Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop

Abstract

This article examines how white youths culturally appropriate hip-hop by adhering to the demands of color-blind ideology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on racial ideology by analyzing how it is put into action by individuals in a specific local context in which race is salient. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.

Cultural inclusion, exclusion and the formative roles of museums

“…The US broadcast communications sector alone, with hourly audiences in the tens of millions, collects annual revenues (derived overwhelmingly from advertising messages) that exceed total annual expenditures for US primary and secondary education by $52 billion (Census Bureau 2006). The content and form of these mass media expressions exert a dominant influence among those audiences whose access to other forms of expression are wholly or largely restricted due to limited literacy, monetary cost, or by other implicit or explicit social proscriptions (Gee, Allen, and Clinton 2001;Hebdige 1979;Larson, Kubey, and Colletti 1989;Mahon 2000;Rodriquez 2006). While these cultural expressions may sometimes help shape attitudes about museums, they are more noteworthy for promoting aligned sets of culture practices as normative or conventional, including who or what belongs, or does not belong, in the museum.…”

Droppin’ Knowledge on Race: Hip-Hop, White Adolescents, and Anti-Racism Education

“…The minimal scholarship on Hip Hop and its white audience supports the notion that rap music has been limited in its capacity to mobilize racially just ideologies and politics in white youth (Hayes, 2004;Rodriguez, 2006). One study indicates Hip Hop may in fact hinder racial progress as many whites use stereotypical representations of black males and females in Hip Hop to legitimize discrimination against black Americans in both "personal" and "political behaviors" (Reyna, Brandt, & Viki, 2009, p. 374).…”

“…Rodriguez (2006) investigates the racial ideologies of politically conscious Hip-Hop fans primarily in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hayes (2004) examines how white Canadian youth in rural Ontario identified with Hip Hop to distinguish themselves from their racially and culturally homogenous home community.…”

Colorblind Islam: The Racial Hinges of Immigrant Muslims in the United States

“…He was a brown-skinned Arab, one of many at Al Amal who, like many in America, loves hip hop music and identifies with certain elements of black culture, especially a key element of much of the male student experience at Al Amal: basketball (O'Brien, 2017; see also Warikoo, 2011). Blackness, for these students, was associated with pleasure, and they felt, as do white people in a colorblind society (Rodriquez, 2006), that they could sample that pleasure without any moral problem or obligation. Blackness, for them, was also associated with African American identity (which was not represented at their school) rather than simple phenotype.…”