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Does Hip Hop Belong To Me? The Philosophy of Race and Culture

PAUL C. TAYLOR

Sidney’s Question—and a Follow-up

The film Brown Sugar begins with a bit of explanation from a fictional hip-hop journalist named Sidney.⁹⁰ She tells us that she starts every interview with the same question: “when did you fall in love with hip hop?” The film then shows a parade of hip-hop stars—real ones, not film characters—answering Sidney’s question, fondly recalling their first encounter with some iconic figure, event, or performance. Watching this scene jogs my memory as well. I think back to my first encounter with hip hop, and find that I can still hear “Rapper’s Delight” blaring from the puny tape recorder, still see my middle school friends huddling around the single tiny speaker, still feel the exhilaration and excitement of that new sound, those nimble words. But none of those memories come to me as they do to Sidney’s interview subjects, as an answer to her opening question. I can’t remember falling in love with hip hop because, frankly, I never did.

It’s not what you’re thinking. I haven’t fallen out of love. My once-warm feelings have not simply grown cool, perhaps under the sobering influence of advancing years. And my years aren’t so advanced that hip hop never had a chance with me at all. For what it’s worth, Jay-Z and Dr. Dre are about my age, and Russell Simmons is older than I am. I like hip hop about as much as I ever did. And I really did, and do, like some of it. It’s just that love was never the dominant emotion for me. It was more like the admiration and respect you feel for your best friend’s best guy or girl. I don’t have those feelings, you say. But I see why someone else might.

Some people may be puzzled by all of this. Whatever else it is, hip hop seems to be part of black culture. And I am a black American man who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties when hip hop burst onto the world stage. So how can I not love hip hop? Or: what does it mean that I don’t? If you’re not inclined to ask these questions, don’t worry. Fewer people ask them these days than perhaps ever before, and this track shows why this is as it should be. Still, many people do take such questions seriously. Let’s figure out why the questions arise and consider some answers to them, as these exercises will illuminate central issues in the philosophy of race and culture.

The Eminem Enigma

Even if you’re not baffled or intrigued by my lack of passion for hip hop, this track will make more sense if you understand why other people might be. So let’s approach the same issues from a slightly different direction. If you’re reading this book, you’ve probably heard of Eminem. But in case you haven’t, here’s half of what you need to know: Eminem is the white rapper du jour, heir apparent to such luminaries as Young Black Teenagers (all of whom were white), Vanilla Ice, the dancehall DJ named ‘Snow’, and the duo called Third Bass (the best of the lot, and not just because they didn’t name themselves after something white. The world is not breathlessly awaiting the Talcum Powder Posse). If you’ve heard of Eminem it may seem unfair to put him in the same category as Vanilla Ice and YBT. And that’s the other half of what you need to know. Eminem actually seems to have earned the respect of his mostly black peers.

A respected white rapper is certainly a strange and rare phenomenon. Other examples of this kind of strangeness include black hockey players, Vietnamese Capoeira practitioners, Chinese Jamaican restaurants, white running backs (in American football), and Cablinasian golf pros.⁹¹ These labels describe real people and things, and relatively rare people and things; but, more than that, they describe people and things that seem in some sense out of place and that are therefore difficult to understand. All these things are versions of (what I’m thrilled to call) the Eminem enigma.

So if you can understand that these enigmas might leave some people puzzled, then you’ve got the idea. You don’t have to accept that white people like Eminem are somehow out of place in the hip-hop world, any more than you have to accept the idea that black people like me are somehow out of touch when we’re not passionately attached to hip hop. You just need to recognize that the idea appeals to some people, people who believe that forms of life correspond to kinds of people. And this idea ought to be familiar: it’s intimately bound up with our idea of culture.

Hip Hop and Culture

The way most people think of such things nowadays, the word ‘culture’ refers to a people’s whole way of life. It denotes the entire ensemble of attitudes, institutions, and practices that define a coherent way of living. Working to build and maintain this coherence is what communities do, as their members co-operate to satisfy characteristically human aspirations to, for example, meaningfulness, order, and beauty. So culture comprises the foods we eat and the ways we eat them. It resides in the holidays we celebrate, the decorations we string up on those days, and the religious or political narratives that tell us why we bother. These are all dimensions along which a community may fashion its own distinctive way of life. And these expressive practices, and many more besides, are elements of culture.

