Race to Post: White Hegemonic Capitalism and Black Empowerment in 21St Century Black Popular Culture and Literature Regina N

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2013 Race to Post: White Hegemonic Capitalism and Black Empowerment in 21st Century Black Popular Culture and Literature Regina N. Bradley

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

RACE TO POST: WHITE HEGEMONIC CAPITALISM AND BLACK EMPOWERMENT

IN 21ST CENTURY BLACK POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE

REGINA N. BRADLEY

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2013 Regina N. Bradley defended this dissertation on May 14, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were:

David Ikard Professor Directing Dissertation

Maxine Jones University Representative

Maxine Montgomery Committee Member

Leigh Edwards Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

Dedicated to Eugene and Sara Barnett. Paw Paw and Nana Boo, “here me.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to begin my acknowledgements by shouting out my dissertation director

David Ikard. Dr. Ikard, I had no idea what I was in for when I knocked on your office door back in 2008. What an incredible journey! You helped me step my game up and transition from a graduate student to a scholar. Thank you for investing your time, your red ink, and your support into my project. The gangstallect is real! Many thanks to Maxine Montgomery, Maxine Jones, and Leigh Edwards for their time and insight at various stages of this dissertation. You are much appreciated. A special thank you also goes to Mr. Tim’m West for his kindness and generous feedback in the development stages of this dissertation.

The completion of this dissertation would not be possible without the support of the

Legion of Doom (those graduate students and junior scholars on the hunt). Many thanks to

Matthew Morrison, Matthew Davis, Pete Kunze, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Roopika Risam, and

Liana Silva for the extra push to get through a thought, a sentence, a chapter, and ultimately a dissertation.

I never would have made it without my blood and chosen family. To my Paw Paw, the late Eugene Barnett Jr., and grandmother, Sara Barnett, this dissertation is dedicated to you. In the spirit of how I used to greet you as a little girl, “here me.” This dissertation is also dedicated to my daddy, the late Reverend Reginald K. Barnett. To Mommy, Aunt Dee Dee, your hugs, prayers, and support GOT me here. Shouts to my blood brothers Isaiah Washington and Jeremy

Ingram and my chosen brothers Clifford Marcus, Warren Luke, Andre Mitchell, John Williams,

Brian Dawson, Ellis Dumas, and Jonathon Lawrence. To my sister circle, words do no justice in describing the immense love and gratitude I have for you all. To Ebony Washington, Erica

Bridley, Treva Lindsey, Tanisha Ford, Jessica Johnson, Bettina Love, Toni Arnold, Elizabeth

Mitchell, Courtney Holman, Brittany Manson, Gabrielle Merideth, Sheena Burrus, and Erika

Lawrence what else can I say but “I love you, sis. Thank you.”

Lastly and certainly not least, to my rock and love of my life Roy Bradley, baby, we did it! Thank you for loving me through the revisions, the tears, and the triumphs. I’m here because you are my guardian angel. On to the next one!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vi

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. HIP HOP’S MESSY ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS ...... 27

3. BLACK SATIRE, HIP HOP SENSIBILITY, AND RACIALIZED COMMON SENSE ... 51

4. BLACK CULTURAL TRAUMA, SLAVERY, AND HIP HOP SENSIBILITY IN THE KNOWN WORLD ...... 77

5. MESSY DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND THE DEATH OF TRAYVON MARTIN ...... 95

REFERENCES ...... 115

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 120

ABSTRACT

Race to Post examines the complex and varied negotiations of race and class in contemporary black popular culture from 1996 to the present. Examining a variety of texts, including rap music, novels, satirical performances, and new social media, I argue that these mediums reflect the obstacles to black empowerment and self-definition in this contemporary, ‘post-racial’ moment of American history. Specifically, I use rap music and African American satire to trouble black identity’s political and economic capital in authenticating discourses of blackness.

It begins from the recognition that as these media clear space for marginalized blacks to be seen and heard they also make black pain and “realness” commodities to be bartered and sold. I examine this contradiction through a Gramscian analysis of class and organic intellectualism. I argue that black popular culture exhibits the tensions blacks in postracial America currently face: how to be socially respected, responsible to their race, and “get paid.” In the context of the current post-civil rights moment (post 9/11, post-Hurricane Katrina, and post-Obama), popular culture reflects the contradictory and ironic politics and economics of the black popular imagination.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama marked for many a seismic change in race relations in the United States. Indeed, Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign slogan encouraged this exuberance, embodying the possibility, if not the inevitability, of a post-racial society.

While the notion that we live in a post-racial society has been popular with whites for over a century, Obama’s presidency endowed it with new life and ideological vitality. Even many black folks—who have longed viewed such claims of post-racialism as ridiculous—began to buy into the idea, questioning whether there was perhaps something to this post-racialism after all if a black man could be elected to the highest office in the land As the country lays witness to

Obama’s second presidential term, it has become undeniably clear from the ways in which blacks continue to experience stigmas and inhumane treatment that a far more complex set of racial variables were at play with a significant portion of whites embracing his candidacy. As existing racial inequalities, combined with the racial furor that has marked his candidacy, demonstrate – from the Henry Louis Gates’s controversy to the Trayvon Martin case – we continue to live in a radically raced society. This is not to say that Obama’s election to the presidency is insignificant where race relations are concerned. But rather, given the fact that black America continues to lose rather than gain ground on socioeconomic equality, his election reflects an adjustment to white hegemony; a shift in how white power is meted out rather than an unraveling of that power. David Roediger asserts that “if whiteness continues to confer substantial material advantages, and if large groups of Black and Latino people exist in grinding poverty, then the wholesale abandonment of older categories of racial categorization and identification seems unlikely” (11). Insofar as black self-determination is concerned, these new

1 and tricky racial politics demand that we rethink white hegemony and consider the extent to which variables such as gender, class, and social status inform the receptivity and experience of blackness.

My project, Race to Post, explores these complex and varied negotiations of race and class in contemporary black popular culture from 1996 to the present. Focusing on a variety of texts, including rap music, novels, satirical performances, and new social media, I argue that these mediums reflect the obstacles to black empowerment in the contemporary moment. While

Black America is, and has always been, extremely diverse, from sexuality to religious beliefs, racial oppression has historically dictated a level of solidarity around issues of race and racism.

Blacks born in what Mark Anthony Neal calls the “post-soul” era – the late 1960s through 1970s

– bucked this trend of solidarity partly out of rebellion for a failed civil rights campaign and partly to clear a space for their unique expression of blackness. Betram Ashe describes this post- soul phenomenon as “troubling blackness:”1 “they [artists and texts] worry blackness, they stir it up, touch it, feel it out, and hold it up for examination in ways that depart significantly from previous – and necessary – preoccupations with struggling for political freedom, or with an attempt to establish and sustain a coherent black identity” (614). I argue that this phenomenon of troubling blackness is as liberating as it is confining in a post-racial political environment that denies extant black suffering.

It is also important to note that contemporary black suffering is as gendered as it is political. For example, T. Sharpley-Whiting troubles considerations of black suffering by inquiring into the alignment between rap and patriarchy that is dominant in today’s Hip-Hop narratives, especially since “hip-hop artists speak to, and for, a generation very often described

1 For further discussion of post-blackness and post-soul aesthetics, please see Thelma Golden’s introduction, “Freestyle Catalog” (2001), “These –are – the – Breaks: a Roundtable Discussion on Teaching the Post-Soul Aesthetic” (AAR 41.4, 2007), and Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision (2011). 2 as alienated and disaffected” (4). Joan Morgan’s 1999 hip hop feminist manifesto When

Chickenheads Come Home to Roost calls for a critique of the unchecked impositions of black misogyny on black women’s bodies in hip hop. Further, Morgan exercises the useful theoretical tool Jose Munoz refers to as “disidentification” – the complicated critique of Hip-Hop rooted in one’s allegiance to the culture. It is useful to this project because of her call for a ‘gray area’ of critical, feminist thought that allows for the discussion of black gender politics while sustaining its value as a principal medium of black cultural expression at the turn of the 21st century.

Moragn avers, “[t]he keys that unlock the riches of contemporary black female identity…[lie in] the juncture where ‘truth’ is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of gray.”

Because a contemporary black experience does not exist in polarized narratives and is consumed by a multi-ethnic audience, Morgan’s framework is useful to this project because it destabilizes rap as a hardwired hypermasculine and hyper-commodified space. There is no simple parallelism between black cultural expression and the capitalist commodification that project its beat.

My contribution to constructing ‘the gray’ lies in the inclusion of how postracialism is promoted as a commodified lens of analyzing gender and power in rap. Imani Perry’s discussion of hip hop black masculinity as political discourse in Prophets in the Hood (2004) and Neal’s theorization of race “meta-identities” and masculinity in his 2005 New Black Man also provide lenses to redress intersections of capitalist Americanness contemporary black manhood in rap.

Of meta-identities, Neal writes:

the post-civil rights era has witnessed a relative explosion of what I call black-meta

identities, a diversity of black identities that under the logic of segregated America,

remained under wraps…while so many aspects of black identity have flourished in the

post-civil rights era, allowing for rich and diverse visions of blackness, black masculinity

has remained one aspect of black identity still in need of a radical reconstruction” (28).

Indeed, the hyper visibility of blackness as black manhood over the past two decades makes it appear knowable and accessible in white spaces, even as white empathy for black oppression continues to wane in the face of claims to post-racism. My project absorbs each of these critical lenses and diversifies current race and gender scholarship on popular culture by exploring how black complicity serves as a register of race and power in post-racial cultural production and capital.

With an eye toward developing critical models to think about black empowerment in this new and shifting post-racial climate, this study builds upon and extends black cultural and literary studies, and whiteness studies. It also uses Gramscian theoretical formulations of the popular as an interpretative model. Mapping out as he does the inextricable relationship between culture, politics, and materiality, Gramsci offers useful ways to think about the possibilities of black popular culture as a liberating enterprise; a medium through which the complexities of, say, racial profiling and structural inequalities can be exposed and critiqued. To this end, I argue that black popular culture, even with its capitalist impulses and commercialization, can be usefully read as what Gramsci calls an “organic intellectual space.” In other words, a dynamic which explains, in part, why blacks and other oppressed groups throughout the world continue to utilize it as a mode of protest and resistance. Resisting power domains on which one depends for social identity and validation is, of course, tricky business. As Ashe points out, we need to

‘trouble blackness’ as well as white hegemony in order to understand blacks’ attraction/repulsion toward white male capitalist domains of power.

Focusing on black popular culture in general and hip hop culture in particular, this study troubles blackness by thinking about the political and economic capital of authenticating discourses of blackness, both from the standpoint of clearing out a space for marginalized blacks to be seen and heard, and in ways that enable black pain and “realness” to become commodities to be bartered and sold. Contrary to popular belief, the black poor and the artists that represent them are acutely aware of this tension, even if they cannot fully express it. This dynamic plays out in hip hop music, for example, in the ways that rappers negotiate their subjects’ positions as spokespersons for the ‘hood and representatives of the (white) American Dream. Jay-Z and

Kanye West’s collaborative album Watch the Throne bespeaks this tension. Songs like “Niggas in Paris,” a celebration of international travel and wealth, are set against songs like “Murder to

Excellence,” which links uncritical wealth attainment to cycles of black violence and poverty.

Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) scathingly satirizes the popularity of “Niggas in Paris” with “Niggas in Poorest.” Bey’s sardonic production and delivery of the song is fundamentally expressed through his use of the social media outlet YouTube instead of mainstream networks like MTV or BET, which are readily available outlets for him as a widely known and successful rapper and actor. Bey criticizes the corporatized rap which Jay-Z and Kanye West represent in his parody of “Niggas in Paris” by sampling its instrumental accompaniment, intonation, and literal production. Further, Jay-Z and Kanye West are rumored to have used numerous makeshift studios around the world in order to keep the album from leaking to the public. Bey utilizes a similarly ‘homegrown’ studio setup in a modest living room or bedroom – much like those rappers who are still ‘trying to make it’ – while delivering lines about how the American dream is not reserved for blacks. The tug-and-pull of social responsibility and respectability embodied in raps like “Niggas in Paris” and “Niggas in Poorest” exists between paralleling registers of

5 self-definition and historicized white privilege. The above example demonstrates that black rappers are aware of the tensions between authenticating and capitalizing upon black pain while clearing out a space for speaking about the marginalization of a contemporary black experience.

Further, these songs help depict rap as a site for post-Civil Rights renegotiation of black empowerment within a capitalistic framework. Rap simultaneously thrives off of multiculturalism consumption while commodifying black identity.

Troubling blackness also means, on one level, speaking to the ways in which class informs and complicates the experience of race. In that way, it is important to note that a contemporary, post-Civil Rights black experience is situated between intersecting tensions of race and class. The black working-class is the epicenter of black identity in America’s popular imagination. In thinking about hip hop as the most recognizable and commodified form of black expression, its validity lies in sustaining ties to the inner city aesthetic, or what Nelson George refers to as the “ghettocentric imagination.” Much of this tension exists in the profitability of black working-class narratives. Returning to the wake of Obama’s election, class representations of blackness shifted to reflect a functioning and expanding black middleclass. That higher visibility of the black middleclass falsely suggests, like Obama’s election, that African

Americans have achieved a level of racial equality – that the country is near a new dawn of true post-racialism. Vijay Prashad usefully interrogates such vacuous claims of post-raciality. Riffing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness, Prashad avers, “the problem of the twenty- first century is the problem of the color blind.” Prashad further observes: “the problem is simple: it [colorblindness] believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice...the state we are told, must be above race” (38). Reading Americanness as

6 colorblind/post-racial is problematic because of the incessant – and increasingly stealth – treatment of race and class as taboo topics of discussion.

