Show & Prove Hip Hop Conference 2018

Whether or not we like it or agree with it, this particular performance of Blackness is arguably a new subgenre of hip hop music. “Decades after Zip Coon and Sambo shuffled, jived, and bug-eyed on the minstrel stage, hip-hop has once again made black face caricature a popular mode of American entertainment. Spinning car rims, ‘pimps and hoes,’ and ‘bling-bling’ jewelry have replaced the chicken and watermelon...” argues Travis L. Gosa. This subgenre of hip hop music fuels the momentum of tanning America, which I’ve interpreted as all-inclusive branding and marketing for the polyethnic consumer base it serves. Consider for a moment the urgency of all-inclusivity particularly when it seemingly excludes whiteness and its simultaneous snail’s pace towards equitable representation. I argue that all-inclusivity for the purposes of circumventing the decentering of whiteness is one reason for some performances of Hip Hop shifting from celebration to entertainment, which inadvertently contributed to the appropriation of a cultural movement now reduced to a minstrel show. Dr. Halifu Osumare states, “there’s a thin line between appropriation and celebration. Because while we were celebrating, they were appropriating.” Still, white’s cultural appropriation of black performances of celebration afforded us some agency when reproducing our images from the perspectives of the white gaze. For their entertainment, and our access to some agency and financial upward mobility, our self-exploitation and subsequent commodification became our way of achieving a piece of the “American Dream”. This reality complicates both 19th -20th century minstrelsy representations and 21st century re-presentations of minstrelsy. While a painful echo emanates from the legacy of Black minstrelsy, it also resonates, at its core a historic innovation and a means of resistance to the misrepresentations of Black culture by whites.

Hip hop artists who are embracing black progress by any means necessary are “changing what it means to be black and middle class in ways that make our proponents of traditional values cringe because they refuse to be disciplined into puritan characterizations of normative middle-class behavior” argues Davarian Baldwin. While minstrel-like elements in Hip Hop may be evident, I believe generalizing 21st century hip-hop rap as the latest form of minstrelsy is a risky supposition simply because it doesn’t represent, nor does it re-present a singular model. According to my investigation of the manifestation of Hip Hop’s rap music of the 21st century, the genre as a whole is being held accountable for portraying modern day blackface minstrelsy. While my research reveals that many Hip Hop artists are the targets of ridicule for performing as contemporary coons, rap music in general is suffering from the accusation of “buffoonery.” I argue that if today’s image of rap music is going to be labeled as a minstrel show, the history of the genre needs reevaluation, and a deeper investigation of its performative roots is crucial. There are various aspects of historical blackface minstrelsy and it is important to know what aspect of these performative utterances you are dealing with in order appropriately to label them. My sources (Austen and Taylor, 2012; Johnson, 2012; Lhamon, 2000; Lott, 1993) reveal that the performance choices and actions of minstrel artists were often purely practical in the process of accessing agency in the entertainment industry of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes those choices consisted of a method for negating the caricature depictions of Blacks and liberating the culture by creating performative counter-narratives. It could also serve as a medium for presenting parody, satire, and fiction via a “double-consciousness” approach. Still, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild argues that while “Minstrelsy was good in providing legitimate, paid work for black performers and preserving black plantation forms that might have otherwise disappeared, it was bad in etching a dire stereotype.”

My initial research question was: When being personally subjected to Hip Hop performance in a Black minstrel-like manner that may potentially garner financial gain and recognition, how should rap artists negotiate their performance choices? Now I ask, is there a non-stereotypical performance mode for repurposing the historical caricaturing of blacks for sport and profit by white men? 

In Raising Cain Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop W.T. Lhamon (2000) notes, “the blackface figure always resisted, or did not easily fit into other peoples’ forms-and so gradually forced a form that gave it room of its own” (p.59). Then is this new subgenre of hip hop music a forced form that has established a space of its own, or will it always be under the weight of Blaxploitation? 

The struggle with changing the joke and slipping the yoke is that the true self has been so distorted by, “the images produced by and for whites to justify Blacks’ oppression…that black people are trying to stay true to imagined identities that they’ve accepted and internalized and even reproduced… It’s startling that today, more than eighty-five years later, we are dealing with the same shadow…” says M. K. Asante Jr. in It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation.

What about the black caricaturing and minstrel-like performances by white rappers, such as Iggy Azalea, Tekashi 69, and Post Malone? Even if black rappers ceased their minstrel-like performances, would the representations of black minstrelsy in rap die in the 21st century where is was birthed or as Travis L. Gosa predicts, will we be “stuck lamenting the blackface tradition in the twenty-second century due to a lack of pragmatic advice” and or due to “this fantasy about the disposability of black life [which] is a constant in American history” as Teju Cole states. So, I’m concerned that like Gosa suggests, since “mainstream radio and music channels are saturated with dumbed-down rap lyrics and thug buffoonery, while political acts remain marginalized in the underground,” conscious rap may not prevail because it won’t be produced at the rate minstrelsy rap will, and even if we dead our own subversive caricatures will they finally be extinct?