Hip hop is a culture in this sense, made up, like any other culture, of many different but related social practices. It hasn’t always been seen in this way. Hip hop emerged from mostly black and brown urban communities just as mostly white policymakers and pundits were deciding that these communities were pathological reflections of “normal” society. From the perspective of “normalcy,” the people in the South Bronx weren’t conferring meaning on their experiences and surroundings; they weren’t finding joy and significance in their lives by creating new expressive practices. Hip hop’s pioneers weren’t using the materials at their disposal, materials provided by technological shifts and made necessary by, among other things, shrinking budgets for traditional arts education programs, to make music and art and dance. They weren’t creating new forms of poetry and lyricism out of the bawdy forms of “kinetic orality” that we find in Jamaican toasting, in black southern blues lyrics, and in playing the dozens. Since music and art and dance require oboes and easels and tutus, since poetry is what Plath and Berryman produce, these dark peoples couldn’t have been making culture. Not real culture.

Luckily, and as I’ve said, this evaluative, ethnocentric notion of culture moves fewer people than it once did, thanks in part to interdisciplinary researchers in the field of cultural studies. People may still prefer Bach’s fugues to Lil Jon’s dulcet stylings (for good reason: I’d prefer a stomach cramp to Lil Jon’s dulcet stylings). But now we know that we have to critically analyze specific artifacts to make this preference articulate: we can’t simply indict entire traditions.

In this track I’ll talk mostly about rap music because it’s the aspect of hip hop that I know best. I’m not suggesting that hip hop’s other defining practices—breakdancing, graffiti art, making music with turntables and sampling devices, and so on—are less important or interesting. Just think of the hip-hop approach to fashion and design: what would rap, and the American culture industries, be without baggy pants, jeeps, rims, and Timberlands?⁹² Now let’s return to our guiding question: What does it mean that I, a black American man who came of age in the Eighties and Nineties, am not in love with hip-hop culture?

First Answer, Intro: Dre’s Dilemma

If culture is something all communities produce, then my detachment from hip-hop culture means that I’m detached from the hip-hop community. This isn’t necessarily cause for concern: I’m detached from the polka community, too, but it doesn’t especially worry me. Like everyone else, I need to find meaning and beauty in my world; but I don’t have to find those things in hip hop. But worry sets in if hip hop is, used to be, or ought to be, home to me—if it’s where I’m supposed to find meaning. This is what’s at stake in the film Brown Sugar: Sidney’s best friend and eventual lover, Dre, sells out and suffers for it. He leaves his relationship with hip hop, with real hip hop, for the phony aping of hip-hop styles by no-talent, music industry mon-eygrubbers. And this departure from his roots helps him sustain a bad marriage and an unnatural separation from his soulmate, the journalist who happens to share his love of hip hop. So Dre’s dilemma is whether to sell out or stay true to his roots.

This dilemma shows us what’s at stake, morally, psychologically, and philosophically, if we consent to talking about cultural belonging. We can see this better if we put the dilemma in terms that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European nationalism made popular, terms that proponents of Afrocentrism and communitarianism have kept before us in recent years. Dre’s problem—and, by extension, mine, if this analysis is right—is alienation: he is no longer living out an authentic existence as a member of his community. On this view, human existence gets its meaning, and human individuals get their identities, from social life. Someone who breaks away from his or her roots is . . . well, let’s take the organic metaphor seriously: what happens to a tree if it gets separated from its roots?

Of course, there is considerable wisdom in this story about roots and belonging, authenticity and alienation. Our roots confer meaning on our world and help make life worth living. And people who become unwillingly dislocated from their cultural backgrounds are likely to experience considerable psychological distress. We might put the point even more strenuously. As philosopher Charles Taylor argues on behalf of a whole tradition of thought, being connected to other people—in “webs of interlocution,” he says in one place—is a precondition of even forming a sense of self.⁹³

But we shouldn’t forget the aspects of culture that the narrative of authenticity obscures. For example, cultures proliferate and overlap. They emerge from communities of various sizes and types, all of which may lay claim to a single individual’s loyalties at the same time. I may participate in the distinctive ways of being and doing that define my neighborhood, my company, my ethnic group, and my city, and find none of these commitments contradictory. One result of this is that alienation from any one of these contexts needn’t condemn me to total psychological dislocation and distress.