As a result of this type of public treatment, African Americans have replicated similar shifting frameworks of black identity in order to remain visible. For example, Michelle

Alexander deems this period of American history as “The New Jim Crow” era due to the alarmingly high rate of black incarceration in the United States. Journalist Soledad O’Brien facilitates CNN’s Race in America series, highlighting the differences in approaches and treatment of race realities in a 21st century United States social landscape. Ytasha Womack suggests instead of African Americans living in a post-racial American society, black Americans are Post Black. Journalist Touré suggests similar conventions in Who’s Afraid of Post Blackness?

(2011), opting instead to think about this moment of American history as an opportunity for

African Americans to remove themselves from the rigidity of black stereotypes and essentialism.

This negotiation of not only post-racialism but post-blackness pans in the form of what Trey

Ellis configures as a “cultural mulatto.” Introduced in Ellis’ 1989 essay “The New Black

Aesthetic,” Ellis writes, “[the cultural mulatto is] educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures…[one who] can also navigate easily into the white world” (235). The polarization of whiteness and blackness that once framed racial consciousness and interaction, Ellis avers, is no longer applicable to post-Civil Rights American culture. The danger of a ‘blended black’ cultural experience, Ellis warns, is a post-Civil Rights black complicity, “assimilatonist nightmares; neutered mutations instead of thriving hybrids. Trying to please both worlds instead of themselves, they end up truly pleasing neither” (242). The awkwardness of white voyeurism’s influence upon a post-Civil Rights experience is signified by racialized cultural mulatto figures like Jasmine DuBois from the Boondocks. These types of characters signify a danger of failing

7 to critically engage these undermining notions of blackness within a mixed racial audience. In

The Souls of Mixed Folk (2011) Michele Elam labels this type of awkwardness as a symptom of

“Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome.” The common thread among these varying degrees of racial anxiety is that each provides alternative outlets of cultural expression that speak to the significance of ethnic erasure in the United States.

This peculiar sidestep by whites and blacks alike of the significance of race and class warrants further attention due to its heavy presence in hip hop and satire. It parallels projections of Americans being a part of a post-Civil Rights legislative and social climate. The recent uproar over the murder of African American teen Trayvon Martin, for example, is particularly cogent in debunking any hopeful aspirations of America’s postracial status. Martin’s death at the hands of

“white Hispanic” George Zimmerman casts light on the limitations of post-racial thinking.2

Outrage, particularly from the political right, regarding President Obama’s remarks that “if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon” highlights the angst of black-white race relations. Adam

Mansbach argues much of that angst exists because whites grossly misappropriate ‘post-race’ for

‘post-racism:’ “Post race suggests, now without an air of self-congratulation, that we are moving towards an acceptance of the multi-faceted nature of identity. . .the problem is that post-race inevitably implies post-racism. To conflate the two ignores the very nature of oppression” (76; original emphasis).

The saliency of Martin’s death lies in the fact that it forcefully confronts historicized plateaus of race identity, class, and the American dream. His presence in a gated townhouse

2 Much of the anxiety encompassing George Zimmerman’s public perception is the tension that exists in labeling Zimmerman’s racial affiliation. Zimmerman’s father, Robert Zimmerman, Sr., chastised the media portrayal of his son, offering instead an alternative reading of his son as a “white hispanic.” That attempt to draw attention to Zimmerman’s otherness and not his whiteness points to a larger conversation about subtle cultural hegemonic privilege and the necessity of an othered experience to sustain privilege and social-cultural discourse. See Ruben Navarette’s “Trayvon Martin Killing Raises Loaded Racial Terms.” 8 community in Sanford, Florida initially suggests accessibility by blacks to privileges of whiteness, represented by the gated community. Martin’s death, however, is not simply grounded in dying in a gated community, but the public re-awakening to an understanding that Martin’s blackness nullifies class-based progress. Martin’s death illuminates the continued presence of racial profiling in the United States. As Tim’m West opines, “his [Martin’s] reduction to a ‘thug’ as a young black teenager with a hoodie overshadows class transcendence, perhaps speaking to any romantic promise that class equity alone would solve the pathology of racism.” The rupture of racial discourse triggered by events like Martin’s death reflects what Antonio Gramsci calls an organic crisis. An organic crisis occurs when “incurable structural conditions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them” (178). In reading Martin’s death as a symptom of a

Gramscian organic crisis in post-Civil Rights America, there is room to complicate intersections of class and enterprise in today’s social-political landscape. A Gramscian reading troubles conceptualizations of American identity that register how capitalism shapes American ideologies of racial, gendered, social, and political normalcy carried over from previous decades.

In an effort to gauge social and political agency, Gramsci suggests two sets of occurrences: organic and conjectural. Conjectural events “do not have any very far-reaching historical significance” and “give rise to political criticism of a minor, day-to-day character”

(177). Gramsci considers these events “blips” in a larger trajectory of political resistance and urgency. Conjectural crises give way to ‘organic phenomena,’ modes of actions that “give rise to socio-historical criticism, whose subject is wider social groupings” (177). In conceptualizing this moment of American history as problematically colorblind and postracial, Race to Post argues

9 that scholars can usefully read the Civil Rights and Black Liberation era of the mid 20th century as conjectural. Minorities’ participation in these movements falls under the premise that their intentions pushed forward racial integration and, by extension, racial equality. In this sense, racial tolerance translated as access to white privilege. This access to class privilege was in turn nestled in legislation and social practices considered inaccessible by blacks. The historical significance of the Civil Rights Movement, then, sets the United States up for consideration as a site of a colorblind and therefore post-Civil Rights cultural landscape. Instead of acknowledging the lingering presence of Jim Crow’s terror in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, Jim

Crow is conspicuously erased as socially irrelevant by whites and blacks. The dismissive nature of Jim Crow’s significance intersects subtler notions of white hegemonic privilege with black complicity and a glass ceiling of racial tolerance. Because blacks have uncritically bought into the romanticized Civil Rights Movement narrative, its suggested (un)timeliness restricts its reach to a conjectural crisis. Instead of catering strictly to minorities, which many believe is the premise of the Civil Rights era, post-Civil Rights black popular culture audiences represent the

‘wider social groupings’ posited by Gramsci as susceptible to organic crises. Thus, blacks and whites struggle to maneuver sliding representations of race, class, and identity put into play by

Civil Rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s.

Americans’ stumble through shifting representations of race and class is highlighted in the aftermath of Martin’s murder. This attempted display of collective (racial) solidarity reflects

Gramsci’s theorization of popular culture as a site of common sense. As Roger Simon points out,

“[Gramsci’s] common sense is the site on which the dominant ideology is constructed, but is also the site for resistance to that ideology” (27). The prevalence of Martin’s death in America’s public view confronts the commonalities of racial angsts with alternative readings of race and

10 class in the United States. This tension is readily apparent in the hoodie demonstrations, where

Blacks’ and whites’ participate by wearing hoodies, which became a popular tool of protesting

Martin’s death as a young black man. Hoodie demonstrations, as a reflection of popular beliefs, simultaneously emphasize the stigmatization of Martin’s black body while raising him up – through the hoodie – as a symbol of racial solidarity. Though white empathizers in Martin’s death share a similar political objective as their black counterparts, white privilege alters the political efficacy of their critique of embodied racism. As several white race studies critics rightly point out, whites who wear hoodies are not subjected to the same racial angst that accompanies black bodies who wear hoodies. Adam Mansbach avers,

I don’t dispute that white resentments should be addressed, if only because white

people will refuse to grapple with race unless they are allowed to centralize

themselves. But to begin such a discussion [about] the mythic National Dialogue

on Race – without acknowledging that structural racism is a cancer metastasizing

through every aspect of American life is impossible (75).

It is important for whites to address outrage about tragedies like Martin’s death, their angst, and the underlying implications of whites’ participation in structural racism in order to progress towards racial equality in the United States.

Similarly, the intraracial angst surrounding Martin’s death is equally perplexing, situating him between class ascendance (the ‘mountaintop’ of the black middleclass) and pathological black masculinity. The public expectation that Martin’s middle class standing exorcised him from violence reserved for working-class black men thrust him into scrutiny as an inopportune

‘poster child’ of racial violence. Martin’s death and similarly racialized events trouble how intersections of class and race shape social-political and racial identity within a sliding American

11 culture-scape. Framing postracialism as an organic crisis, then, presents this time period as a far- reaching and therefore organic event in the trajectory of political agency and racial empowerment. Thus, this project addresses postracialism as an outgrowth of white hegemony and uses black hip hop and contemporary black satire as a site of organic intellectualism in late

20th and 21st century black popular culture in the face of a post-racialism that denies and undermines its value.

In the United States social-cultural framework, the ‘incurable structural conditions’ are frequently associated with rigid definitions of white hegemonic privilege. A primary crux of this project is the understanding that white hegemonic privilege – privilege commonly believed to be restricted to whites – is representative of sliding social-cultural accessibility. Some blacks, too, benefit from such privilege. This type of “honorary whiteness,” as coined by Eduardo Bonilla-

Silva, is nestled in the understanding that minorities’ fate – racially and economically – is tethered to white power: “the dissipation of ethnicity will not be limited to ‘honorary whites,’ as members of the ‘collective black’ strata strive to position themselves higher on the new racial totem pole based on degrees of proximity or closeness to whiteness” (282). Honorary whiteness is the manifestation of colorblind racism Bonilla-Silva addresses in his discussion of race in a post-Civil Rights social climate. As Bonilla-Silva defines in Racism without Racists (2006), colorblind racism “explains contemporary racial inequality as the results of nonracial dynamics”

(2). Particularly striking in Bonilla-Silva’s discussion of colorblind racism is the sustained yet subtle presence of white supremacy as a framework of current racial identities. Because

“whiteness [is] stretched out and…seemingly inclusive” colorblind racism can guise itself as postracialism. If it is true, as Mansbach argues, that for whites postracial is synonymous with post-racist (as in, we now live in a post-racist society), Bonilla-Silva’s observations shape a

12 framework for understanding the complexities of black popular culture as a site of racialized

Americanness.

In looking at black popular culture as a site of racialized Americanness, it important to note how this framework is exaggerated in order to call attention to sliding representations of

(anti)racism within American identity. One such subtle subversion of this colorblind racism seen in satire is the popularity of ‘whiteface,’ or black artists performing as white people. The overstating of whiteness using chalky white makeup and light-colored contacts is a visual subversion of honorary whiteness and blacks’ investment in white hegemonic privilege. George

Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) is one of the earlier manifestations of whiteface as a satirical critique in 20th century black culture. Schuyler’s plotline surrounds the invention of a machine that turns black people white. Schuyler’s humorous and, at times, scathing confrontation of blacks’ and whites’ mutual investment in white supremacy suggests it is absurd. In his one-man show Black Ben the Blacksmith or Prison Play (1968), Richard Pryor seemingly picks up where

Schuyler left off by performing as all white characters. Particularly striking in Pryor’s performance is his redressing of whiteface as a sonic construction of race. Instead of physically

‘dressing up’ to play white, Pryor uses his voice to dictate whiteness. In doing so, Pryor arguably carved the niche for post-Civil Rights satiric renditions of race and identity. His comedic successors Eddie Murphy, Shawn and Marlon Wayans, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron McGruder all use whiteface as a staple in their explorations of whiteness. These ‘post-Pryor’ renditions of whiteness and privilege in the black community, especially their sonic implications, are in turn referenced by McGruder in his animated series The Boondocks. McGruder employs black actors

Charlie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson to voice the white characters Ed Wuncler III and Gin

Rummy, respectively. McGruder’s casting of a black comedian and actor as white characters

13 speaks to McGruder’s awareness of the taboo surrounding implications of race while critiquing the complicity of African Americans and white privilege. Murphy and Jackson, while culturally identifiable as African American, provide a “pass” for Ed and Rummy’s characters to repeatedly use racially charged language like “nigga.” These vocal performances of blackness suit pathological and violent expectations of blackness by whites while avoiding the complexity of black humanity and manhood.

1.1 Whiteness Studies and Troubling Black Identity

The burgeoning field of whiteness studies has usefully thrown light on the crucial importance of race to the dominant group. As whiteness is bound up with normalcy, the primacy of race and blackness to white identity is not often apparent in the public domain, thus making it appear that race is an issue that only concerns blacks and people color. Whiteness studies reveal the fact that whiteness is actually socially constructed rather than biologically-determined. White superiority as a concept, then, requires an oppositional construction in black inferiority to give it meaning and social capital. My project looks to pick up this conversation with an at length analysis of how white consumerism informs and is negotiated in this particular moment of black consciousness. This question is particularly critical to expanding hip hop criticism because of the shift in how hip hop culture and, more specifically, rap music is consumed and absorbed as a site of self-definition and black empowerment. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993) will be particularly important to my critique of how black popular culture signifies on post-racialism because it lays the foundation for critical analysis of whiteness in American literature from a nonwhite perspective. Morrison labels this investigation of blackness in American culture as “American Africanisms,” the “ways in which a nonwhite,

Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or personae was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses of this fabricated presence served” (6). By presenting blackness as “a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American,” Morrison posits that whiteness is validated by the nonwhite presence (38). White authors write around black realities, opting instead to substitute their own understandings of the black experience from a buffered perspective that suits the needs of their writing. By acknowledging the humanity of people of color, writers are forced to make whiteness visible, which complicates negotiations of blackness.

