who stop by and visit the home.”16 A white rapper found success in a genre invented by black men; his old neighbors menaced his fans. The fans came on a pilgrimage, determined to see for themselves the unsafe neighborhood and the crumbling childhood home that had made the white rapper who he was. You’d think one of them might have put down a dollar to purchase the house, but before it could sell, it burned down. Eminem’s employees recovered bricks from the rubble and sold them to fans via his website.
Just across town, Ben Carson—a black, Yale-educated surgeon—was running for president. In a 2015 campaign video, he posed in front of a dilapidated house much like the one Eminem put on his album cover. “Poverty and the mean streets of Detroit could have defined my life,” he said. “I’m Dr. Ben Carson, and this is my story.”17 That was his story, maybe, but that wasn’t his house. Reporters traveled to the house where Carson actually lived as a child and a teenager, and found that it “sits on a tree-lined block of well-kept, middle-class houses.”18 Carson’s childhood neighbor, who still lives on the same block, said, “This has always been, I would say, a pretty decent neighborhood—people working, kids playing. We used to keep the doors unlocked. Doors would be open at night. You could just walk in.”19 A black man rose from a pretty decent neighborhood to run for President but settle for a cabinet position as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He worried that if public housing were made too comfortable it wouldn’t inspire its residents to claw their way out of there, so he took $31,000 of the taxpayer money that could have gone to improve public housing and spent it instead on a dining-room set for his own office.20
Wasn’t this the American Dream? Ben Carson had beaten the odds to become a renowned pediatric surgeon, an inspiration to millions. He didn’t need to pretend he’d grown up in a worse house than he actually did. He didn’t need to claim to have overcome a “pathological temper”21 that caused him to attack and stab his classmates in incidents CNN was unable to verify. Ice-T suggested Vanilla Ice didn’t have to lie either: “One of his mistakes was he came into the rap business saying he was from the street. He didn’t have to say that. All he had to do was say hey, I’m a white kid, I’m trying to rap, and I want to be accepted. You don’t have to lie and say you’re from someplace you’re not, you know?”22 We had become obsessed with whether or not our public figures were telling the truth—and rightly so—but our fact-checking distracted us from the bigger problems with our impulse to buy into such stories. Being born poor made for a good story, once you got rich. Growing up poor was worth so much that our rappers and politicians were willing to lie about it, yet all it did for most people was keep them poor for the rest of their lives.
Four
HIP-HOP COMES TO CAMPUS
MF Grimm arrived at campus in the back seat of a taxi cab, having taken a 300-dollar ride from New York City to my campus more than halfway across New Jersey. “Professor Hess!” he said. “It made my mom’s day to hear that I’m speaking at a college. So, this is embarrassing, but I don’t have any cash. Can you cover the cab fare? I promise I’ll pay you back.” Grimm had waived his meager speaking fee. The creative-writing club paid for his flight from Los Angeles, and the American Studies program put him up in a hotel, but I paid the ornery cab driver with cash from my own pocket. What are you doing? I asked myself. This man is a stranger who lives on the other side of the country. You will never see this money again. I was ashamed of myself for thinking that way, for worrying Grimm would steal my three hundred dollars even as I worried I’d stolen much more from him. I thought of his song “Taken,” where he borrows Rakim’s old line “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re about to see/a pastime hobby about to be … taken to the maximum” but changes that last part to “taken away from us.” I worried I’d taken hip-hop out of its proper context and that teaching hip-hop to college students was just yet another way to remove it from where it began.
Grimm captivated my students with a talk that ranged from his experiences riding on top of Mr. Snuffleupagus as a child actor on Sesame Street to recording MF DOOM’s album Operation: Doomsday next door to a meth lab. He autographed some books, then I volunteered to personally drive him to the very clean and affordable New Jersey Transit train that would take him back to New York. I waved goodbye, then I opened my new copy of Grimm’s memoir, Sentences, to read the inscription: “To Dr. Hess—Thanks for keeping hip-hop alive.” I couldn’t pat myself on the back for it—even Vanilla Ice had his black supporters—but I found it encouraging that a rapper saw the value in a college course on rap. A week later, Grimm called to ask for my address so he could mail me my three hundred dollars.
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