Also, cultures are not as stable as narratives of roots and belonging sometimes suggest. They are, in fact, always in flux. This means in part that individuals continually appropriate and revise the meaning-making resources that their cultures supply. But, as philosophers like Seyla Benhabib and Will Kymlicka remind us, it also means that cultures are occasions for political struggle and social policy. Pluralist states may decide to select some ways of life for promotion and some for repression. Or settler states may decide, as a matter of justice, to help indigenous populations maintain their cultures, perhaps in compensation for centuries of oppression. The cultures selected for promotion may protect unjust internal hierarchies by repressing members who call for democratic debate and cultural change.⁹⁴

These particular dynamics, concerning the politics of multiculturalism or of subjugated internal minority populations, may seem to have little bearing on the hip-hop world. But the broader point has to do with the politics and techniques of cultural preservation. And the steady stream of public inquiries into the state of hip hop—in light of the commercialization of gangsta rap, or the east-west feuds, or the rise of dirty divas like Lil’ Kim—shows that cultural preservation is a crucial part of the hip-hop agenda.

And here we can return to Dre’s dilemma, or to the question—about my detachment from hip hop—that brought us to Dre. Preserving a culture involves, among other things, getting people to connect their lives and futures to the relevant community. One way to do this is to insist that participation is a natural imperative, like breathing or eating. If this is right, then ignoring a challenge to “our way of life” is like declining to eat, or letting someone hack off a limb. It’s unnatural, irrational, and self-destructive. So my detachment from hip hop might be a problem because hip hop and I naturally belong to each other. But how can we make sense of that idea?

First Answer, Continued: It’s a Black Thing . . .

Like this: You said above that “black and brown” communities produced and produce hip hop. If that’s right, then hip hop is part of black culture. And you, as a black person, should embrace it.

Appealing to race is pretty much the only way to argue that I have some natural tie to hip hop. Any other way of defining the relevant community will leave me out. Just think about how much I differ from Dre, the character from Brown Sugar. He is from New York City, which, by most accounts, is where cultural resources from the Americas and the African diaspora coalesced into hip hop. I, by contrast, am from Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is by no account an interesting site for hip-hop innovation. Every day when he was growing up, Dre heard rappers freestyling on the sidewalks and in the parks in his neighborhood. I didn’t really follow up that memorable encounter with “Rapper’s Delight” until I went away to college. (The first live rap battle I ever heard was in my freshman dorm. Between two guys from New York.)

Surely training, upbringing, place of origin, and many other factors play some role in picking out the communities to which one belongs. And on these grounds, Dre can credibly assert his membership in the hip-hop world in a way I can’t. But if hip hop is, more than anything else, a form of black culture, then geography and upbringing don’t matter. It’s part of me simply because of how I’m built. Following a suggestion from Cornel West, we might call this a form of racialist reasoning.⁹⁵ Racialist reasoning is seductively, but also deceptively, simple. It requires at least three potentially troubling steps. If you want to demonstrate my racial ties to hip-hop culture, you’ll have to show that hip hop counts as black culture in a way that makes some claim on me. This means showing that cultures can correspond to racial groups, and that it is possible to speak coherently of races at all.

Step 1: Racialism

Let’s start with the idea of race.⁹⁶ We have this idea because sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans found it useful. It helped them make sense of the physical and cultural diversity they encountered on their voyages of discovery, and it helped them justify the labor, land, and lives to which they helped themselves during the more, um, entrepreneurial phases of these voyages. They came to think of races as natural human groupings, distinguishable by inheritable clusters of physical, mental, and cultural traits. People who looked a certain way were supposed to have certain prospects for psychological development and cultural achievement. To put it too simply: light peoples with straight hair were intelligent, temperate, and cultured; and all the darker peoples were to one degree or another not those things.

Let’s refer to this way of thinking as classical racialism, and recognize its substantial virtues. It greatly simplified the task of justifying otherwise objectionable social arrangements. Black, brown, and yellow peoples needed colonial rulers, for example, because they were like children, in need of guidance—especially when it came to their eternal souls, and their economies. And this race-thinking also provided psychic income to people who lacked other grounds for esteeming themselves, like the majority of white people in the U.S. who didn’t own slaves, and who weren’t living the high life on some plantation, and who needed to be dissuaded from joining forces with the slaves to overthrow the wealthy elites.

There’s just one big problem with classical racialism. It’s false. Neither culture nor intelligence is inherited the way eye color is. And the physical traits that are supposed to define race membership don’t hang together or clearly distinguish human groups the way classical race-thinking requires them to. You know what I mean: there are “black” people with lighter skin than “white” people; there are Asian people with wide, flat noses and black people with narrow, aquiline noses; and so on.

