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.