manager, “but maybe he chose to go to the street and learn his trade. When he said he’s from the ghetto, it may not be true that he grew up in the ghetto—but maybe he spent a lot of time there.”4 Makes sense. If there’s one thing rap tells us the ghetto welcomes, it’s well-off white kids dropping by for apprenticeships. “If you ain’t never been to the ghetto,” warned Treach of Naughty by Nature, “don’t ever come to the ghetto. Cause you wouldn’t understand the ghetto. So stay the fuck out of the ghetto.”5
Ice’s lies might have struck a nerve with Perkins, a black man who’d grown up in the kind of neighborhood Vanilla Ice only visited. One of the few black journalists at the Chicago Tribune, Perkins rejected the paper’s plan to publicize his rise from the housing projects to the Tribune newsroom in order to promote its commitment to diversity. He refused to allow the paper to publish his photograph with his column; “[Readers] see a black man,” he reasoned, “they think he’ll be a certain way.”6 A black journalist hid his face and his life story from readers, even as he exposed a white rapper for faking his life story to appear something closer to black. A black journalist brought down a white rapper for having stolen his struggle story from his black peers, but when it came to presenting his own struggle, he preferred readers assume he was white.
A white rapper cribbed his struggle story from black rappers and outsold any rapper before him. When black rappers complained, he tried to turn the backlash into a struggle in itself. “People are out to bust Vanilla Ice,” his publicist Elaine Schock told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “because he’s successful and because he’s white. I do think it’s reverse racism.”7 Was it, though? Vanilla Ice was a guest in the house of hiphop and he sneaked out with a piece of its foundation and stood on it to reach the top of the pop charts. Facing the backlash, Ice brought Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav with him to his interview on The Arsenio Hall Show, but his strategy backfired when Hall asked Flav to wait offstage while he took Ice to task. “A lot of black rappers,” he said, “are probably angry because some of the white people screaming [for you] didn’t buy rap until you did it, until they saw a vanilla face on the cover of an album.”8
“You saw Flavor Flav. Me and him, we’re homies,”9 Ice asserted, although only moments earlier he’d received the man’s handshake so awkwardly it looked more like they’d met for the first time ever right there on stage. “Is that why you brought him out? Just to show you have a black supporter?” asked Arsenio.10 I was fifteen years old when I watched this interview air live on Arsenio Hall, and it was the first time I felt like rap didn’t belong to me; I’d discovered it, after all, on that hike through the woods to Wolf Creek Dam. Now, re-watching the clip when I’m forty-two and preparing to teach a lesson on white rappers, I have to ask myself this question—when I bring rappers as guest speakers, how pure are my motives? I’m dedicated to having students talk face-to-face with rappers, but I can’t deny that I also mean to enhance my own credibility by making my course look legitimate enough that a rapper would drop by.
Vanilla Ice positioned himself as an anomaly among white people, telling Hall he was the unicorn among “the majority of white people” who “cannot dance.”11 Being white and thus rhythmically disadvantaged, Ice suggested, had made succeeding even harder for him, yet he overcame biology to develop an undeniable skill that sold records and concert tickets: “People who said I never could make it, that I’d never amount to S-H-I—you know the rest—said a white boy can’t make it in rap music, kiss my white … you know the rest.”12 Once it came out that he’d exaggerated his link to the ghetto, fans were less willing to take his word on his skills as an artist. Perkins exposed Ice’s lies, but Ice’s fans were at fault for finding his fake story compelling. Why were listeners so eager to hear about a white man who’d ventured into a black neighborhood and outshined the black musicians?
Vanilla Ice was so thoroughly discredited that for the next ten years, any emerging white rapper was haunted by his inauthenticity. No rapper wanted to look like another Vanilla Ice. House of Pain wore shamrocks and Celtics jerseys in a sort of racial rebranding effort. We’re not white, these symbols suggested; we’re Irish. The group’s frontman, Everlast, had released a solo album just two years earlier and never said “Irish” once, yet his House of Pain album included “Top O’ the Mornin’ to Ya,” “Danny Boy, Danny Boy,” and “Shamrocks and Shenanigans.” The Irish, who endured indentured servitude but never the chattel slavery that brought Africans to the Americas,13 had endured social and economic exclusion in the US at the hands of other whites, but that exclusion was very much in the past by the time House of Pain’s hit single “Jump Around” reached number 3 on the US charts, and number 6 in Ireland.
Not until 1999, nearly a decade after Vanilla Ice, did another white rapper reach (then exceed) his level of sales and fame. Eminem convinced listeners that not only did he really, truly grow up poor in Detroit, but Vanilla Ice had made things even harder for him by making white rappers look like liars. 8 Mile’s most powerful scene shows Eminem’s character B. Rabbit win a freestyle battle by revealing his black opponent, Papa Doc, is not who he appears to be. Rabbit disarms Doc by owning up to living in a trailer with his mom—“I’m a piece of fucking white trash, I say it proudly”—as he accuses Doc of posing as something he’s not:
I know something about you
You went to Cranbrook, that’s a private school.
What’s the matter, Dawg, you embarrassed?
This guy’s a gangster? His real name’s Clarence.
And Clarence lives at home with both parents.
And Clarence’s parents have a real good marriage.
The revelations rendered Doc mute, but I imagine that late that night, tucked into bed, he might have thought, Yeah, but a cop would still shoot me first.
If Doc could have thought faster on his feet in the battle, he might have put into rhyme the notion that when strangers see him they see a black man, rather than a man with a private-school diploma. Why do you think the crowd was so willing to believe I was a gangster, he could have asked Eminem’s character, and so unwilling to believe you’ve faced a struggle?
White rappers try to shift the discussion from race to class, as if the wealthiest boardrooms and schools and neighborhoods had not been designed to keep black people out, while ghettoes and prisons were designed to keep black people in. When I tell stories about my childhood, I don’t mean to suggest that class trumps race, or that food stamps even the playing field. My parents, unlike Clarence’s, didn’t have a real good marriage, but that doesn’t make me less white. Eminem certainly admits being white made it easier for him to sell platinum; he attends to the advantages white skin gave him in selling records to white fans who might not have owned one song by a black rapper: “See the problem is/I speak to suburban kids/who otherwise would have never knew these words exist … they connected with me too because I looked like them.” Yet Jimmy Iovine, the record exec who signed Eminem, claimed hip-hop had so torn down racial binaries in this country that 8 Mile was “about class, not race.”14 “A white label head,” responded Public Enemy’s “media assassin” Harry Allen, “discusses a movie, ostensibly about a Black art form, in which the lead character is white, the screenwriter is white, the director is white, the producer is white, most of the productions talent, no doubt, white, and, of course, the film itself owned by a company run by, mostly owned by, and deriving the majority of its income from white people. Yet, something or other is ‘about class, not race.’”15
Eminem’s childhood poverty was so verifiable that he could put his childhood home, at 19946 Dresden Street in Detroit, on his album cover. Eminem’s old neighborhood was so impoverished that in 2013, the Michigan Land Bank put the house up for auction, with
