They’re selling out their own!: Asian American experts and the depoliticization of hip-hop

Last winter, in a graduate seminar, one of my peers was presenting his paper on Blackface entertainers at the turn of the century. What made this particular incident of interest was that it was Black people who were performing in Blackface. At this point, the class dialogue could have pursued a multiple range of interesting avenues. Instead, the conversation ended by drawing an analogy between the current state of hip-hop with that of African Americans performing Blackface. In essence, the analogy, that spurred so many more responses, addressed the issue of the revenue generating market known as hip-hop. I was surprised. The class had no Black people whatsoever, and the only people of color were Asian Americans, the dreaded present day “model minorities”. Yet, what was surprising was just how much people I never thought cared about hip-hop, were suddenly experts on the whole history of hip-hop and could dictate how the current state of the culture has gone astray. I was particularly taken aback by the manner in which Black people, in this conversation, basically sold out their culture.

Fast forward to last weekend’s academic conference. I was listening to the keynote speaker, who shall remain nameless, wrap up his speech, thus opening up the remainder of time to questions and answers. The first question addressed (surprise surprise) hip-hop. In particular, the question was an attempt to get the speaker’s opinion on Kenyon Farrow’s (in)famous critique of Asian Americans entitled: “We real cool? On Hip-Hop, Asian-Americans, Black Folks, and Appropriation.” In the article, Farrow describes attending an Asian American hip-hop conference, sitting in on a panel, and during a question and answer section basically lays out how Asian Americans are exploiting and appropriating hip-hop, similar to how whites have appropriated Jazz and Rock before them. In some ways, Farrow articulates the “model minority” identity of Asian Americans by lumping them with whites. In continuing his argument, Farrow’s comments receive a torrent of responses (by his standards violent and vehement). The comments range from age-old standards from “no one owns culture” to “you need to learn your history.” On the whole, instead of engaging with Farrow, the responses basically fell into a defensive mode of argument, usually by grasping onto the solidarities between Black and Asian Americans (comparing exclusionary immigration to slavery) or tokenism of the few Asian Americans who are quasi-recognizable in hip-hop. There is no doubt in my mind, and I hope Farrow’s, that there are Asian Americans that have been in involved in hip-hop’s history, and that Asian Americans have also experienced and struggled against American racism. But the problem is that Farrow’s critique was quickly sidestepped in favor of “bigger” and “more important” solidarities and celebratory histories of Asian Americans and African Americans working together. If one is to look at this from a different angle, one could easily find the discourses of multiculturalism flowing through these arguments. Still, I digress.

The keynote speaker, when faced with this question, and having just spent the last hour claiming the evils of multiculturalism, quickly sidestepped Farrow’s critique by saying there are “bigger” problems to talk about. In particular, the speaker focuses on social justice issues concerning the disparities between political-economic positions of races in the United States. He then asks to flip the question on Farrow: “How come Black commercial rappers aren’t putting money back into the Black community?” Again, the non-Black expert on hip-hop brings up the image of Black people exploiting their own. Blackface by Black people. I was amazed yet again. I looked around, thinking that no one could be actually buying this. Yet people, almost all identifying as Asian or Asian-American, were nodding in approval. I could tell they were all feeling very smug about knowing that they weren’t the model minority, in fact, they were possibly part of those that were keeping hip-hop “pure” because obviously Black people couldn’t handle the responsibility. Immediately I was reminded of all the white music afficianados and experts who knew what “true” music was (Miles, Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters etc.) and how they had recovered from the mistakes of the past and have saved the purity of the music. The fact that Oliver Wong PhD and Jeff Chang, both Chinese Americans, are currently some of the most well known internet “experts” on hip-hop should raise some critical flags. To add the proverbial salt to the wound, the remaining questions also concerned itself with the fetishization of Blackness by Asian Americans. This could have been an interesting critique of how Asian Americans benefit from Black identity and at the same time distance themselves from the negative surrounding discourses of Black identity, yet instead, it eerily recalls turn of the 20th century eugenics discourse, in particular how detrimental Blackness is to Asian Americans’ “true” identity. Furthermore, Blackness becomes more and more like a social disease that contaminates the pureness of Asian Americans, thus leading to a weakened identity and detrimental to any further development of an Asian American social movement.