American Africanisms is useful in thinking about current popular cultural expressions like rap because of the exaggerated presence and performance of black identity. White anxieties displaced upon the imagined, manufactured black bodies found in rap spill over into treatment and realities of black bodies today. Acts of hyper-pathological blackness seen in rap narratives – celebration of violence, death, and the criminalization of the black male body – signify an awareness of white paranoia. These acts also register as a mutual investment in white supremacy by blacks and whites as a capitalistic and cultural privilege.

An ability to reference the emerging and growing field of whiteness studies enables my efforts to pinpoint the sliding representation, yet steady significance, of whiteness as a touchstone of American race and culture politics. In other words, whiteness studies allow this project to not only complicate the contemporary black experience, but ‘trouble whiteness’ to understand sliding negotiations of white privilege in a post-Civil Rights social climate. For example, in Whiteness Visible (1998) Valarie Babb highlights the cultural capital of whiteness, writing that “whiteness is more than an appearance; it is a system of privileges accorded to those with white skin” (9). George Lipsitz’ The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1997) and

Richard Dyer’s White (2001) pronounce that the “worth” of whiteness is endowed by a bridged

15 understanding of white normalcy and nonwhite desire. Dyer astutely points out how “whites must be seen to be white, yet whiteness as race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power by being unseen” (45). This divestment, as Lipsitz observes, is critical to the survival of white hegemonic privilege: “whiteness dares not speak its name, cannot speak in its own behalf, but rather advances through a color-blind language radically at odds with the distinctly racialized distribution of resources and life chances in U.S. society” (236). American hegemony, while propagated to be a cultural indicator of whiteness or the lack thereof, reflects a complex matrix of power with variables not exclusive to racial identity (e.g., class). This necessary collapse of dominant hegemonic discourse illuminates the reality that nonwhites too participate and are invested in cultural production and appropriation.

Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists (2006) picks up Babb’s observations and posits that whites’ fear of open racial identity and politics stems from an intricate need to maintain the normalcy of white supremacist discourse: “white racial views…[are] a racial ideology, a loosely organized set of ideas, phrases, and stories that helps whites justify contemporary white supremacy” (208). Further, in White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (2001),

Bonilla-Silva supplies a useful framework in understanding a new racism that frames contemporary American society. He supplies five elements of America’s new racism structure:

“the increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and practice; the avoidance of racial terminology and the ever growing claim by whites that they experience ‘reverse racism’; the elaboration of a racial agenda over political matters that eschews direct racial references; the invisibility of most mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality; and, finally, the rearticulation of some racial practices characteristic of the Jim Crow period of race relations” (90). Bonilla-

Silva’s first two elements are especially useful to this project. Applying each of Bonilla-Silva’s

16 factors to commercial rap music presents rap as a space where whites fetishize blackness but maintain a separate identity from it – a privilege not readily available to blacks, especially black men. Because rap music is maintained and commodified as an African American-based culture, white patrons are considered displaced and therefore must prove their worth. As a result of this tension, many white hip hop fans consider themselves to be discriminated against because of their whiteness. Bakari Kitwana’s Why White Kids Love Hip Hop (2005), Tricia Rose’s The Hip

Hop Wars (2008), and Michael P. Jeffries’ Thug Life (2011) each tackle these concerns of

‘reverse racism’ in hip hop. Still, how does one address Eminem, whose talent and working class background provide him a ‘black card’ even when admitting to using racial slurs in his early raps? Without dismissing his angsts or, as Mansbach writes, “white resentment,” how does

Eminem help rap artists and fans trouble understandings of post-Civil Rights blackness?

Bonilla-Silva suggests that in order to dismantle white supremacist notions of identity in the 21st century there needs to be an acknowledgement of its existence and mutual investment by whites and blacks within America’s social hierarchy. There is a need to define and identify characteristics of white supremacist discourse from a viewpoint outside of the white perspective.

“If dominant groups are able to create a simulation of reality or ‘hyper-reality,’” Bonilla-Silva asserts, “dominated groups must counter it with their own vision of reality and utopia” (203).

One way to counter this colorblind propaganda forced upon people of color, as Bonilla-Silva dictates, is the subversion of white cultural hegemony through mediums of black popular culture.

The angst associated with this current moment of American history exists within a cultural vacuum fixated on the fringes of the American public sphere. Ironically, America’s popular culture exists in a vacuum which fails to acknowledge the sliding social-cultural landscape in which minorities, especially black Americans, are addressed in their projected erasure.

In no place is this dismissal of the complexities of the African American experience and its associated agency (or perceived lack thereof) grappled with more prevalently than rap music culture. Byron Hurt’s 2006 documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes wrestles with the portrayal of black manhood within rap. Hurt interviews multiple rap stars like Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli, and JadaKiss, as well as unknown and unsigned rappers. Notably, the unsigned rappers’ verses typically spoke about inflicting violence upon each other as measures of power and success.

When Hurt asked the rappers why their lyrics are restricted to violent and misogynistic discourse, many expressed belief that these narratives were what corporate labels wanted to hear.

Similar sentiments were echoed in the documentary Fade to Black during a scene in which rapper Jay-Z talks to an unsigned rapper in his studio while recording his own album, The Black

Album. Playing into this image, and thus normalizing blackness and black manhood as virulent, is profitable in hip hop. Accommodating black pathological narratives is thereby rewarded and signified in the belief that ’getting signed’ to a label means access to money and, ultimately, white privilege. In turn, being afforded such privilege equates visibility and thus relevance. This

‘honorary whiteness,’ then, resonates as not only racial but capitalistic complicity. As Jelani

Cobb astutely observes, “a rapper without a record deal is a commercial without a time slot” (9).

These examples demonstrate paralleling discourses of visibility, enterprise, and race pertinent to this study. They provide a lens for observing how rap troubles black complicity to capitalism as an obstacle to the continuation of needed Civil Rights discourse, and where racial inequalities are still very much evident.

As I will demonstrate in this study, black popular culture is simultaneously indicting and celebratory of status quo notions of race and racism. Because of its position as a conflictive space of expression and profit, hip hop culture provides one such indispensable medium for

18 identifying and configuring discourse that speaks to a slippery post-Civil Rights social-cultural landscape and political climate. The value in considering black popular culture as a conflictive space is its ability to gauge shifting ideals of Americanism while remaining positioned within

American capitalism. In The Hip Hop Wars (2008) Tricia Rose masterfully demonstrates the complications of hip hop as a cultural and capitalist medium. Rose writes, “[n]o black musical form before hip hop – no matter how much it ‘crossed over’ into mainstream American culture – ever attracted the level of corporate attention and mainstream media visibility, control, and intervention that characterizes hip hop today” (7). Moreover, Rose offers a way to think about how white consumerist impulse that complicates commercialized critiques of white supremacy:

We have the opportunity to use the current state of commercial hip hop as a catalyst

to think with more care about the terms of cross-racial exchanges and the role of

black culture in a mass-mediated world…According to some critics, if we just got

rid of hip hop and the bad behavior it supports (so the argument goes), ‘they’d all

do better in school, and structurally created racism and disadvantage would

disappear like vapor. This hyper-behavioralism – an approach that overemphasizes

individual action and undersestimates the impact of institutionalized forms of racial

and class discrimination – feeds the very systematic discrimination it pretends isn’t

a factor at all (7-8).

Rap’s connection to enterprise and the American public imagination calls for a redress of the discourses that frame its existence. Initially, using Gramscian notions of intellectualism acknowledges black bodies’ humanity and capability of thought. This method defers historicized connections of blackness and inferiority while looking at black ‘popular’ intellectuals as necessary in scripting the American experience. Gramscian models of intellectualism position

19 black popular culture as a tool for recognizing shifting intersections of power, race, and the 21st century American identity. Gramsci’s discussion of agency and organic intellectualism is apropos to redressing (black) American popular cultural discourse because Gramsci acknowledges class and enterprise as primary signifiers in identity and political agency. In a word, the type of intellectualism necessary to treat the messy intersections of race and class as seen in black popular culture is rooted in capitalist discourse. This type of ‘capitalist intellectual’ provides room for reconsiderations of blackness in hypercommodifed spaces like rap music, where black moguls are complicit with white business executives. The presence of moguls like

Jay-Z, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Russell Simmons pushes for a reassessment of black investment in power frameworks dictated within and throughout rap as an industry and as an outlet of contemporary black identity.

1.2 Black Cultural Studies and Troubling Contemporary Black Popular

Imagination

Because of the mutual investment of blacks and whites in media like hip hop and black contemporary satire, Gramsci’s discussion of the popular as “one’s conception of the world [that] is not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic” provides room for discrepancies of racial stereotypes and lived experience to coexist. When this concept occurs, “one belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass human groups” (324). Gramsci’s theorization of the popular and liberation theory is not overlooked in black cultural studies. This project utilizes these critiques to historicize constructions of black empowerment in the 20th century white

American imagination. Although in conversation with these theorists, Race to Post furthers this

20 body of criticism in order to identify the more ambiguous social-political obstacles previously unrecognized in late 20th and 21st century American racial discourse.

As early as 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois acknowledged blacks’ multiplicity as double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois writes, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (3). He subverts otherness to demonstrate the oddity of white supremacist discourse in

American society instead of the widely consumed notion by whites (and blacks) of African

Americans as peculiar. James Baldwin’s explosive 1963 critique The Fire Next Time speaks to these degrees of racial disjointing in the United States, in that “the American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors” (114). Baldwin’s observations suggest that the lack of discourse available to describe the African American experience is due to the inability to frame these experiences from the perspective of the oppressed. Thus, Baldwin asserts, “white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed” (35).

Yet it is Ralph Ellison’s bitingly sarcastic questioning of cultural exposure and interaction from his 1977 essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” that furthers the interrogation of popular culture to address race relations. Ellison uses his own experiences as a musician to speak to social respectability and responsibility within music as a multicultural medium: “What, by the way, is one to make of a white youngster who, with a transistor radio, screaming a Stevie Wonder tune, glued to his ear, shouts racial epithets at black youngsters

21 trying to swim at a public beach?” (37). In that way, Ellison questions how racial politics within a popular – and commodified – cultural medium like black American music highlights the costs of acknowledging the perpetuation of white supremacist discourse by whites and nonwhites.

Thus, black complacency further complicates the black popular imagination as a gauge of the post-Civil Rights social climate, with many African Americans opting to be uncritical of their identities and plights by accepting their blackness at face value.

In the 1991 Time interview, “The Pain of Being Black,” Toni Morrison’s description of

American race relations further speaks to how these conflicting ideals of race continue to be in the foreground of American identity at the end of the 20th century. Morrison suggests that although there is a push for race to be a subtle implication of Americanness, it remains an anchor in how the United States functions and sees itself. Because the worth of the ideal of

Americanism continues to be anchored in race, Baldwin’s question of race and power is also apropos here: “how can one, however, dream of power in other terms than in symbols of power?” (109). These symbols of power are heightened in contemporary black popular culture. It captures shifting markers of race, class, and power that the American public wishes to subdue.

Because Americans consider popular culture a ‘safe space’ of entertainment bound by multiculturalism, the monetary and social-political success of shows like comedian Dave

Chappelle’s Chappelle’s Show or ego trip’s The (White) Rapper Show indicate a mutual interest in subduing race as a mode of entertainment by blacks and whites. This shared imagination of multiple groups of Americans suggests a literal and figurative investment in race narratives as disjointed from race realities in the United States. Pairing black cultural studies with Gramsci’s definition of the popular, therefore, allows room for the murkiness of capitalistic black popular culture to still exist as a site of criticism.

Gramsci provides pivotal working models for developing discourse needed for discussion of this moment of black cultural expression and production emerging through its absorption as a capitalistic enterprise. Engaging popular culture as a site of capitalism opens up discussions of class and identity as not only economic but cultural currency. Gramsci’s egalitarian defining of intellectualism – “all men are philosophers” – pivots on the understanding of intellectual engagement as ‘technical’ and natural (9). The capability for anyone to be an intellectual creates space for both consumers and producers of (black) American popular imagination to engage in constructions of identity and agency. This identity construction is especially poignant in establishing frames of popular intellectualism necessary for deconstructing this current moment of black American cultural identity and expression as is reflected by its hip hop and satire.

Gramsci’s disclaimer about the construction of intellectuals is particularly poignant to understanding the nature of intellectuals framing this project: “the process of creating intellectuals is long, difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersals and regroupings, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried” (334). Situating struggle and class as the epicenter of blackness in the United States weighs heavily upon construction of mass-consumed black (popular) narratives. The pressure of black artists and performers to ’keep it real’ runs parallel with the dismissal of possibly losing their lived experiences. Investing in the industrialized and frequently stereotypical realities of African American life forces performers to exist between social respectability, race responsibility, and monetary compensation. These types of juxtapositions faced by artists push forward a complicated intellectual agenda with popular culture and the American imagination.

