Veronica Sexton

                   Hip Hop & Race

"To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song: you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves." - Sékou Touré (1959)

     Hip Hop emerged when New York City, like many other urban cities are experiencing "white 

flight" which led to the deurbanization, deindustrialization, and constructed these spaces pf social 

stratification. "Ghettos" and "hood" became some of the appropriated epithets for these marginalized 

communities of color. These spaces, through apparatuses such as emceeing, djiing, and having 

knowledge of self, formulated the foundation for what we know as hip hop today. Our quasi-thesis is 

centered around the commodification of the Black race in hip hop. I would like to explore hip hop, 

and how it has transcended as another commodity in the capitalist structure of American society. 

essentially my argument will entail there history of Blacks in America vis a vis to music, and how hip 

hop, like African American Spirituals and jazz, manifested through the racial and social oppression of 

American society, continuing the cultural theft and appropriation - without forgetting the onset of our 

beginnings - the Transatlantic slave trade.

     

    The slave plantation was the first space that most Blacks occupied in the the Americas as a result 

of the slave trade. In Breckenridges's, African American Music for Everyone, he posits that much 

evidence supports the assertion that what evolved into what we now regard as the spiritual song was 

commonly sung during the Transatlantic slave trade; but the first true African American Spiritual 

containing musical notation as well as text, titled "Go Down Moses" was not published until 1861. 

Juxtaposed with the creation of hip hop, which formed out of dilapidated and impoverished living 

conditions, the slaves formed their religious music from their oppressed society settings. 

Breckenridge gives a few reasons why this manifested on the plantation, "(1) the slaves utilized 

religious words for developing communication strategies, (2) the slave master favored the singing of 

these words, as he felt less threatened by potential insurrections, (is this still occurring?) (3) and to 

many slaves these words provided faith and hope for a better life," Hip Hop has a unique form of 

communication, and as we have discussed this semester - the vernacular of the Islamic faith and the 

Five Precent Nation is found present in Hip Hop, (a unique manifestation, considering thirty percent 

of the African slaves brought into the United States were Muslims), and hip hop has 

provided faith and hope for a better life to many especially those living in abject poverty.

     

     In Hip Hop on Film, Kimberley Monteyne asserts, "minstrel shows frequently evoked the 

transgressive topography of black bodies - especially black female bodies - as porous, monstrous, and 

consuming, while emphasizing their "perverse" orality in song verses, skirts, and make-up" 

Monteyne's book discusses hip hop on film, but the history of the protrayal of Black as the underclass 

is a key topic, especially in regards to marketing. Citing Eric Lott's Love & Theft, "Their (Northern 

white workers) desire for class stability and economic autonomy alternately united them with the 

cause of abolitionism and drove them to burlesque and repudiate "blackness" as a protection against 

emasculation and downward class movement initiated by the forces of industrial capitalism."