Jay-Z is coming to the Bronx. I’ll be there. And I’ll be watching to see which Jay-Z shows up: the one who taught us that it’s Politics as Usual or the one who refuses to talk about politics. Either way, Staley is wrong. But proving him wrong requires the culture to remember what it was made for, to bear witness, to organize, to bring people back to each other and back to the streets.

Hip-hop has always had that power. I’m asking it to use it again.

• Alex Duran is program director at Galaxy Gives and a co-producer of The Alabama Solution