This project is divided into four chapters. Each section puzzles through the problems and possibilities of using black popular cultural mediums to understand blacks’ complex humanity

23 and raced/classed subjectivity in the 20th century on the one hand, and to interrogate white hegemony and blacks’ complicity therein on the other. Chapter One considers the political utility of viewing rappers as organic intellectuals within a commercial framework. Here, I call attention to the inherent messiness of even the most earnest of political engagements. That is, I de-romanticize the idealist nature of Gramsci’s theoretical formulation to make room for consideration of the organic intellectual within hip hop as a usefully flawed individual rather than a fully self-actualized intermediary that can maintain an objective distance for cultural contamination. For this reason, I focus the chapter on the late Tupac Shakur, an iconic rapper that initially embodied this construction of “hip hop messy organic intellectualism” in its current commercialized form. Though Shakur was deeply invested in the glitz and glamour of

Hollywood and stardom, he remained politically committed to the plight of the urban black poor.

His artistry reflected the political tensions of being an organic intellectual with investments in status quo power.

In conversation with Tupac Shakur is Jay-Z and Kanye West’s collaboration Watch the

Throne (2011). Where Shakur represents the burgeoning crossover popularity of rap music to a mainstream white audience, Jay-Z and West are the epicenter of commercial rap at the height of its popularity in the 21st century. The collaboration Watch the Throne updates the trajectory of commercial rap as a space of intellectual engagement and agency by blending exploits of materialism – expected concepts of commercial rap music – and social commentary.

Focusing on McGruder’s animated series The Boondocks and Paul Beatty’s The White

Boy Shuffle (1996), Chapter Two maps out the trajectory of how these satirists signify upon failed promises of the Civil Rights Movement using hip hop aesthetics and Gramsci’s notion of common sense as a critical touchstone. Gramsci defines common sense as a site where

a conception of the world…is not to be conceived solely as the ‘individual’

elaboration of systematically coherent concepts but also and above all as a

cultural battle to transform the popular ‘mentality’ and to diffuse the

philosophical innovations which will demonstrate themselves to be ‘historically

true’ to the extent that they have become concretely – i.e. historically and socially

– universal (348).

Common sense, then, is a collective and frequently conflictive understanding of how the world works. Pairing this concept with hip hop aesthetics, racial common sense becomes a sliding site of commodifiable notions of racial tolerance grounded in what I theorize as hip hop sensibility. I argue that contemporary black satire uses this conceptualization of common sense within hip hop to confront shifts in black marginalization and complicity.

Chapter Three interrogates static notions of cultural hegemonic privilege and whiteness in Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003). Offering a hip hop reading of Jones’ novel, this chapter maps out shifting negotiations of slavery and black cultural trauma as commodities in this moment of American imagination. The Known World serves as a case study of black oppression and black complicity. It compels the reader to confront how status and class inform the lived experience of blackness. These challenges parallel current navigations of commercial hip hop. I argue that grounding The Known World in hip hop sensibility provides a new historicist critique of black oppression that is framed by a present understanding of racial oppression to accentuate how African Americans participate and benefit from the commodification and appropriation of blackness. Both hip hop and Jones’ novel deal with the simultaneous collapse of ‘traditional’ white supremacist discourse as a point of privilege and the mutual investment of blacks into such discourse in order to be represented. I argue that these

25 discourses reimagine racial identity of the past because of the hyperawareness of how class informs an understanding of race politics and culture in the present.

Finally, Chapter Four investigates shifting notions of activism and post-Obama black intellectual empowerment through a case study of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Using examples from social media like news reports, blog posts, Facebook, and twitter, this chapter posits that the crux of teasing out such implications of blackness and class is how Martin’s death has galvanized alternative forms of protest through intersecting modes of popular culture. Of particular interest to this section is how social media shapes this activism: in what ways has social media spurred new modes of protest that reflect the angst of a postracial United States?

CHAPTER TWO

HIP HOP’S MESSY ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS

“Ultimately the legitimate potential that hip-hop artists possess as ‘urban griots turned Gramscian intellectuals’ is consistently challenged and undermined by the needs of a transnational economy” Mark Anthony Neal, “Critical Noire”

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina denotes yet another shift in America’s post-Civil

Rights narrative. Arguably the first major disaster in the wake of 9/11, Katrina brought sharply into focus an interrogation of the monolithic narrative being propagated in the American popular imagination. Katrina re-focused race as a prominent trope of American identity and privilege.

Nowhere was this devastating impact better highlighted than the storm’s epicenter, New Orleans,

Louisiana. Although under the leadership of African American mayor Ray Nagin and known for its creolization of cultures, post-Katrina New Orleans jarred Americans’ attention from fears of terrorist attacks abroad and turned them inward to the racial terrors taking place in the American south. Much of this redirected attention is due in part to the media portrayals of Katrina victims.

Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado’s study “Loot or Find” critiques what they label as racial frames of post-Katrina media coverage. They write: “the tragedy of Katrina created a rupture in the racial-progress narrative that had all but erased the suffering of poor black people from the political landscape. . .Katrina – or the facts the public observed about its effects –disrupted our tendency to frame black disadvantage in terms of cultural deficiency” (original emphasis; 92-93).

The return of black poverty to the forefront of national attention in the form of photos and television coverage suggested blacks as “looters,” bestial, and violent because of horrific stories

27 of rape and murder in New Orleans. The visual (and sonic) impositions of race and class in framing a post-Katrina New Orleans suggests hypersensitivity to race, rather than any movement towards an implied post-racial society. Indeed, photos of impoverished blacks on the tops of buildings crying out for help and the negative social-cultural connotations of black displacement to neighboring cities like Houston and Atlanta reduce black poverty to a pathological corner of the American popular imagination. Harris and Carbado’s theorization of racialized frames of the popular imagination are useful in understanding the complexities of the United States’ postracial social-political agenda and black liberation: “As a result of racial frames, black people are both visible (as criminals) and invisible (as victims). Racial frames both capture and displace us – discursively and materially. More than shaping whether we see black people as criminal or innocent, perpetrator or victim, these frames shape whether we see black people at all” (103).

These racialized cultural frames triggered by Katrina extend into commercial rap music.

Consider, for example, rapper Kanye West’s treatment of Katrina in front of a national audience.

On September 2, 2005 West appeared on an NBC benefit telecast for Hurricane Katrina victims.

West, emotionally charged and going off script, blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Early in his rapping career and fresh off the critically acclaimed sophomore album Late Registration, West was then thrust into the public eye as a seemingly budding political pundit. His popularity and visibility as a rapper automatically translated his concerns as speaking for all African-Americans. West, however, shies away from being labeled a leader, quickly disclaiming his outburst as a personal opinion. Aside from Hurricane Katrina marking yet another shift in the trajectory of American post-Civil Rights identity, West’s comments suggest a refocusing of commercial rap to speak about social-political and racial inequalities affecting people of color. Whether West’s post-Katrina candor marked rap as what Chuck-D

28 terms “CNN for black people” was undercut by his backtracking, which suggested his awareness of the potential consequences of politically racialized statements given his market success.

West’s initially blistering comments towards the Bush administration’s handling of

Katrina’s aftermath positions him both as a producer of black cultural expression and a mediator of said blackness. In this sense, West upholds the idealistic Gramscian model of an organic intellectual, giving voice and political agency to the working class. Yet West’s awareness of Hip

Hop as a commercial space warrants further discussion in teasing out the tensions between political agency and enterprise. A palpable tension exists between rappers functioning as black social-political pundits and as endorsed corporate lackeys.

With an eye toward thinking about hip hop as a framework of contemporary black empowerment, this chapter teases out the ways rappers grapple with conflicting impulses of social consciousness and enterprise. I propose that rappers navigate both sets of discourses, maintaining an awareness of their positions of hypervisibility as entertainers and gatekeepers of blackness. Successful commercial rappers are what I theorize as “messy” organic intellectuals, double agents of social commentary and commercial glamour. Their investment in both social responsibility and commodification constitute a useful “flawed-ness” that opens up space to engage commercial rap as a site of political agency and black empowerment. Considering rap’s crossover and commercial success, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that rap identifies solely with the African American experience. The challenge for rappers today is considering whether or not they want to be considered touchstones of black liberation in a moment where profit, not protest, is highly regarded.

2.1 Contextualizing Hip Hop’s Messy Organic Intellectuals

In its current and corporatized form, rap is what Greg Tate refers to as a “hip-hop marketplace,” a space where black narratives and identities are shaped, manufactured, and sold.

In addition to being a marketplace for commodified black experiences, commercial rap serves as a contemporary portal to blackness for nonblack audiences. I use Tricia Rose’s definition of commercialism from her study The Hip Hop Wars to contextualize my understanding of commercial rap: “the term commercial is meant to illuminate the significant role of corporate and mainstream American cultural imperatives in shaping the direction and content of what is most visible and most highly promoted in hip hop” (242). In this sense, commercial rap offers a roadmap for whites to understand contemporary black life. Inundated with lyrics about race and materialism – being ‘hoodrich’ or ‘ghettofabulous’ – blackness is packaged as a uni-dimensional, easily digestible experience. Unlike other black cultural media, rap is both a sonic and visual representation of a post-Civil Rights experience. What a consumer hears as black in lyrics and instrumentation is re-affirmed by what one may see on reality television as hip hop.3

Because of its crossover success in the 1990s, hip hop is positioned as not only a marker of a post-Civil Rights black (cultural) experience, but as a deemed signifier of multiculturalism in America. The challenge in establishing commercial rap music as a register of postracial identity lies within acknowledging the fault lines of rap as an intellectual and capitalistic discourse. Todd Boyd’s argument of rap’s purpose as a social-political tool and commodity provides useful context in understanding the messiness of commercial intellectualism in rap:

3 The popularity of reality shows starring rappers and their affiliates, like Love and Hip Hop, Run’s House, T.I. and Tiny: a Family Hustle, Ice and Coco, and Family Hood, usher in a new dimension of the hip hop visual aesthetic. The rise of a hip hop reality television genre replaced the previous popularity of music videos, once the only (limited) space where rappers were visible and acknowledged to exist. With the success of these types of hip hop reality shows comes a juxtaposition of personal experience and capitalizing their brand as rap stars. The juggling of these performance scripts signifies the increasingly gray area of rap as both a commodity and blueprint for the trajectory of a post-Civil Rights black experience. 30

rap represents the emotional range of urban, mostly male existence. At the same time, the

commodifying impulses of the music industry have opened a space for selling cultural

products that in their very construction undermine the structure that distributes them. It is

well known that rap’s massive popular audience consists of dominant and marginal

audiences. Nor is it a revelation that the capitalistic courting of this massive audience at

some level solidifies the music’s political message. However, there is a point at which

radical political discourse meets the demands of the marketplace and the two merge. The

space between the points where radical political discourse can critique dominant culture

and dominant culture becomes financially viable through the selling of this contrary

discourse is the only available space for a reasoned understanding of contemporary

political culture (327).

I argue that hip hop’s messy organic intellectuals exist in this space of critiquing and engaging dominant culture for profit. The ability for these individuals to exist between often conflicting discourses of commercialism and consciousness carves a niche for understanding the sliding dynamics of race and enterprise currently in place. Exchanging postracial-as-profit ideals, no matter how convincingly marketed, remains centered in racialized cultural currency. Tricia Rose discusses these tensions at length in The Hip Hop Wars, providing context for the conflicting impulses of commercialism and realness within this current moment of mainstream rap music.

She points out commercial rapper’s narratives and their co-opting of realness as an accessible yet commodified ‘truth to power’ discourse:

This assumption – that rappers are creating rhymed autobiographies – is the result of both

rappers’ own investment in perpetuating the idea that everything they say is true to their

life experience. . .and the genre’s investment in the pretense of no pretense. That is, the

genre’s promoters capitalize on the illusion that the artists are not performing but

‘keeping it real’ – telling the truth, wearing outfits on stage that they’d wear in the street

(no costumes), remaining exactly as they’d be if they were not famous, except richer. Part

of this ‘keeping it real’ ethos is a laudable effort to continue to identify with many of

their fans, who don’t see their style or life experiences represented anywhere else, from

their own point of view; part of it is the result of conformity to the genre’s conventions. It

makes rappers more accessible, more reflective of some of the lived experiences and

conditions that shape the lives of some of their fans. And it gives fans a sense that they

themselves have the potential to reach celebrity status, to gain social value and prestige

while remaining ‘true’ to street life and culture, turning what traps them into an imagined

gateway of success (38).

In thinking of rappers as messy organic intellectuals one can posit how boasts of materialistic wealth and complicity heard and performed in today’s commercial rap co-exist with socially conscious rap in the same space. Hip hop’s messy intellectualism is the negotiating of contradictory impulses of enterprise and social consciousness. Arguing that “there is no inherent correlation between good music and respectability and good music and good politics,” Imani

Perry further contextualizes the framework of commercial rap as a messy site of intellectualism.

