Commercial Hip Hop has become a global genre, listened to by nearly every ethnicity and crafted in multiple languages. However, in the United States it continues to focus on the binary between Black and White – Black as a ghettoized inner city of pimps, hoes, drug dealers and the like, and White as the privileged consumers of such. Having personally been aware for quite some time that whites economically supported the majority of commercial Hip Hop in the form of music sales and concert tickets, reading The Hip Hop Wars by Tricia Rose illuminated the underlying racialized reasons of much of white support.
One such reason, of stereotyping blacks by Whites, draws its historical roots from slavery, and for me recaptured the vivid imagery of Blackface Minstrelsy. The grotesque exaggerations of minstrelsy were rooted in Black cultural expressions, as too is the exaggerated “thug life” glorified in commercial Hip Hop, yet each have been stereotyped into an “authentic” Blackness. These exaggerations are not those of Blacks but of privileged Whites who have the ability to consume, and thus shape, then Blackface Minstrelsy and now commercial Hip Hop. The early cultural forms of musical expression derived from Africa, the desire of enslaved Black women by White slave owners, and the portrayals of enslaved Black men as lazy, stupid, etc, can subsequently be seen through its manifestation by Whites into Blackface Minstrelsy as the exaggerated stereotypes of Buck, Jezebel, and pickaninny, who in turn have manifested themselves by Whites into commercial Hip Hop into pimps, hoes, and hustler youth.
Discussion Question: To what extent should mass consumption by Whites have in determining Black Culture, and what responsibility do Blacks have in asserting control over our image?
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