"Love Music Hate Racism" Concert photo by David Jones.
Retrieved from flickr.com
From Hip Hop’ s origin in the South Bronx to its international expansion through commercialization, much of it’s cultural foundation gets translated differently by different racial groups. Many times when Hip Hop is analyzed, a Black versus White artists/consumers framework is often used. This puts heavy emphasis on cultural appropriation, color-blindness, and questions of authenticity of white Hip Hop artist. However, there is a lack of analysis on how Hip Hop is not just a Black or White culture/music, but a blurring between the two. The Black versus white Hip Hop artists/consumers framework fails to challenge institutional racism which leads to reinforcing hegemony within American society.
The article “Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Return to the Hip-Hop Fray” in the New York Times by Jon Caramanica, addresses cultural appropriation and white supremacy in the midst of silence about racism. Hip Hop artist Macklemore uses his platform to bring attention to the unspoken issues of race, racism, and cultural appropriation that many white Hip Hop artist fail to address within their music. In Macklemore’s song “White Privilege II” he calls out the authenticity of white rappers based on their political stance of issues within communities and their use of Hip Hop. Interestingly, Macklemore’s challenge of authenticity among white Hip Hop artists shares aspects of Kembrew McLeod’s (1999) six semantic dimensions of claiming authenticity within Hip Hop. Macklemore shares McLeod’s (1999) authenticity ideology of artists staying true to themselves, not making music for commercial benefits, and emphasizing Hip Hop’s status as a culture. Despite McLeod’s absence of white artists in his analysis and the emphasis of Hip Hop being for the Black community, his authenticity model reflects a kind of foundation for all Hip Hop artist. Macklemore’s Hip Hop stance against cultural appropriation and authenticity fails to acknowledge how Hip Hop is racialized and black/white artists alike are ridiculed for their lyrical content.
An important issue within Hip Hop that that lacks conversation is how racism is perceived by white supremacy through the style of music itself despite the race of the artist. Hip Hop is a racialized form of music that speaks about homophobia, patriarchy, violence, drugs, etc. and is viewed as a dangerous culture because it’s consumption is perceived to be a contributor or driving force for these issues. In Rodman’s (2006) article, he forms a dialogue about Eminem, despite being a white rapper, for being criticized as a bad influence for his hyper-masculine, violent, and homophobic lyrics just as much as a black Hip Hop artist would be. However, these topics are not new to society nor are they new to this genre of music but they are treated as strictly a Black and/or Hip Hop culture. It is this reason that according to Rodman, Eminem as a White rapper challenges race within Hip Hop as being a fixed, non-flexible, and non-overlapping category (Rodman, 2006).
Rodriguez’s (2006) discusses how whites appropriate hip hop and use a color-blind ideology to justify their presence in hip hop and remove racially coded meanings in the music. Through participant observation and interviews of white hip hop fans who attends Hip Hop concerts, Rodriguez finds that most whites do not see race in their own lives and that their color-blind ideology allows them to justify their presence within the Hip Hop concerts and to appropriate the culture. The significance of the color-blind ideology is that it allows those with power, white consumers, to decontextualize cultural objects from its history and experiences while producing and reproducing itself. An example of one interviewer’s statement, Jeff, is that black Hip Hop artist must bridge the gap between white and black by realizing that we are all just people and he analyzes artist’s message of freedom of the black people as freedom for all people (Rodriguez, 2006). It is this kind of color-blindness that puts Hip Hop’s central themes and culture at risk from hegemonic ideologies that seek to silence and deny racism.
Work Cited
McLeod, K. (1999). Authenticity Within Hip Hop and Other Cultures Threatened With Assimilation. In Neal, M.A., & Forman, M. (Eds-.). (2004) That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd ed.). (pp. 165-178). New York: Routledge.
Rodman, G. (2006). Race...and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authencity In Neal, M.A., & Forman, M. (Eds-.). (2004) That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd ed.). (pp. 180-195). New York: Routledge.
Rodriquez, J. (2006). Color-blind ideology and the cultural appropriation of hip-hop. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(6), 645-668. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/6645946/Color-Blind_Ideology_and_the_Cultural_Appropriation_of_Hip-Hop
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