She argues that commercial rap exists within a frequently shifting “reunion space,” a site where sliding representations of race and culture politics blur any previous or existing boundaries to the point they are unrecognizable as being distinct: “Because of the reunion space the blending of the high and low, the sacred and profane[e], and the open discourse encouraged in rap. . .[there is] no mandate on the artist to be politically uplifting all the time, or even at all” (41). Instead of identifying the tensions that exist between the rapper as responsible for the narratives he or she

32 produces and their corporatization, the rapper’s focus is placed on the “tension between ideology and art” (41). This notion situates rap as a messy organic intellectual space – one where enterprise and black liberation blur to show rapper’s complicity with hip hop’s commodification while attempting to maintain its position as an empowering medium.

Gender also plays an important role in this political calculus. Indeed, we have to understand intraracial gender politics to appreciate hip hop’s conflicted intellectualism. Black women within commercial hip hop are marginalized and often invalidated as producers of hip hop culture. While previous cycles of commercial hip hop highlighted the (hyper)sexuality and intellectual prowess of female rappers Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, and, to an extent, Missy Elliott, this current moment of commercial rap boasts only Nicki Minaj. Minaj, born Onika Tanya

Maraj, entered commercial rap in 2007 with the release of her first corporate sponsored mixtape

Beam Me Up Scotty. Minaj satisfies the characteristics of a messy organic intellectual because of her visibility and viability as a commercially successful female emcee within a hypermasculine and hypercommodified space. In this sense, Minaj maneuvers commercial rap as a space where

“one finds both clearly articulated feminisms as well as complicity with sexist paradigms” (188).

Particularly striking about Minaj’s manipulation of commercial rap discourse is her splintered performance persona, boasting three (or more) identities triggered by different stimuli.

Minaj has introduced Nicki Minaj, Martha Zolanski, and her most popular persona Roman

Zolanski, whom Minaj describes as “the boy that lives inside me. He’s a lunatic and he’s gay.”

Roman frequents Minaj’s raps and songs, infamously appearing in “Roman’s Revenge” and

“Roman’s Holiday.” For Minaj to perform as a British, gay, and (presumably) white male displaces her from the common conceptualizations of women currently in place in commercial hip hop. In addition to simultaneously functioning between current categories for women in hip

33 hop4 – including what Cheryl Keyes classifies as “Queen Mother,” “Fly Girl,” “Sista with

Attitude,” and “Lesbian” – Minaj introduces a new category which I postulate as the

“Madwoman/Madhatter.” Borrowing from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s discussion of “the madwoman in the attic,” the madwoman/mad hatter black woman in hip hop personifies literal and figurative “madness” through theatric performance of multiple, non-normative personas in order to create a niche for personal and creative expression within a (hetero)normative space.

Her varied personas allow Minaj to function outside the constraints of commercial rap’s marginalization of black women, yet acknowledge the absurdity, if not peculiarity, of black women’s objectivity. In the documentary Nicki Minaj: My Time Now (2010), for example, Minaj speaks to these peculiarities, identifying the differences in the treatment and ideologies of respect between male and female rappers:

When I am assertive, I’m a bitch. When a man is assertive, he’s a boss. He’s bossed up.

But [there’s] lots of negative connotation behind being a bitch. . .when you’re a girl, you

have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super

sweet and you have to be sexy and you have to be this, you have to be that, and you have

to be nice. . . I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being!

Minaj identifies respect as what Tricia Rose calls a “Trojan horse,” a patriarchal understanding of respect as “a central means by which black women’s complicit subordination to respectful patriarchal power has been secured. . .Respect for women is part of an exchange that rewards women who follow these rules.” Ironically, Minaj’s acknowledgement of this hollow definition

4 For further discussion of women’s archetypes in hip hop, please see T. Sharpley-Whiting’s discussion of the groupie in Pimps Up Hoes Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Women (2008) and Cheryl Keyes’ essay “Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance” in The Journal of American Folklore 113:449 (Sum 2000) 255-269. 34 of respect within hip hop as a patriarchal concept does not prevent her from succumbing to its vices.

Although she is capable of functioning outside of the hypermasculinity of commercial rap discourse, Minaj teeters on the line of feminism and patriarchy through her affiliation with rapper Lil Wayne, CEO of the YMCMB (Young Money Cash Money Billionaires) label. Minaj’s subordination to Wayne – and intellectual messiness – is best demonstrated in the cancelation of her performance at the 2012 Summer Jam hosted by New York radio station Hot 97. After on air personality Peter Rosenberg dismissed Minaj’s popular record “Starships” as “bullshit,” Wayne and Minaj immediately withdrew from the concert. Minaj tweeted: “I go above and beyond for my fans. But won’t ever go against Wayne’s word. What he says, goes.” Minaj’s willingness to be Wayne’s subordinate and accept his representation of giving her ‘respect’ is regressive and demonstrates that she is not immune to genuflecting to the demands of patriarchy in the industry.

Although Minaj speaks for herself, her narrative is aligned with Wayne in ways that flatten her complexity as a madwoman/madhatter female emcee. In this instance, Minaj re-articulates her narrative as being complicit with commercial rap’s “sexist paradigms” she frequently fights to dissolve.

Although plagued by conflicting negotiations of gender and white patriarchy, rap usefully frames American sliding postracial (and gender) politics. Lester Spence’s discussion of what he theorizes as a “black parallel public” is particularly useful for negotiating the messy intersections of intellectualism and blackness in commercial hip hop.5 Suggesting black agency runs symbiotically with mainstream constructions of white privilege, Spence argues black angsts exist in alternative circles of discourse embedded within American popular culture. Spence writes:

5 For further discussion of black public culture, see also Mark Anthony Neal’s discussion of a black parallel public in What the Music Said: Popular Music and Black Public Culture (Routledge, 1998) and Soul Babies (Routledge, 2002). 35

“the black parallel public operates according to established class, heterosexual, and gender norms, providing a space within which blacks can accommodate, criticize, and generate alternatives to the so-called mainstream public sphere. In its capacity as an accommodating space, it both inculcates and enforces both at large and internal norms and values” (9). Situating rap as a form of a black parallel public offers context in its utilization of American norms like race and class while carving out room for critiquing such norms. Complicating Spence’s observations about the politicization of rap as a parallel cultural expression is its intersection with capitalism.

Further, Spence writes of rappers as ‘black cultural workers’ in a similar sense as

Gramsci’s discussion of organic intellectuals: “rap MCs, like other black cultural workers, both accommodate and criticize mainstream norms and values. They are not dominated in the traditional sense of the term because they have relative artistic and political autonomy. They use and reproduce contemporary ideas about urban space and black masculinity and black representation writ large but do so in a way that grants them access and a modicum of political and cultural power” (9). Rap’s mass consumption across race and class places it as a gauge of normative social-political practices while maintaining a stake in American enterprise.

Rappers as messy organic intellectuals grapple with perceived accountability to this

(black) parallel public while navigating the marketing of commercial rap as a widening multicultural space of acceptance (consumption). It is important to note, however, that all commercial rappers do not carry the weight of balancing (social) accountability and making money. Some rappers, like Gucci Mane or Trinidad James, for example, write and perform

‘party’ music. There is little reflection or depth to their music. There are few traces of any congruent or even inadvertent desires to indulge critical discourses surrounding the

36 contemporary black experience. The angst of performing “black reality” – or lack thereof – that wedges rappers between these spaces usefully destabilizes the idealized notion of rappers as organically political agents by identifying their limitations within commercial rap’s spectrum.

An aspect of rap that is downplayed and further complicates it as a messy organic intellectual site is its embodiment of corporatized multiculturalism. Tricia Rose in The Hip Hop

Wars points out the peculiarity of considering rap as multicultural space:

the idea that Hip Hop is for everyone – that it presents a new moment of multicultural

exchange where white consumption is no longer about racial consumption (no more

white negroes, Hip Hop is the new multiculturalism). . .denies the fact that mainstream

Hip Hop consumption has been propelled by the same images and terms of appropriation

that have consistently shaped mainstream consumption of black style and music and that

they take place under vast and entrenched forms of racial inequality (229).

This misconception of commercial rap as a ‘safe’ space free of racial discourse is problematic when attempting to address the long-reaching intersections of race and enterprise that occur within commercial hip hop. The colorblind rhetoric corporations put forth about rap’s equal opportunity consumption is problematic. Rose writes, “they [corporate sponsors] promote the

‘hip hop includes everyone’ rhetoric while it works to exploit the very racial dynamic and perpetuate the very stereotypes of black people for the white consumption from which it profits”

(234). Rappers, in agreeing to keep within the expectations outlined in their contracts, are rewarded for their complicit blackness. Instead of a multicultural safe space, commercial rap becomes what Perry calls “situationally black,” an occurrence where a “strange blend of voices of resistance and otherness [is] marketed through the channels of American imperialism; it is the space where the passion and anxiety of [black] adolescence are all engaged through the

37 consumption of black music” (41). How, then, can rap exist as a platform for exercising black empowerment while being commodified?

In its initial crossover into the American mainstream marketplace, rappers spoke to a post-Civil Rights black disparity that resonated with an audience familiar with the failures of social-political constructs like Reaganomics in the 1980s and the preceding social-economic struggles from the 1970s. Rappers like Public Enemy, Poor Righteous, and Arrested

Development were commercially successful groups. Their racialized political raps branched out from similar veins of 1960s Black Nationalist thought. The shift in social conscious became less profitable once those trains of social-economic and political thought were deemed irreverent because of seemingly improving social-economic conditions in the mid 1990s. Because rap groups like Public Enemy did not invest in the glitz and glamour of commercial rap’s wild success, their message did not resonate in the same capacity as that of rappers who did talk about

“making it.” It is in this dynamic that the messy organic intellectual takes shape, simultaneously engaging commercial aesthetics and expectations with social responsibility. The high popularity and access to commercial rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and T.I. suggests commercial rap as the site of a collective bargaining in the understanding of contemporary black identity. By using this current phase of commercial rap to frame the messy organic intellectual, one can map out commercial rap as a trajectory of black identity most visible to and utilized by a mainstream

(white) American public.

In identifying the messy organic intellectual in commercial rap, Tupac Shakur immediately comes to mind as an example of one who openly engaged complexities of race, enterprise, and complicity in his music. Shakur utilized numerous mediums of cultural

38 production to speak to his struggles with fame and social responsibility.6 In his anthology of poetry The Rose that Grew from Concrete, Shakur speaks on the topics of racism, police brutality, and death. His discography is filled with songs that tackle obstacles of getting paid and remaining (hyper) aware of responsibility to black consciousness. Paired with extensive readings in political thought, including Niccolo Machiavelli’s power manifesto The Prince, Shakur is the bridge over commercial waters that connect a 1960s Black Nationalist identity with a more market-driven, multicultural hip hop audience. He is arguably commercial hip hop’s first messy organic intellectual.

2.2 “Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.”: the Intellectual Plight of Tupac Shakur

Following in a similar political trajectory as groups like Public Enemy and vein of outrage against police brutality like N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police,” Shakur’s freshman album

2Pacalypse Now (1991) draws on the irritation and social-economic outrage of the black poor and working class that rap music initially represented. Originally part of a burgeoning commercial Hip-Hop movement through affiliation with rap group Digital Underground,

Shakur’s early rap career pivoted off of hyper sexuality and visibility of his manhood. Ironically,

Digital Underground retracted from the violent and hypermasculine image of black men in commercial hip hop at the time. By no means would they be recognized as gangstas. Still,

Shakur’s first solo release 2pacalypse Now refocused his attentions on the social-political tensions of growing up a young black man in a post-Civil Rights America. Playing on the allegory of an apocalyptic ending, Shakur’s title frames his narrative as a rupture in the

6 The Tupac Amaru Shakur archives housed at the Robert Woodruff Library in Atlanta, GA houses a set of writings I categorize as incomplete plays and short stories written by Shakur about being black in post-Civil Rights America. These stories, “1999,” “Fragile,” “Exodus,” and “Gold Nigga,” each speak to black uprisings against social oppression and white privilege, arguably a microcosm of the struggles Shakur himself faced as an iconic figure. 39

American dream shared especially by nonwhites. The agency of the album and its title lies in the moment of its release, a moment where (black) rage was very much prevalent in the treatment of urban blacks in the 1980s.

In the album’s dedication, Shakur writes: “2 all young Black Males: They let me C 21 but

I doubt if I see 25. Be careful. My music is for all of us who were born with the burden of

Blackness. Fuck it! It’s a black thang! C U in Ghetto Heaven.” The complexity of Shakur’s dedication is wrapped in the existentially nihilistic outlook of his black manhood. The fatalistic projection of not seeing 25 – made prophetic by his death from gunshot wounds months after his

25th birthday – suggests violence against the black body as normative. Equally penetrating are the tense parallels between “the burden of Blackness” and urbanity. Shakur’s definition of the

“burden of Blackness” is rooted in an experience of class consciousness and struggle. It suggests that the pathology imposed upon the black poor and working class is deepened by their social and economic disenfranchisement. Shakur’s declaration – “fuck it! It’s a black thang!” – smacks of black nationalism, but also signifies the imposed normalcy of class struggle on urban blacks and an inability to escape this pathological existence. Shakur further signifies these pathological implications of black masculinity in the form of doubly bound acronyms like N.I.G.G.A. and later T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.7

As a messy organic intellectual, Shakur consciously “smuggles” social awareness into an otherwise commercialized discourse, alluding to the formal censorship rappers faced at the call of critics like C. Delores Tucker and that of executives about what type of content would be delivered to consumers. Tricia Rose astutely brings this detail of Shakur’s career into sharp focus:

7 T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. stands for “The Hate U Give Infants Fucks Everyone” and N.I.G.G.A. stands for “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished.” The latter acronym, N.I.G.G.A., initially appeared on 2pacalypse Now. 40

Tupac’s stories of ghetto life were far greater in range and complexity, less glamorous

and celebratory, and more expressive of pain and loss than those that populate

mainstream commercial hip hop today. He admitted to worrying about his power to

negatively influence his fans. Tupac wanted to speak to those kids who were already

caught up in the system because he felt they were herded there and discarded. Their

stories and lives were considered unworthy of social recognition, and he wanted to give

them social space and value. But he also knew that a compelling recognition of that life –

without strong critique and without real-life options – can encourage the very actions and

behaviors that get kids involved in crime and violence in the first place (143).

