Accidental Racism: kind of like what your Nana does whenever she brings up people of different ethnicities. The intention is not to be racist, but the connotations are racist.
I recently wrote a research essay for the class Music in Popular Culture on what it is that makes a hip-hop artist authentic and how this authenticity results in a music genre that is quite exclusive. Hip-hop, more than other genres, bases a lot of it’s artist authenticity on attitude, race, location, style and past. Artists like Macklemore and Iggy Azalea will always be questioned more than those like A$AP Rocky or Kendrick Lamar because of these things. The likes of Iggy are not only judged on the quality of their music but also how they conduct themselves culturally.
Why is this?
Hip-hop is based on expression of a certain shared situation. It is from this situation that hip-hop evolved and formed.“With hip hop, born in the Bronx, these guys created something out of nothing. That’s amazing. That’s alchemy. That’s magic” (Kugelberg, 2007). It is because of this that hip-hop authenticity relies so much on not only musical skill but also the other concepts previously mentioned.
Hip-hop also has a lot of theme’s it deals with. Violence is a prominent one. Ice Cube, in the song Straight Outta Compton, raps “When I’m called off, I got a sawed-off. Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off”. I wrote a large paragraph on how violence is such a large part of hip-hop. I also wrote a paragraph on how you need to be African-American to be authentic (the paragraph was more persuasive than that).
After already submitting my essay, considering the way I set it out and the claims I made… I get the feeling that I unintentionally said all black hip-hop artists are violent and (to make it worse) that regular and graphic violence was an essential part of the african-american culture. This was not at all what I was trying to say. This is accidental racism. While trying to exclusively discuss the music genre of hip-hop I made broad and general claims about a culture. Upon reading the essay none of the claims I make are completely unfounded, they are all justified and (if I do say so myself) true. It’s just that I made unintentional connections between certain things. Individually these things are ok but as part of the same essay contention they became a problem.
This is probably the message Nan would have picked up in the essay.
Disclaimers:
– Yes I know there are examples of successful white artists
– There is plenty of excellent hip-hop that defies all these ideas that produce authenticity and still have merit
– I’m aware there is also lots of hip-hop that tackles the idea of violence, making the point that it’s a negative thing