Scientists and anti-racist activists of all colors insisted on these and other difficulties, and by the middle of the twentieth century they’d started to replace the classical conception of race with a kind of critical racialism. On this approach races are socially defined groups, groups that we create when we assign meaning to human appearance and ancestry. When nineteenth-century Americans said that people who looked like Frederick Douglass couldn’t be expected to write, or do philosophy, or exhibit bravery, and that such people ought to be subordinated to their white superiors, they were assigning meaning to dark skin and African features. Similarly, when contemporary sociologists like Thomas Shapiro say that someone who looks like Beyoncé, or who’s descended from someone who looks like Beyoncé, is more likely than a white person to suffer police brutality, racial profiling, and job and housing discrimination, and when they say that she’s less likely to have a net worth commensurate with her income level, they’re also assigning a meaning to her appearance and ancestry.⁹⁷ As it happens, classical racialism assigns false and immoral meanings, while critical racialism assigns plausible and diagnostic meanings.

Step 2: Color and Culture

So we can still talk meaningfully about races—the protests of certain philosophers notwithstanding.⁹⁸ But the price of doing so is giving up on them as natural cultural communities. Races are populations of people whose bodies and bloodlines become meaningful in the right social settings. And for critical race theorists, bodies and bloodlines receive their meanings from the mechanisms of social stratification: the bearers of certain bodies and bloodlines are more likely to receive certain social goods and get treated in certain ways. Cultural “membership” might be among the social goods that get distributed along racial lines. But there’s nothing natural about this process. And this means that my relative detachment from black culture isn’t obviously a sign of deviance or of some error on my part.⁹⁹ Of course, to deny that cultural attachments emerge naturally the way coral reefs do isn’t to say that they don’t emerge at all. Even if there’s nothing about how I’m made that naturally draws me to Angie Stone’s hip-hop-soaked neo-soul, it and other beneficiaries of the hip-hop influence might still count as black culture, and they might still make some claim on me.

Step 3: Blackness, Hip Hop, Prudence, and Duties

So how can we define a culture as black without making it a natural accompaniment of racial identity, as skin color’s supposed to be? We might appeal to history; perhaps by pointing out that black people played the major roles in creating and developing the practices in question. Or we might appeal to sociological patterns, perhaps by pointing to the fact, if it is a fact, that the average black person is more likely to participate in or know about the practices than your average non-black person. Neither of these arguments will be airtight, but I’ll assume that they’re plausible enough. The real problems begin when we move from identifying hip hop as black culture to demanding that black people embrace hip hop. There are at least three options here. None are particularly satisfying.

Here’s (the major premise of) one argument: Participating in black culture gives black people the tools to survive an anti-black world. But even if black culture can play this role, as I think it can, why would hip-hop culture be any better at it than jazz, or blues, or African American literature, or capoeira? People were once fond of describing rap as the black CNN. I’m less convinced of this now than I once was; but in any case, it still doesn’t give hip hop an advantage over black churches or barber shops. (Think of these as the black “Nightline” and “Daily Show”.)

Here’s another (partial) argument: Black people have a duty to support the practices that emerge from black communities. But we’ve already deprived ourselves of the most powerful support for this way of thinking. Without the natural cultural attachments that classical racialism imagines, the mere fact of blackness isn’t enough to obligate me to black cultures. And even if it were, we’d still have to answer the question we just posed: why hip-hop culture and not capoeira?

Third try: Cultural communities are naturally occurring complex phenomena: they are the social equivalent of ecosystems. And we should fight to preserve them, the way we do with imperiled ecosystems. The peril in this case is that hip hop has grown estranged from the black communities that gave it its life, purpose, perspective, and style. It has gone over to the corporate world, to the place where music and fashion are commodities rather than aspects of a community’s life-world. Consequently, it is in danger of dying out. It will survive only if black people, like you, reclaim it.