It is important to note that while Shakur’s music and ideologies like N.I.G.G.A. and later

T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. articulate a need for retribution against white hegemony, he still pivots on the stereotypical role of a dysfunctional, angry black man. This shaky balancing act between black rage and empowerment also signify the tensions between black nationalism, capitalism, and a post-Civil Rights experience. In an anonymous note titled “Note terminating .T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.” found in Shakur’s personal papers, the writer states:

Tupac owned THUG LIFE; solely Tupac was THUG LIFE. These were only

rappers. Tupac terminated THUG LIFE as of 10/95. The reason of the termination

was he felt there was nowhere left to go with it (Tupac Amaru Shakur Archives,

Woodruff Library).

This metonymic death of T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. foreshadows Shakur’s own demise the following year and the rise of Shakur’s last moniker, Makavelli. The end of T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. enables

Shakur to resituate the political agency that marked his previous albums. The dichotomy of death

41 and resurrection presented here marks the complexity of Shakur’s position as a gatekeeper of contemporary social-political change.

Further complicating the significance of the rise of Makavelli is Shakur’s affiliation with recording label Death Row Records. Mark Anthony Neal’s observations about hip hop as a counter hegemonic tool are useful in attempting to juxtapose Shakur’s maneuvering of corporatism with social commentary: “Hip-Hop music allowed them [black youth] to counter the iconography of fear, menace, and spectacle that dominated mass-mediated perceptions of contemporary black life by giving voice to the everyday realities of black life in ways that could not be easily reduced to commodifiable stereotypes” (372). Shakur was brazenly aware of his involvement and critique of corporate America. In this sense, he is a messy organic intellectual because of his ability to raise the awareness about black pathology while replicating pathology for profit. He recognizes and understands his role as a producer of black working class narratives, simultaneously shedding light on their realities while cobbling together a sellable product.

As a messy organic intellectual, Shakur’s desperation to remain attached to his working class background and its affixed traumas run parallel to their worth as commercial rap narratives.

The corporatization of Shakur’s narratives as forms of empowerment discourse are hijacked as reflections of the hypermasculine space in which Shakur and gangsta rap existed. In this regard, he is situated within his inner conflicts of balancing Afrocentric convictions and the expected complacency of an angry young black male that resonated in the early 1990s and Gangsta rap genre. Tupac Shakur’s lyrics desperately seek a balance between self-fulfillment and obligations to the inner city, the crux of both his lived and performed experiences. Michael Eric Dyson writes:

Tupac constantly questioned his direction by filling his lyrics with characters who were

both victims and perpetrators of crime, characters who were thugs begging God for

guidance through the minefields of self-destruction, characters leaving the ghetto while

others stayed, characters who asked why they suffered even as they imposed suffering. In

that haze of morbid contradictions, Tupac shone the light of his dark, brooding, pensive

spirit, refusing to close his eyes to the misery he saw, risking everything to bear witness

to the pain he pondered and perpetuated (128).

His pensiveness often an intellectual gamble, Shakur frequently negotiates “the real” and its boundaries. Shakur engaged his audience with his thoughts, asking rhetorical questions gauging his self (and corporate) worth. Thus, much of Shakur’s music catalog is a tense balancing act between corporate constructions of realness and his own realities.

This balancing act is most illuminated in the production of his final studio release The

Don Killuminati: the 7 Day Theory (1996). Posthumously released, The Don Killuminati is shrouded in layers of race politics. With this album, Shakur attempted to situate himself within the (black) American popular imagination as not only a leader but a quintessential artist. It is a return to the politically charged discourse Shakur introduced in 2Pacalypse Now. The difference, however, is with his last album Shakur mandated the politicization of his blackness and body on his own terms, intersecting enterprise and employing the Eurocentric political thought of Nicolo

Machiavelli. The Don Killuminati album is Shakur’s attempt to complicate this commercialized discourse by troubling not only his blackness but the frameworks of blackness that dictate a post-

Civil Rights black identity. In addition to positioning himself as a pupil of Machiavelli, Shakur’s spelling of Makavelli signifies the politicization of what Nicole Fleetwood theorizes as (his) black iconicity. Fleetwood writes: “black iconicity serves as a site for black audiences and the

43 nation to gather around the seeing of blackness. However, in the focus of the singularity of the image, the complexity of black lived experience and discourses of race are effaced” (10; emphasis mine). In this point of his career, Shakur understood and utilized the notoriety surrounding his image to his advantage as a commercial figure. The Don Killuminati utilized

Machiavelli’s The Prince in its visual and musical aesthetics, presenting Shakur as not only a prince but an icon of his own making. In thinking about the significance of Shakur’s attempts to resituate himself as a self-empowered figure, critique of the black body as an iconic figure in visual culture is significant.

In a similar fashion to Shakur’s transformation into Makaveli, the Shakur hologram unveiled at the 2012 Coachella music festival transported Shakur into this current moment of post-raciality and solidified his place as a messy organic intellectual. This technological production of Shakur pushes him past race into spectership. Romanticism of Shakur’s legacy and mystery surrounding his death mingles with the corporate fervor and profitability that his image sustains in this current moment of rap.8 Shakur’s hologram speaks to a burgeoning dimension of what Neal suggests as post-soul cultural expression, a “radical re-imagining of the contemporary

African American experience, attempting to liberate contemporary interpretations of that experience from the sensibilities that were formalized and institutionalized during earlier social paradigms” (3). This radical reimagining is reflected in the use of technology to bring Shakur

8 It is important to consider not only his image but the selective memory of what Shakur’s identity represents in current commercial rap. Rappers Meek Mill and Rick Ross’ collaboration “Tupac Back,” for example, rehashes Shakur’s gangsta image while dismissing the complexity of his music. A run down of titles and one liners from Shakur’s rap catalog, “Tupac Back” depends upon Shakur’s cultural capital as a rap legend while restricting him to the pathological traits that framed him as a gangsta. Rick Ross asserts in the chorus: “Tupac Back! Tupac Back!/ These bitches out here screamin’ that Tupac Back/All eyes on me, can you picture me rollin’/…stranded on Death Row/Brenda’s having my baby/But I’m stacking my paper/I need a brand new Mercedes/They screamin’ Tupac Back! Tupac Back!” Ross’ use of Death Row signifies the most visible and corporatized shift in Shakur’s career, paying homage to the more materialistic and violent aspects of Shakur’s time at Death Row Records. Shakur’s industrial woes are tied to the line “stranded on death row,” subtly hinting at Shakur’s estate’s battles with Death Row CEO Suge Knight after his death, and the rumors that the record label conspired his death.

44 back from the dead, doubly signifying a technological dependence of this current moment of commercial rap music and its use to maintain the cultural significance of Shakur’s memory.

It is important to note, however, that although Shakur’s hologram hinges upon his memory as an early and mid 1990s representation of black masculinity within hip hop, it still re- enforces (and for some introduces) the violent discourse that surrounded his body in real-life.

Todd Boyd’s description of the “hyperreal”[sic] helps situate Shakur within commercial hip hop as a cultural-technical discourse. Boyd writes, “the hypperreal creates a media image that directs attention away from the actual occurrences [surrounding the image] and thus puts us in the realm of pure spectacle” (Boyd 71). In considering the Shakur hologram as a hyperreal image the audience is turned away from the current event taking place – Coachella – and repositioned within the moment when Shakur was alive. Shakur’s hologram signifies Shakur’s promise to resurrect himself – literally – from the dead while enabling his (its?) audience to avoid dealing with Shakur’s physical death.

The hologram demonstrates Shakur’s embodiment of being “ready to die” and fulfilling his obligations as a gangsta rapper. Shakur’s hologram also represents what David Marriot suggests as a spook, an image that signifies a “connection between race and terror, magic and surveillance, idolatry and power…it makes visible [the] impenetrable unseen” (1). John Jennings similarly avers the hologram as a haunted space within technological production: “Tupac is literally a ghost in the machine. Whoever controls the binary code that conjures up Tupac's hologram is his master; Snoop’s dancing with a ghost on stage makes his [Shakur’s] black body a shared haunted space.” Employing Marriot’s and Jennings’s theories, Shakur’s hologram represents his body as a haunted space that exhibits Shakur’s memory within a restrictive discourse of popular black manhood. His memory ‘manifests’ as a hologram to reflect a

45 continued fixation on Shakur as representative of black pathology in the American popular imagination. The ownership of Shakur’s hologram and thus his body reaffirms what Fleetwood depicts as problematic representation of the black body in public (hind)sight: “the black body is always problematic in the field of vision because of the discourses of captivity and capitalism that frame it as such” (18). Can Shakur’s hologram be considered an extension of his intellectual process and self-politicization in a current capitalistic framework? And if so, might we situate his death as the inevitable outcome of an impossible reconciliation between black class struggle and capitalism?

2.3 Made it in America: Sampling as Intellectualism in Watch the Throne

Like the shifting social-cultural landscape it reflects, this current moment of commercial rap engages new ways to negotiate its potential as a liberating space. Unlike past cycles of rap as a black cultural production, including the impact and influence of Shakur’s legacy, today’s commercial rap music scene is faced with the challenge of sustaining a deemed initial purpose of black agency while selling units for survival. Much of this search for originality comes through the practice of sampling, the process of borrowing sound bytes, voices, and instrumentation to create a ‘new’ sonic backdrop. Sampling signifies commercial rap’s intellectual capability. By creating what Joe Schloss calls a “sonic collage,” sampling in rap music allots space for renegotiations and interpretations of black liberation within a capitalistic space. Schloss’ Making

Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip Hop is a seminal text in understanding the craftwork behind sampling as it is used to mark this contemporary moment of commercial rap’s production. “Hip- hop production constitutes an ideal value for developing a tactical sense of when to make knowledge public,” Schloss observes. “The constant struggle that producers face between using

46 their work to display their esoteric record knowledge to each other and making beats that appeal to a broad audience that wants to dance” (81). Sampling represents the ability to manipulate sound to create a specific aesthetic, frequently catered to the expectation of the consuming audience. It provides space for both hidden and public scripts of race and gender to sonically parlay, intersect, conflict, and consume. Further, Richard Schur points out that “[s]ampling as a creative method or framework bridges the acts of consumption and production” (46). Sampling constructs a lens of understanding intersections of commercial black cultural expression with

American (popular) culture.

Of particular interest for explication of the significance of sampling in the construction of

21st century black liberation discourse is Jay-Z and Kanye West’s collaborative album Watch the

Throne (2011). A tribute to tight productive and vocal work, Watch the Throne (hereafter WTT) is a sonic foray of enterprise and blackness’ limitations within commercial rap music. WTT answers Boyd’s challenge of “progressive politics” in hip hop, offering “phat beats” and lyrical flow that grapple with privilege and commercialism in hip hop (328). This effect is achieved in large part due to the unorthodox uses of sound throughout the album, which speak to not only a form of commercial elitism that both Jay-Z and West have attained, but the limitations in which this elitism is (dis)regarded. The spotlight of producers like Swizz Beats, RZA, and West himself sonically open up alternative means of discussion about commercially successful rappers’ negotiations of social-political responsibility and corporatism. To date, WTT is the most comprehensive representation of the complex relationship between commercialization and black identity politics in this contemporary moment, utilizing overarching tropes of materialism and capitalist impulse alongside retorts of protest and resistance. WTT’s ‘protest’ discourse illuminates the reality of rap music as a bankrupt resistance discourse and its commercialism as a

47 portal to wealth and opulence. The result is seemingly conflicting narratives and sounds of social agency and American degeneracy via their black masculinity. WTT is a reminder of how complicated the contemporary black experience is within hip hop as a popular space. It distorts claims of hip hop as a form of postracial discourse by using these same claims to highlight their limitations via stories of opulence and wealth. WTT inundates its audience with social and cultural critiques enveloped within narratives of luxury and access. Yet, these narratives are accompanied and complicated by samplings of soul music, popular culture, and instrumentation.

