have been married for over a decade. His participation in hip-hop culture, which went from turntablist and party DJ to independent label owner and tour DJ, has now given way to working a “regular” job while he remains a fan of the music from a distance. But he still loves hip-hop. His love for his favorite rapper, Rakim, is only rivaled by his enthusiasm for his favorite rock band, The Grateful Dead. He considers himself a true “Dead Head” and he sometimes flies to other states to meet like-minded buddies for concerts and festivals.
Hip-hop has always been, with limitations, a culture celebrated in the spirit of inclusion. A twenty-something-year-old German kid from Berlin can feel the same urge to bob his head and make “the ugly face” when he hears the undeniable boom bap of a DJ Premier beat blasting through refrigerator-sized speakers as a black kid who was born and raised in the Mecca, New York City. When Rakim uttered the phrase, “It ain’t where ya from, it’s where ya at,” that rule of inclusion was cemented into the unwritten Constitution of Hip-Hop. All are welcome; just come correct. From what John tells me, Rock & Roll doesn’t share that same spirit.
I’m guessing, based on the above description of my friend John, you were picturing a certain person in your mind, right up to the part about him being a Dead Head. You may have even gone back to read the previous paragraphs to see if you missed something. If you were picturing my friend as the only tie-dye-shirt-wearing black guy at the Grateful Dead Concert with a bunch of his white buddies, you’d be wrong. His buddies are white, but so is John. And yes, his wife is black. I have always considered John one of the white guys who “gets it.” Not because of that old “Once you go black …” cliché, or because he’s a Rakim fan who owns DJ equipment, but because despite the color of his skin he understands what the struggle is all about.
From the point John’s wife gave birth to their son, that comprehension of the struggle became much more profound for him. He is no longer able to be a spectator to the black experience in America. He is on the field and in the game. As his child gets through his teenage years, John feels the target growing on his son’s back. Each time a new report of an unarmed black person being shot by police goes viral, John’s concerns for his own son grow. The conversations he hears among his rock friends when these stories hit the news has made him see some of those friends in a different light. He’s had to become the only voice in those circles who sees the plight of Black and Brown Americans. It’s frustrating … infuriating even. He’s had quite a few arguments with good friends over these issues, especially the NFL player protests. Eventually he made the decision to drop out of his 2017 Fantasy Football Leagues and Pools because of these issues. When looking at his friends, he can’t help but think, “What if this were my son? Would these guys be saying the same things? Would these buddies of mine look for ways to justify his murder by police?”
John admits he has had to stop associating with a few of the guys in his group, but others have been more open to seeing things from someplace other than their own perspective. Because of John, some of them have developed a different opinion of these issues, even entertaining feelings of empathy. This conversion of views came about through careful dialogue. Having those difficult conversations with his friends was important to John, if for no other reason than, in his mind, defending his children. You don’t need to be married to a black woman/man or have half-black children to “get it,” but sometimes it takes someone in your circle to lead you to the conversation. Getting a person to look at an issue introspectively helps them see things as they really are. The challenge is getting them to come down from the stands and get in the game.
This book looks to offer strategies and a framework for how those conversations can be initiated. The idea of being a “white ally” boldly challenges mainstream Americans to take a look into a broken mirror and see the shattered pieces for what they are. I believe that by picking up this book you are making the decision to try to see things differently. I’m hopeful that these writings will have you falling into one of two categories: recruiter or recruit. Our author, you will see, is clearly a recruiter. I believe his goal is to actively recruit more white allies into our society because he knows that having more people that are able to relate to and appreciate the plight of people of color, the better our world can become. Is that you? Will you take on the role of recruiter, bringing more friends and associates into a different way of thinking and being? Or will you become a recruit, one who after absorbing all his book has to offer, is now more sensitive to the very different path that people who “don’t look like you” walk every day? Either are noble and honorable classifications and if you become either, society should applaud your bravery. My friend John started out as a spectator watching the world from the proverbial bleachers, but soon found himself right in the middle of the game.
MASTA ACE
Introduction
WHAT SHOULD A WHITE ALLY DO?
Don’t start with this book. Or at least don’t stop with it. Read Ijeoma Oluo, Claudia Rankine, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, Michelle Alexander, Carol Anderson, Morgan Jerkins, Brittney Cooper, M.K. Asante, Ibram X. Kendi, Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Harry Allen, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and other black writers at the heart of a renewed and much-needed conversation about race and racism in the United States. You certainly don’t want the only book you read about race to have been written by a white author like me. Nobody’s exactly clamoring to read what a middle-aged white guy has to say about hip-hop, but at the same time I see white authors too comfortable leaving the work of discussing race and racism to authors of color, which both overburdens their writing and reinforces the concept of race as a topic white people aren’t asked to think much about. My perspective certainly shouldn’t replace that of a black writer, but it may provide a point of entry to show the power of black voices on the developing mind of a white kid whose environment encouraged him not to listen. Too often white writers focus on showing they know the right things to say when it comes to race without addressing how they learned in the first place and how they worked to overcome the mistakes they made along the way. That’s the story I’ll try to tell here.
This is a book about how a white man born into racial isolation in small-town America grew up to study and teach the black culture of hip-hop. Born just outside of Science Hill, Kentucky, I grew up listening to the militant rap of Public Enemy while living in a place where the state song still included the word “darkies.” If it weren’t for hip-hop music and my mother’s belief in higher education, I could have slipped into a lifetime of closed-mindedness and casual racism. Growing up in rural Kentucky in the Eighties and Nineties, I had no black teachers, few black classmates, and no black members of my church congregation. This racial isolation fostered a smug certainty about our way of life and a fear that it was threatened by the mere suggestion that there were other ways.
I saw a knee-jerk reaction to the 1990s iterations of multiculturalism and political correctness. When I left home for college in Louisville—the big city to me—my neighbors, coaches, and teachers warned me not to let my professors brainwash me. This was the mentality with which I embarked upon higher education. What were my neighbors clinging to? What were they afraid I might learn? Education is not indoctrination. It’s no mystery why learning about black history tends to make white people less liable to buy into racist thinking and more likely to question the reasons whites invented and embraced those racist notions. It’s no coincidence that the more history I learned, the less I could buy that there was a conspiracy against whites—as my neighbors had suggested—and the more I’ve come to understand the longstanding national conspiracy to keep black people out of white schools, pools, and neighborhoods, as well as the advantages that conspiracy continues to give a white man in 2018.
Listening to hip-hop made me have to think about what it means to be white, while the environment in my hometown encouraged me to avoid or even mock such self-examination. I listened to so much hiphop, and read so many books about it, that when I went on to graduate school it was a natural choice of topic for my doctoral dissertation. Yet the more I
