Black Like Them

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Obviously, hip-hop is no clear window into African American life; it's just the most popular. Chart-topping rap capitalists speak for little but the economic vitality of the Gangsta Entertainment Complex, and white kids kicking Ebonics and wearing Kangols will not end racial discrimination. There are real social problems that hip-hop will never touch. In 1996, the typical black household had a net worth of $4,500, one-tenth that of the average white household; poverty among black children is at 40 percent; young black males are murdered at a still startling rate--111 per 100,000, according to 1995 figures. All of which puts impassioned white hip-hop-heads in an odd position. Sure, whites have participated in hip-hop--as fans, promoters, writers, breakers, DJs, producers, photographers, label owners, and rappers--for as long as the art form has existed. Still, hip-hop Caucasoids of all persuasions are usually lumped together as interlopers or charlatans, self-conscious of both the music's expanding white audience and their role in that expansion.

Says El-P (a.k.a. Jamie Meline), a New York City-based MC-producer, "When people ask me about being white in hip-hop, I tell them, 'Look, you can't pretend.' The reason a lot of white people play themselves and just get it wrong is that they have the arrogance to think that they can identify with the experience of the black man or woman in America; not just empathize with it, but feel it. And you can't go there. Otherwise, you're sabotaging and belittling the experiences of the people you claim to love."

Fab 5 Freddy has been as responsible as anyone for translating hip-hop culture to mainstream white America. Star of the classic early-'80s New York b-boy flick Wild Style, Freddy draws a direct line from early be-boppers to rock 'n' rollers to rappers.

"Jazz musicians in the '40s were seen in the same light as rappers today; they were the scourge of the earth," he explains. "But white kids couldn't see Charlie Parker on cable TV at all times of the day. He didn't have the pulpit. Unlike Charlie Parker and Chuck Berry and Howlin' Wolf, Tupac [Shakur] and [the Notorious B.I.G.] were promoted as the baddest stars out there. So part of the rebellion becomes racial; that's America. These kids are rebelling against a society that says they shouldn't have anything to do with black people. So they're like, 'Yo, I'm gonna get down with the illest niggas I can find!' "

Popular culture's racial dynamic is evolving madly, and for folks born before 1970, that is often threatening or downright baffling. "Hip-hop is the only popular culture that takes seriously the relationship between race and democracy in America," says Henry Giroux, a professor at Penn State University and author of Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth (St. Martin's, 1997). "This music has had a grip on white kids for 15 to 20 years, and everybody calls it pathology and that's that. Are all these white kids just idiots who are being duped and manipulated by the record industry? Who is cynical and arrogant and detached enough to believe that? Sure, some kids are just latching onto the moronic gangsta elements, but the vast majority are caught in some middle space where they're trying to figure themselves out."

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