There is a conscientious management of how Jay-Z and West’s performances – both sonic and textual – must resolve the contradictions between capitalistic pimping and capitalistic protest. Aside from the subversion of expatriotism as a lap of luxury instead of a form of social protest and agency, the track “Niggas in Paris” samples a line from a scene in the popular comedy Blades of Glory. Sampling this movie is an acknowledgement of commercial rap’s intersections with mainstream and, in effect, white popular culture. Whiteness’ connection to rap music is brazenly present in this song, offering tense and often subverted markers and performances of white male privilege by black male rappers. The song opens with the lines

“We’re gonna skate to one song and one song only,” while the accompaniment plays in the background. An awkward yet humorous sampling of Will Ferrell’s lines, the opening could be interpreted as using Ferrell’s voice and lines to poke fun at the misconception of commercial rap music as a white corporate entity. Sampling Ferrell, then, gives whiteness a tangible and culturally recognizable voice. In this respect, Ferrell’s demand for “one song and one song only” sonically signifies the monolithic and corporatized manufacturing of rap music, thus pointing out the awkwardness of the lack of creativity in rap music that Jay-Z and West seek to rectify throughout WTT. After West delivers a verse about buying luxury labels, world travel, and

“suffering from realness,” the second Blades of Glory interlude resituates the audience with a satirical interpretation of rap as a black-white cultural production. West’s affirmation of his associates “going gorillas” in Paris is interrupted by sampling Jon Heder’s character’s response to Ferrell’s initial demands with a high and awkward “I don’t know what that means.” Ferrell responds, “no one knows what it means but it’s provocative…it gets the people going!” Heder and Ferrell’s ‘private’ exchange signifies Jay-Z and West’s awareness of commercial rap music as a sustained production of white voyeurism. If West introduces “going gorillas” as a new slang term for excessive spending or “balling out of control,” for example, it sustains West’s popularity as a black rapper while validating his blackness to a white and multicultural audience.

Situating Heder and Ferrell’s exchange here reintroduces Jay-Z and West’s intent to highlight multiple layers of consumption, production, and associated privileges.

Similarly, the track “Murder to Excellence” juxtaposes the social awareness of acknowledging the challenges inner city blacks face – “I feel the pain in my city wherever I go/314 soldiers died in Iraq/504 died in Chicago” – with opulence (as personified by Jay-Z). The song’s sonic impositions of West and Jay-Z’s blackness and masculinity teeter between juxtapositions of black protest and blacks’ accessibility to (white) opulence. “It’s a celebration of black excellence/Black tie, black Maybachs/Black excellence, opulence, decadence/Tuxes next to the president/I’m present,” Jay-Z raps. Jay-Z plays on the multi-dimensionality of blackness through signifying class (“the new black elite”), color (“black tuxes”), and enterprise (“black

Maybachs/black excellence, opulence, decadence”) The plays on current manifestations of black cool – materialistic attainment – conflict with historicized markers of black cool – social protest, resistance, and individualism. West’s verse rebukes black cool as pathologically violent and shallow, toying with altruistic intonations of social respectability while Jay-Z’s discussion of

49 blackness ebbs and weaves through materialism and opulence as pliable lenses of cool black manhood. The fluid exchange of discourses through lyrics and background accompaniment reflects the complexity of not only black men but this sliding social-cultural landscape rappers and black men like Jay-Z and Kanye West attempt to maneuver. The sonic and lyrical references of “Murder to Excellence” emerge as a liaison between the authentication of shifting identifications of blackness and capitalism as enabling access and critique.

The messy organic intellectuals studied in this chapter are representative of how rap music situates between postracial and economic discourses. Jarring social events like Hurricane

Katrina often highlight rappers’ struggles to rise to the occasion of socially responsible pundit and entertainer. However, complicating the connection between class and access is rap’s shifting social-political purposes, often rising to the occasion to serve as a voice for the working class but quickly backing down when pushed to sustain that voice. In addition to serving as a mouthpiece for black social change empowerment, rap also grapples with the (re)production of its socially responsible and iconic figures, like the hologram of Shakur. In the cases of Shakur, Jay-Z, and

Kanye West, social responsibility seeped through their access to capitalistic privilege because of their statuses as commercially successful artists.

CHAPTER THREE

BLACK SATIRE, HIP HOP SENSIBILITY, AND RACIALIZED COMMON SENSE

“Hope…is irrational.” --Huey Freeman, The Boondocks

During an episode of his sketch comedy show, Chappelle’s Show, comedian Dave

Chappelle hosted a “Race Draft.” In the skit, ‘delegates’ of each major ethnic group – blacks, whites, Asian, and Hispanics – bid on influential contemporary American popular culture figures under the stipulation that the individual would become a member of the race who won the bid, much like the drafts conducted by professional sports teams. Draftees included Tiger Woods,

Elian Gonzalez, Colin Powell, and hip hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. Particularly telling of each draft pick is their acceptance speeches, in which they contextualize themselves within an essentialized – and often stereotypical – representation of their (selected) ethnic group. Tigers

Woods – played by Chappelle – ‘shouts out’ memes of black popular culture including the term

“for shizzle,” a nod towards rapper Snoop Dogg’s whimsical play with words utilizing the suffix

“-izzle.” Chappelle’s skit pivots on an idealistic proposition that, at best, race is a decided performance. Because it is a social construct, race can be or has been ‘transcended,’ paralleling a popular (mis)understanding that Americans have reached the plateau of racial tolerance via colorblindness.

With similar vigor to Richard Pryor’s sketch comedy show of the 1960s – and regular guest appearances by one of its main writers, Paul Mooney – Chappelle’s Show bridges the shortcomings of black liberation rhetoric from the Civil Rights Movement with the peculiarities of post-Civil Rights racial politics. Characters like the blind black (Ku Klux) Klansman Clayton

Bigsby and sketches like the “Race Draft” entertainingly subvert colorblindness to point out the awkwardness of post-Civil Rights racial attitudes. K.A. Wisniewski observes how “Chappelle examines both new and old tensions and finds humor in the momentary coalescence of the subcultures within these larger paradigms. His humor, like the culture he observes, exists in a liminal space where nothing is constant, operating within ruling class frameworks and yet distinct from it” (5). By purposefully exaggerating the significance of race in American

(popular) culture, Chappelle opens dialogue about blacks’ and whites’ investment in race and hegemonic privilege. Chappelle intentionally situates his humor in the gray areas of America’s social-cultural and, at times, political landscape, paralleling his observations with expected performances of racial discourse and their underlying fault lines.

It is important to note how initial forays into black satire often refuted celebrated forms of black identity constructed within dominant discourse. Black satire initially took place on the fringes of mainstream white America, embodying what Bambi Haggins calls “FUBU” (For Us

By Us) culture. Mel Watkins points out in On the Real Side how satire represents “African

American’s proclivity for sensing his ‘two-ness’…while it [satire] defined and enriched black culture in many ways also instilled a nagging ambivalence or self-consciousness no matter how ironic the wit, or aggressive the underlying implication…blacks were simultaneously aware that it was invisible to most whites” (36). Unlike previous cycles of African American satire like

George Schuyler’s Black No More, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo

Jumbo, this present rendering of black American humor seeks to point out not only the peculiarities of whiteness but how blacks invest in and seek access to hegemonic privilege once publicly engineered towards whites. The satirists of interest for this study are what Mark

Anthony Neal and Bambi Haggins consider “post-soul babies.” Haggins describes them at length:

The most significant voices in contemporary black comedy are – either chronologically

or spiritually – post-soul babies whose comic personae are inflected by complex tastes

and cultural practices that emerged in the post-Civil Rights era, as well as by race, class,

gender, and region. These practices are experiential, based on individual and communal

experiences of the African American condition, but they are also mediated: post-soul

babes are media babes. The comic persona of the post-soul baby may, albeit rarely,

reflect a view of black cultural productions and sociopolitical discourses through rose-

colored glasses; but more often than not it is with jaundiced eyes – and this kind of

hopeful cynicism (or cynical hopefulness permeates contemporary black comedy) (5).

From this perspective post-Civil Rights black American satirists engage a critical space where the awkwardness of postracialism and race identity meets humor. In a sense, post-Civil Rights black satirists are what Trey Ellis calls “cultural mulattos,” post-Civil Rights black artists

“educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures…[who] can also navigate easily into the white world” (235). The polarization of whiteness, blackness, and the privilege that once framed racial consciousness and interaction, Ellis opines, is no longer applicable to post-Civil Rights American culture. The subversion of race and privilege presented by satirists like Paul Beatty, Dave

Chappelle, and Aaron McGruder updates Trey Ellis’ cultural mulatto aesthetic through exaggerations of those polarities in which race no longer functions. The murky social-cultural landscape in which these satirists exist includes navigating the challenges of cultural performances still tethered to obsolete markers of race and privilege. The dangers of failing to be aware of and critically engage these undermining notions of blackness within a mixed racial

53 audience, Ellis warns, are becoming “assimilatonist nightmares; neutered mutations instead of thriving hybrids. Trying to please both worlds instead of themselves, they end up truly pleasing neither” (242).

Contemporary black satirists, then, can redress ideologies of race and identity to speak to the shifting social-cultural landscape framed by an ambiguous (dis)regard for race in the post-

Civil Rights era. Daryl Dickson-Carr contextualizes post-Civil Rights satire as a means to identify sliding markers of race and racism within the context of post-Civil Rights dominant culture:

The more important effect satire probes is the way American racism perverts African

American intellectual discourse. If racism relies upon a stereotyped Other remaining in a

position of inferiority, African American satire argues that some, if not most, blacks are

more than willing to fulfill the stereotypes racism constructs as a means of getting ahead

in an untenable economic situation. The problem is an inability to read ‘the code’ of

racism, which extends beyond the obvious…racism and racists are not stable, monolithic

quantities any more than the black Other is (32).

Similarly, Antonio Gramsci’s positioning of popular culture as a site of a collective consciousness – common sense – provides critical framework to destabilize what we understand as American postracial politics seen in popular culture. He writes about common sense as a

“traditional popular conception of the world – what is unimaginatively called ‘instinct’” (199). It is spontaneous and frequently shifting. Idealistically, Gramscian common sense serves as a form of intellectualism situated within the images and narratives produced from the popular imagination. This version of common sense in American popular culture, however, is distorted by white hegemony. The collective consists of what is consumed within the mainstream culture.

Rooted in white supremacist discourse, a Gramscian sensibility of blackness within the

American popular imagination is situated within pathological narratives and fear of Otherness.

Repurposing contemporary black satire as a site of ‘racialized common sense,’ – a communal

(mis)respresentation of race and identity – attention can be paid to negotiations of hegemonic privilege and its intersections with the cultural production of blackness.

Part of satire’s foray out of the margins of the black community and into the forefront of dominant social-cultural analysis is due to what Haggins labels as ‘crossover’ or a transition from the fringes to mainstream consumption. Haggins writes: “The process of crossover – and the extension of both humor and influence beyond the black communal spaces – adds a problematic twist to the already Byzantine task faced by the African American comic: to be funny, accessible, and topical while retaining his or her authentic voice” (4). Thus, contemporary satirists deal with the additional challenge of maintaining one’s blackness – an exercise of privilege in its own right – and its consumption. The “Byzantine” task Haggins references is also what Daryl Dickson Carr suggests is “speak[ing] the unspeakable” (18). Dickson-Carr writes:

“one result of the Civil Rights Movement’s aftermath, then, is that African Americans face the challenge of articulating a new meaning for the social category of ‘race’ and using this definition to determine the consequences of this new perception of ‘race’ and ‘racial issues’ upon black political and economic life” (166). By designating black satire as a racialized common sense space, room is allotted for satirists to sustain essential characteristics of satire – exaggeration and often whimsical portrayals of race and social-cultural critique – while engaging race politics within the commercial space it occupies. In addition to articulating satire’s purpose within a post-soul and post-Civil Rights aesthetic, capitalist impulse is important in contextualizing

55 contemporary black satirists because they are aware of a murkiness where black life and the

(popular) public sphere simultaneously conflict and coexist.

Popular satirists like Chappelle and his successor Aaron McGruder are often awkwardly sandwiched between commercialism and social responsibility. The possibility of a misstep between profitability and social responsibility is a line commercial black satirists frequently tread. After only three seasons, Chappelle made a notoriously swift departure from Chappelle’s

Show which was most demonstrative of a refusal to tread that line. He immediately abandoned his show after recognizing that his critique had been washed out by what he dubbed “coonery”:

“I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me – and it was the first time I ever gotten a laugh I was uncomfortable with…I felt like it had gotten me in touch with my inner ‘coon.’ They stirred him up…when that guy laughed, I felt like, ‘man, they got me” (Chappelle). Richard Iton writes in his book In Search of the Black Fantastic how resistance discourse, when co-opted into mainstream popular culture, is commodified and loses value:

Resistance, once it becomes routine and recognized, can be anticipated and welcomed by

dominant authorities, and fetishized and folded into the broader process of

institutionalizing dominant hegemonic understanding…this is particularly common in

contexts in which few viable spaces for the formulation, expression, and transmission of

specifically hidden transcripts exist (102).

Black satirists, then, use hip hop sensibility to uncover hidden transcripts and frame negotiations of privilege and identity within a commodified space. My conceptualization of hip hop sensibility stems from my discussion of hip hop as a space of messy organic intellectualism in chapter two. Initially identified by Tricia Rose as a “hidden transcript” of black expression,

56 hip hop provides what Rose refers to as a “contemporary stage for the theater of the powerless”

(101). Rose writes:

on this stage, rappers act out inversions of status hierarchies, tell alternative stories of

contact with police and the education process, and draw portraits of contact with

dominant groups in which the hidden transcript inverts/subverts the public, dominant

transcript. Often rendering a nagging critique of various manifestations of power via

jokes, stories, gestures, and song, rap’s social commentary enacts ideological

insubordination (101).