From this I ask: why and how does this occur? Why is it that non-Black people, in particular Asian Americans and intellectuals, who “know their hip-hop,” can easily dismiss any complaint by Black people about appropriation? Farrow, in his article provides some answers, yet he, like Wong and Chang, tend to look at hip-hop in terms of morals, race in terms of institutions, and culture in terms of natural. I propose that the underlying fault in all of the discussions above is the assumption that culture exists somewhere outside of the political. In essence, the problem is the simultaneous depolitization and racialization of culture. In other words, if hip-hop is a Black culture and culture is somewhere outside of politics, Blackness, along with race and racisms becomes depoliticized. In saying this, one can easily sidestep the politics and power relationships that constitute hip-hop today, simply by following the current mainstream trend of delineating culture as an object outside of politics. Thus culture reveals the paradox of subjectivity that Foucault made famous, that the subject must subject themselves in order to subject others. In order to claim to be part of a culture, one must be subject to culture. Hence the individual becomes saturated by culture. And here lies the problem in most analyses of hip-hop. Asian Americans currently deny that culture is a political community they also deny that this political community belongs to any particular community or individual identity. In this case, community and identity means poor or working class Black community. Hip-hop is thus merely seen as an object, a structure that one can enter as one wishes.

Yet this entrance comes with a catch. Feeding into post-enlightenment ideas of meritocracy, hip-hop entrance must be earned. It is earned by working hard at the “four elements” (emceeing, b-boying, graf, djing) of hip-hop, battling others, gaining respect, and most of all by “knowing your history.” This meritocracy automatically discounts any Black person involved in hip-hop and in facts renders them suspect. For instance, I recently read an interview where Dasit (from the white rapper show) claimed that he has to work twice as hard as any Black person in order to gain the equivalent recognition. Also, when watching one of Jin’s freestyle battles, he regularly referenced how hard it is to be Chinese American in a Black crowd, implying in his rhymes how hard he has to work to overcome the racial bias and defeat his Black opponent. Of interest is that although non-Black emcees complain about working twice as hard, the only way they identify themselves as “making it” is through the recognition of Black individuals in the “hip-hop” community, usually done through displacing the current Black champion. At the same time, this makes any Black person who succeeds and does make money, as having an easier path, a natural effect of being simultaneously culturalized and racialized as Black. In addition this easier path leads to, in the eyes of many non-Blacks, massive rewards, all through the exploitation of the “natural” depoliticized culture known as hip-hop. Hip-hop is thus rendered a depoliticized originary object. Is there an original hip-hop culture? Black? Yes. Poor? Yes. Yet following the postmodern critique, hip-hop of the present is merely representation, a shadow of its original self. In this sense, it is no longer Black and no longer poor, rather it is the fetishized image of Black and urban poor, that circulates and parades around, claiming that is still original on MTV, BET, Myspace, and Youtube. Moreover, it is Black commercial rappers like Jay-z, 50 cent, and Puff that profit from the fetishization of hip-hop, Blackness, and the images of the urban poor. But, again, this creation of the present as mere representation, produces a real original, somewhere in the past, somewhere that others can quest to protect without looking at the actual present Black ghetto: welfare reform, AIDs, the crack epidemic, no child left behind, “gang violence”, police brutality, rape and misogyny, housing projects, and gentrification, to name a few. After all if hip-hop at this point is “merely” representation, a fabrication of its former self, doesn’t the quest to “protect” hip-hop culture lead to the further extricating of the art from the reality of social injustices toward American Black communities? And how far do other people of color and “hip-hop heads” feed into this depoliticization of hip-hop in order to further politicize their own culture and identity? These are questions I would like to ask of Jeff Chang, Oliver Wong, and any other Asian American scholar/intellectual/journalist who make careers and profits (both socially and economically) off of “knowing” what hip-hop really is, and what, at the same time, it isn’t.

RE: RE:

What I meant to say is that I agree with Foucault that, given the nature of power, it is impossible to create a "just" world, but that, nonetheless, I agree with Chomsky that we have to try. I realize that characterizing Foucault's beliefs about political action as "doomed to failure" is somewhat of an overstatement---but I do think that he is saying that no struggle for social justice can truly succeed because the actors in such a struggle cannot escape the reconstitution of structures of power. Chomsky, of course, does not agree with Foucault that justice is ultimately unattainable. Chomsky thinks that human universals of justice exist and can be discovered, that they are within our reach---ethics for him are much simpler than they are for Foucault, and they demand action. I agree with Foucault that we must deconstruct our conceptions of justice and ethics---but I think that I need to approach such deconstruction as a form of political action---deconstruction driven by the need to better understand and engage in the politics of power which constitute our world. And I haven't given up on the existence of a few core universal truths that are worth fighting for. To do so would be to give up on the existence of ethics on any level.

