name ten rappers. Could he name ten black novelists? At one extreme, nobody wants an African-American Studies department staffed entirely with white professors. At the other, nobody wants a white professor to leave James Baldwin off her American Lit syllabus because she thinks white scholars shouldn’t teach black art.
White people shouldn’t hide their silence behind the lofty ideal of avoiding cultural appropriation, but they also shouldn’t speak on black issues with a casual overfamiliarity. Ice Cube called his white fans eavesdroppers, but added that “even though they’re eavesdropping on our records they need to hear it.”2 Lord Jamar called white rappers houseguests. Macklemore used a song to promote tolerance—“If I was gay, I would think hip-hop hates me”—and Jamar took offense: “Okay, white rappers … you are guests in the house of hip-hop. Just because you have a hit record doesn’t give you the right, as I feel, to voice your opinion.”3 I found myself wanting to agree with Lord Jamar, a rap legend I once saw share a bill with Nice & Smooth on the deck of the battleship USS New Jersey. But I can’t agree entirely when I get paid to voice my opinion. I wouldn’t be much of a professor if I never said anything critical of my subject. I can’t agree entirely when he’s essentially complaining, We let a white guy into the party and he said we should let in gay people too. “Don’t push it too far,” said Jamar. “Those of y’all who really studied the culture, that truly love hip-hop and all that, keep it real with yourself, you know this is a black man’s thing.” (Notice he said black man.) The paradox for the white hip-hop scholar is that to know hiphop culture means to know it doesn’t always welcome criticism from white professors.
For me to accept this paradox is not to buy into the tired old nonsensical claims of “reverse racism.” First, the very fact that white people have to call it reverse racism reaffirms the direction the violence has flowed. There is no reverse bullying, reverse terrorism, or reverse rape. Second, it is not “reverse racism” when a white professor makes his living teaching a course on a black cultural form where some of the black musicians say they’d prefer whites step aside. Lord Jamar doesn’t exclude white people—the ones who’ve done their homework, at least—from participating in hip-hop; he just doesn’t want to see a white guest walk into hip-hop’s house and start changing the wallpaper. I imagine he’d approve of my taking a class in hip-hop, but tell me I sure as hell shouldn’t teach one. Michael Eric Dyson—one of the black scholars whose books I assign as required reading—sees a much bigger problem than one person leading one classroom. “I’m not saying,” he writes, “that non-black folk can’t understand and interpret black culture. But there is something to be said for the dynamics of power, where nonblacks have been afforded the privilege to interpret and—given the racial politics of the nation—to legitimate or decertify black vernacular and classical culture in ways that have been denied to black folk.” In other words, it’s not only about how well the professor knows hiphop; it’s about who approved the curriculum and gave that professor his job. My personal experience illustrates Dyson’s point: I wrote a doctoral dissertation on hip-hop that was approved by a committee of four white men and one black woman; I’ve published four books on hiphop but never been assigned a black editor. My work has, of course, gone through the anonymous peer-review which is the foundation of academic publishing, so I can hope—but not assume—some of the unnamed readers who voted to publish my writing were black scholars who specialize in the study of hip-hop. But it’s no stretch of the imagination to believe that a white man could become a credentialed and published expert in a black cultural form without ever having a black person check his work.
American universities offer hundreds of hip-hop courses even as they employ embarrassingly low numbers of black professors—only around six percent of university faculty nationwide. I hope we are facing a sea change and that six percent will soon double and triple—there is certainly some momentum to the call for more black professors—but hiring more black faculty members won’t, on its own, correct an imbalance of power that is about more than percentages. Critic Alex Nichols, writing about the musical Hamilton, rejected the notion that filling more roles with black people solves racial disparity: “Contemporary progressivism has come to mean papering over material inequality with representational diversity. The president will continue to expand the national security state at the same rate as his predecessor, but at least he will be black. Predatory lending will drain the wealth from African American communities, but the board of Goldman Sachs will have several black members. Inequality will be rampant and worsening, but the 1% will at least ‘look like America.’ The actual racial injustices of our time will continue unabated, but the power structure will be diversified so that nobody feels quite so bad about it.”4 Electing a black president didn’t end racism; rather, the prospect of his election brought out the hangman nooses to a Selma, Louisiana schoolyard and the campuses of Maryland and Columbia, and his two terms inspired racists to run for office. If history teaches us anything, it’s that a boom in black professors will probably prompt a similar backlash. Race in America is more complicated than black vs. white, although every time we think we’ve moved beyond that binary something drags us back into the past.
Of course universities need to hire more black professors, and I can’t disagree with the assertion that black scholars should lead the discussion about black culture and vet the white scholars who research and teach that culture. White scholars studying hip-hop should first and foremost listen to black rappers and scholars, but to stop at listening alone is a cop-out. I worry that plenty of white professors would be happy to hire new black professors and direct minority students to them and leave matters of race to be taught in their classrooms so that the white professors don’t have to risk saying the wrong thing. Race permeates every subject; the university shouldn’t delegate to newly hired black professors the responsibilities of confronting race in the classroom.
But even though white professors can’t shirk the responsibilities of discussing race, we could read hundreds of books by black scholars and it still won’t completely wear down the edges of our blinders. Vetted by peer review or vouched for by rappers, a white scholar remains an outsider. I’m never all that satisfied with the self-justifications of the other white scholars, and I’m by no means looking to inspire a new legion of white people to become hip-hop professors. Yet I stand firm in my conviction that I’m a white person doing it well—even if the best way I know to do it is to keep questioning that conviction. I am undeniably part of the forces taking hip-hop further away from its roots, into college classrooms and onto library shelves. I know my hip-hop, but I don’t know how it feels to be black in America, so it would be grossly irresponsible for me not to ask my students to think about the problems and contradictions inherent in what their professor does for a living. But I haven’t quit teaching yet, so I don’t want to sound like I’m going through the motions of making excuses. Saying I know my history—even if it might look like I’m only repeating it—might come off as a self-serving and insincere gesture. My self-examination has to allow for the real possibility of my being wrong; otherwise it’s only a show I put on for my critics. But I can’t say I’ve studied hip-hop for this long just to reach the conclusion that I shouldn’t be doing it.
I’ve been teaching hip-hop in colleges for fifteen years, after all. Having recently turned forty-two years old—almost as old as hip-hop itself—I’ve become keenly aware that my students were born after Tupac was already dead. I am a forty-two-year-old white man who makes his living studying music created by black youth, and my course feels more and more like a history lesson. I can hustle to keep up with the new rappers, but I’ll still never quite get it. I’ll never hear the new songs the way a twenty-year-old hears them. It’s a harsh realization, but worse is its corollary: if I can get too old to write about hip-hop, was I always too white?
Two
WHY WHITE KIDS SHOULD LISTEN TO HIP-HOP
The true power of hip-hop on my individual imagination is that it made me have to think about being white. Born into racial isolation in rural Kentucky, I grew up never having to think about whiteness as anything other than a default