As with the second argument, the best support for this approach is some form of classical racialism. Otherwise, why would anyone think that I’m a more promising potential citizen of the hip-hop community than, say, a Chinese-American who’s spent his whole life living in Brooklyn, listening to rap music, and breakdancing? If the aim is really to preserve the culture, then it shouldn’t matter what the members look like. What matters is that they learn the traditions, master the relevant techniques, and internalize the proper sentiments and values. Unless we go back to the classical racialist idea of physiology determining character and sensibility, there’s not much reason to think that a black person would do this any better than anyone else.¹⁰⁰

Second Answer: The Decline and Fall of Hip Hop

Finally, one might argue that I’m detached from hip hop because I’m observant, and not too morally and politically obtuse. Hip hop has been co-opted and commodified, the argument goes, and it dramatizes and spreads horrible ideas about black men and about all women. So why would anyone, anyone with any moral convictions, be passionate about something like that?

We’ve touched on some of these ideas already, and the others ought to be familiar. Hip hop has become one of the cornerstones of the profit-driven, multinational culture industry. This industry exports its product mainly from the U.S., where it builds into the product certain unfortunate images and myths. Rap videos show us brutish, violent, and sexually voracious black men; they invite viewers with the proper sexual orientation to ogle hypersexual and permanently available black women; they urge us to identify with people of all colors who aspire only to immediate physical gratification or financial gain; and they reinforce misleading conceptions of an apparently pathological black and urban “underclass.” Rap stars have given up cultural criticism for multimedia stardom; they’ve stopped celebrating black power and started hawking clothes and films and deodorant; they’ve forsaken the model of Malcolm X and embraced the example of Donald Trump.

Like so much else that we’ve considered, the complaint is too simplistic. For one thing, it relies too heavily on the mainstream or corporate music industry. There are thriving local and underground music scenes in every musical idiom, and these tend to be much more progressive than what we find on MTV and BET. Also, it focuses only on rap, which, as I’ve said, is all I’m competent to venture any opinion about. Other elements of hip-hop culture may be much more progressive. Finally, it presupposes a romanticized image of rap music, as it were, “before the fall.” Contrary to this depiction, even in the good old days rappers like Public Enemy and KRS-One were in the minority. Most were in it to make a buck, and few had anything interesting to say about politics or culture.

Still, there is something to the complaint. Our culture industries do recycle all manner of insulting gender and racial stereotypes. And one of the principal tasks of the philosophy of culture is to interpret expressive practices and their artifacts like texts, to uncover the hidden and not so hidden complexes of meaning that animate them. This means offering “readings” of specific cultural artifacts, something that I don’t have space for here. I simply want to indicate that there is work here to do, and that the philosopher of culture may join people like Tricia Rose and Daphne Brooks in doing it.

Another thing this criticism gets right is its insistence on the culture industry. Outfits like Viacom—which owns BET, MTV, CBS, and much else besides—have unprecedented access to the U.S. and world populations. This has far-reaching consequences for the idea of the airwaves as a public trust, and for the ideal of a democratic culture accompanied by a diverse marketplace of ideas. Anyone interested in the study of culture ought to be interested in the unprecedented corporate takeover and consolidation of the most powerful resources for communication and expression ever created. I’m suggesting that the philosophy of culture ought to fold the ethics and political economy of media into the more familiar program of cultural criticism. For now, though, and for reasons of space, all I can do is make the suggestion.

No Love (for Hip Hop), No problem

Here are some of the things I haven’t talked about: The news stories I’ve seen over the last few years, chronicling the rappers and breakdancers from declining post-industrial cities in Eastern Europe, all of whom find hip hop directly relevant to their increasingly difficult lives. The websites I’ve seen for Malaysian MCs, and the albums I’ve heard by British dancehall DJs of South Asian descent. The often-overlooked line of Puerto Rican descent in hip-hop culture, as documented by people like Raquel Rivera.¹⁰¹ And the fact that America is defined by hybrid cultural forms like hip hop, which means, as Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and others have argued with regard to jazz and blues, that to be American is to be, in a sense, impure, and gloriously so.

All of this suggests that once we start to attend to the complexities of history, to the details of cultural borrowings and cross-fertilizations, it becomes hard to say when a culture really belongs to any single group. Still, taking seriously the idea that hip hop belongs to a group that I also belong to has, I hope, been fruitful. If I’ve drawn the right conclusions, we found that it’s pretty difficult to condemn my failure to love hip hop without appealing to some kind of outdated race-thinking. We learned that there are more plausible and up-to-date forms of race-thinking but that even these offer no support to the hip-hop proselytizer. We saw that there are non-racist ways of identifying hip hop and other expressive practices as instances of black culture. But we concluded that these more sophisticated racialisms hardly support the command that black people must embrace hip hop.