RE:

So I guess this really is the debate at the heart of my recent questions about ethics.

Chomsky: We can imagine a better world, a more just world, a world based in a universal human code of ethics, and we should work toward the actualization of that world.

Foucault: What is unjust in the world is performed through us, even the most benign of our institutions reenact structures of power, all claims to a universal code of human ethics are necessarily corrupted by this inescapable performance of injustice, and any action toward the actualization of a better world is freighted with this performance of injustice. (That is what he's saying, right?)

But I think they are both right. We're doomed to failure, but we are obligated to try anyway.

-R


Well I would not rush to say that both believe that we are doomed to failure. That is probably the reason why both are even debating this matter, not because it is a dead end, but rather they are searching for futures to struggle toward. At first glance, Chomsky and Foucault seem to be speaking two different intellectual languages: Chomsky the Cartesian and Foucault the genealogicist. For Chomsky the object reality, the future eden, exists somewhere in the future. Through technology, knowledge, and political struggle, "we" can all exist in a future where, according to Kropotkin, "all is for all." For Foucault, the knowledge, technology, and politics is in itself socio-historically constituted, beliefs in an anarcho-communist utopia is produced from this socio-historical context: in this instance the juridicial powers and rights birthed from the enlightenment. For Foucault, the object is merely a representation, not reality, and as time passes, as further ruptures occur, discourses of equality, justice, freedom will change, the very individual will be changed, thus, the future imagined in the present, may not be the "just" society in the future. For Foucault it is not enough to imagine a just society and strive toward it, but rather, the very ideas of just (and other enlightenment thought) must be deconstructed to find what ideas have been repressed and marginalized. In this sense, both do want a better future, but Chomsky judges the "ideal" future through the "ideal" now, while Foucault asserts that the "ideal" now will not be the future's ideal present. Still, looking at both, one can easily see how they are both trapped within enlightenment thought. Other forms of social structures, reason and progress, the ideas of self, and the very idea of time itself, have not been put through the critical ringers of the subaltern. Only when we begin to really critically look at the local, can we truly begin to deconstruct the universal.

Chomsky v. Foucault

So I guess this really is the debate at the heart of my recent questions about ethics.

Chomsky: We can imagine a better world, a more just world, a world based in a universal human code of ethics, and we should work toward the actualization of that world.

Foucault: What is unjust in the world is performed through us, even the most benign of our institutions reenact structures of power, all claims to a universal code of human ethics are necessarily corrupted by this inescapable performance of injustice, and any action toward the actualization of a better world is freighted with this performance of injustice. (That is what he's saying, right?)

But I think they are both right. We're doomed to failure, but we are obligated to try anyway.

Edward Said - The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations 1 of 5

Edward Said - The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations 2 of 5

Edward Said - The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations 3 of 5

Edward Said - The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations 4 of 5

Edward Said - The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations 5 of 5

Race, the Floating Signifier: Featuring Stuart Hall

I am first sad to say I was perusing, yet again, the youtube website. But I am happy and optimistic that I have found some rather inspiring clips. The first is on race, the second on media represenation. Both are by Stuart Hall. I would like to take this moment, to mention how I hope to someday in the future to attend one of his talks in person. And that the clip on race (especially his delivery), in particular, is extremely relevent to my own thinking.

Justice Vs. Power - Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 1

I was poking around youtube and came across these two clips.

Justice Vs. Power - Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 2

Homi Bhabha: Culture and Security

Public Programs

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture
Culture and Security
Homi Bhabha
6:30 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Founded in 1995 through the generosity of Phyllis Wattis, this series of lectures brings influential thinkers to SFMOMA. This spring's distinguished lecturer is Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Bhabha is one of the most incisive and eloquent theorists of cultural identity working today. His books include The Location of Culture, Nation and Narration, and the new work A Measure of Dwelling, which addresses the history of cosmopolitanism. Okwui Enwezor, dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, will speak in response to the lecture, drawing on his experience as curator of numerous exhibitions on the global politics of contemporary art.

Is your culture capable of killing me? For Bhabha, this question defines the West's attitude toward the rest of the world today. While in the past the concern was whether other cultures were capable of modernization (i.e., Westernization) or capitalism, the Western perspective in the 21st century is determined by a demand for security. Bhabha explores what is at stake given this new state of affairs and discusses the role of cultural practice in response.

$8 general; $5 SFMOMA members, students, and seniors. Tickets are available at the Museum (with no surcharge) or online.