Hip hop culture, especially rap music, is the most visible and commodified form of post-Civil

Rights black expression that similarly ‘crossed over’ to mainstream popular culture. It parallels satire in that both mediums signify the contemporary black experience through memes of

‘making it’ in America. Thus, hip hop, like satire, was initially categorized as FUBU culture for blacks to vent frustration with dominant social-cultural practices. Also similarly to satire, hip hop

‘crossed over’ in ways that created conflicting impulses between consciousness and corporatism:

“in contemporary America, where most popular culture is electronically mass-mediated, hidden or resistant popular transcripts are readily absorbed into the public domain and subject to incorporation and invalidation. Cultural expressions of discontent are no longer protected by the insulated social sites that have historically encouraged the refinement of resistive transcripts”

(101). Haggins’ observations about Chappelle as a post-soul satirist and hip hop enthusiast are also appropriate for other popular black satirists Paul Beatty and Aaron McGruder: “the comic’s persona is imbued with a hip-hop sensibility – the aesthetic and the politics musical genre are inextricably tied to his own” (210).

Additionally, hip hop sensibility anchors black satire as a site of racialized common sense because it embodies a dominant understanding of black authenticity in the mainstream Post-Civil

Rights popular imagination. Paul Beatty’s 1996 novel The White Boy Shuffle is one of the first satiric novels of the post-Civil Rights era to grapple with contemporary blackness using hip hop sensibility. Although The White Boy Shuffle holds closer proximity to the Civil Rights Movement than the work of Chappelle and McGruder, Beatty uses hip hop aesthetics to reflect the initial struggles of carving out a black identity detached from open markers of racism and white hegemony like Jim Crow. Beatty’s protagonist Gunnar Kaufman negotiates his blackness through two primary staples of commercial hip hop aesthetics: ghetto life and pathological black masculinity. In a particularly powerful scene showcasing the gangsta rap group Stoic

Undertakers, Gunnar comments on their minstrel-esque performance: “Carloads of sybaritic rappers and hired concubines cruised down the street in ghetto palanquins, mint condition 1964

Impala lowriders, reciting their lyrics and leaning into the camera with gnarled intimidating scowls. ‘Cut!’ The curled lips snapped back into watermelon grins like fleshy rubber bands.

‘How was that massa? Menacing enough fo’ ya?” (77). Aside from the tensions between black youth and the “just the way it is” mentality, with this narrative Beatty addresses a problematic gangsta rap aesthetic. Even more problematic is the commodification and consumption of such an aesthetic as an uncontested reality in one’s daily life. Beatty subverts Mark Anthony Neal’s observations about hip hop’s initial purposes—that it “allowed [African American youth] to counter the iconography of fear, menace and spectacle that dominated mass-mediated perceptions of contemporary black life” (138). Beatty’s passage highlights the romanticized inner city aesthetic within mainstream American popular culture that creates a fetishistic bubble of black poverty in which African Americans and, specifically, black men are forced to exist.

Hip hop, like satire, provides access to black identity for a multicultural audience and can be used to complicate notions of being ‘down’ and authenticated as such within the (black)

American imagination. Haggins’ definition of ‘down’ is particularly useful in meshing hip hop and satiric aesthetics into a singular framework:

[one who is ‘down’ is] hip to the sociocultural positioning of black language, style,

music, and humor embedded in the texts. As with any form of cultural activity, there are

multiple levels of ‘down-ness.’ Insider/outsider, black/white, civil rights era/post-soul

sensibilities – from these differing reading positions, segments of the audience discern

cultural traces and treatises produced in these comedies, which, in turn, inform the

notions of blackness in contemporary American society (207).

The “multiple levels of down-ness” within hip hop sensibility play out in contemporary satire as a way to establish a foundation for blackness while troubling the hip hop aesthetic.

Consider McGruder’s treatment of hip hop in his animated series The Boondocks.

Unlike Chappelle, who features prominent rappers like Mos Def, Red Man, and Wu-Tang Clan’s

RZA and GZA, McGruder uses animation and voiceovers to complicate hip hop as an essentially black and authenticated discourse. While there are quick instances of McGruder using hip hop as a mouthpiece for social consciousness and black empowerment – i.e., RZA of Wu-Tang Clan as the lead character Huey Freeman’s social conscience – McGruder ultimately highlights commercial rap and its heavy co-optation as the ‘be all end all” of black American identity.

Unlike Chappelle who nuances hip hop throughout his comedy via rappers’ performances as skit characters and “outside the studio” 9 musical performances, McGruder’s interweaving of hip hop

9 The music performances at the end of each Chappelle’s Show episode never took place in the studio where the show was being taped. I argue that this device fed into Chappelle’s treatment of hip hop (sensibility) as an anti- establishment marker within a commercial spectrum. 59 as a “black thang” takes place front and center in the fictitious suburb of Woodcrest, a far cry from the Freemans’ hometown of Chicago. The ‘invasion’ of hip hop into white suburbia via rappers like Thugnificient and the Lethal Injection Crew, and Gangstalicious serve as signifiers of the (hyper) black masculinity and commodification/consumption of blackness in the white imagination. McGruder establishes this sentiment via the presence of these rappers in Woodcrest and their music as the only music heard throughout the series. The loop of songs like “Thuggin’

Love” and “Booty Butt Cheeks” critiques the redundancy of corporate rap music and its narratives as flat and easily digestible. McGruder’s creation of these characters suggests the commodification of hip hop sensibility (and blackness) as a product instead of an ideal.

Hip hop sensibility within satire allows for a probing of black complicity and agency within mainstream popular culture. It is a highly visible construct of post-Civil Rights blackness.

It destabilizes the black American narrative from polarized representations of victimization and pathology into hazier, more current representations of blackness as assimilated within American culture. Part of this assimilation includes the pursuit of capitalistic ideals and hegemonic power previously off limits to blacks. Dickson-Carr astutely points out the conflicting ideals of post-

Civil Rights blackness:

It is altogether possible, even probable, that African Americans participate in their own

oppression, with or without their consent. A more chilling possibility that African

American satire suggests is that even if some individuals are able to decipher racism’s

ubiquitous coding, they may not have the will to counter and destroy racism in whatever

form it takes. To do so might require sacrifice of material comfort, and in the vision of

the black satirist, blacks stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of humanity in being

venal, greedy, selfish, and self-sabotaging (33).

Because the academic community has paid its due diligence to Chappelle’s use of hip hop sensibility in his comedy (Haggins, 2007; Cobb 2007; Wisniewski 2009; Corlett, 2011), of particular interest for this study is analyzing how contemporary black satirists Beatty and

McGruder use hip hop sensibility to navigate the conflicting impulses of a post-Civil Rights black experience. There is a dearth of scholarship that focuses on hip hop sensibility in both satirists’ work. Beatty and McGruder use hip hop to contextualize black humor as a site of racialized common sense that engages black complicity. I argue that Beatty is among the first of contemporary black satirists to foreground hip hop sensibility, using gangsta rap aesthetics to question if messianic black leadership is still relevant in his 1996 novel The White Boy Shuffle. A decade later, McGruder grapples with similar questions in his animated series The Boondocks, using hip hop to critique the idealism of black empowerment after the election of President

Obama. Both texts invoke hip hop sensibility in their establishment of a racialized common sense by situating hip hop as a foundation for mapping the trajectory of current racial politics in the United States.

3.1 Staying Black: Gangsta Rap Aesthetics and Agency in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy

Shuffle

Beatty situates himself within hip hop sensibility through the gangsta rap aesthetic.

Gangsta rap is a subgenre of hip hop from California that rose to commercial prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s which spun nihilistic narratives of violence and traumatic inner city life for black youth – particularly young black men. Pivoting off the meme of “young, black, and don’t give a fuck,” 10 gangsta rap’s tales of inert pathology and the inability to ‘get ahead’ seized

10 I borrow this term from the opening of the film Menace II Society (1993) where narrator and protagonist Caine Lawson says his friend O-dawg is “America’s worst nightmare: young, black, and don’t give a fuck.” 61

America’s attention and wallets. Particularly important to the gangsta rap aesthetic are police brutality and frustrations with the inability to rectify the policing of black bodies by crooked cops. Songs like Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” and N.W.A’s infamous ode to racial profiling “Fuck tha

Police” shed light on the continued racial anxieties that face post-Civil Rights blacks. In that way, gangsta rap provided an updated sonic backdrop for the continued struggles of racial violence in southern California. For example, the Watts Race Riots of 1968 and the 1992 Los

Angeles race riots, spurred by expedition of white officers in the beating of Rodney King, cement gangsta rap as a gauge of contemporary race (and gender) politics. It is from gangsta rap’s renderings of inner city life that post-Civil Rights Americans situate their understanding of a contemporary black experience.

I argue that gangsta rap is an initial premise of contemporary racialized common sense, introducing hip hop as a framework for understanding race and identity. It is from this perspective that I believe Beatty lends credence to The White Boy Shuffle, sampling from these touchstones of gangsta rap aesthetics and using them to examine the ways in which the Civil

Rights Movement failed. By making Gunnar Kaufman a young black man in the midst of Los

Angeles’ racial anxieties, Beatty, aware of gangsta rap’s reach, uses these notions to situate The

White Boy Shuffle as a case study of the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and its failures.

He uses hip hop sensibility to signify the peculiarities of black agency in a post-Civil Rights moment of American history.

For example, Beatty parodies police brutality against inner city blacks by making

Gunnar’s father Rölf a sketch artist for the Los Angeles Police Department:

I’d watch my father draw composite sketches for victimized citizens who used his face as

reference point. ‘He was thick-lipped, nose a tad bigger than yours, with your flare

though.’ Daddy would bring some felon to still life and without looking up from his

measured strokes admonish me that my face better not appear on any police officer’s

sketchpad. He’d send me home in a patrol car, black charcoal smudged all over my face

(10).

Rölf, pulling from his own racial anxieties and desperation to assimilate into whiteness, counterclaims police authority as a white hegemonic privilege by literally illustrating what

(black) pathology looks like. Although Rölf desires to see himself as fully integrated within white society because of his police badge and subversive meekness, whites still disassociate him from social acceptance by using his face to frame the stereotype of black criminality. Simply put,

Rölf drank the integration Kool-Aid and choked on it.

This fact is especially prevalent when Gunnar shares a story from his father’s Mississippi upbringing, detailing an incident where Rölf deems social humiliation as a by-product of integration and acceptance by his white peers. After participating in a racist re-enactment of the murders of SNCC Freedom Riders James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner,

Rölf follows the mob of white high school students to a bonfire celebrating the re-enactment’s success. To avoid confronting the traumatic experience, Rölf overdrinks and passes out, waking up naked and spraypainted white. His “white skin tingling with assimilation,” Rölf looks at his social humiliation as a form of hazing and acceptance by (as?) white (21).

Thus, Beatty uses Rölf’s character to dismantle the idealism surrounding integration as an effective product of Civil Rights legislation. Indeed, integration as a reconciliation site of past racial traumas gives rise to intra-racial frustration, which manifests in Rölf violently displacing his angst upon his family. Rölf signifies self-defilement as integration and attempts to instill his son with similar rhetoric. Gunnar, realizing his father’s self-hatred and ‘selling out,’ denounces

63 his father and, to an extent, the legitimacy of integration/assimilation as a Post-Civil Rights achievement. If Rölf is any indication of the utopic racial mountaintop the Civil Rights

Movement pushed to achieve, Gunnar knowingly chooses to fall to the Hillside ghetto. The frustrations and anxiety that Gunnar feels towards his father parallel the angst of inner city blacks in the 1980s and 1990s, the foundation of which is lent to the gangsta rap aesthetics.

Gunnar’s antithetical stance to Civil Rights rhetoric – especially the perception of a needed nucleic black leadership that resonated in previous eras – illuminates the lack of discourse surrounding the social-economic challenges blacks faced in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. In an effort to fill in the gaps, Gunnar suggests blacks’ mass suicide as a last ditch effort to achieve social change:

In the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted,

entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the

slow deaths of toxic addiction and the American work ethic when the immediate

gratification of suicide awaits?...Lunch counters, bus seats, and executive washrooms be

damned; our mass suicide will be the ultimate sit-in (2).

By denouncing previous efforts of black empowerment as failures, Gunnar’s demand of suicide serves as a possible reclamation of blacks’ ability to define themselves and their positions in the post-Civil Rights United States.

Particularly striking in Beatty’s satirizing of death and blackness is his emphasis on the break between blacks’ individuality and collective identity. Gunnar signifies this break, existing as both a “Negro Demagogue” and an individual. This dual existence is especially prevalent when Gunnar calls for blacks to kill themselves as a revolutionary act, yet when asked about his own suicide he gruffly replies “when I’m good and goddamn ready” (202). Unlike the

64 assassination and martyrdom of previous black leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,

Gunnar’s sensibilities of death as a member of the hip hop generation rely on his ability to define himself outside of the grasp of Civil Rights rhetoric. After signifying his rise to leadership as

“no longer a need for fed-up second-class citizens to place a want ad in the Sunday classifieds,”

Gunnar demonstrates an awareness of Civil Rights leadership through denouncing it. In this sense, blacks celebrate Gunnar’s nihilism because of what he designates as a residual need by a black collective to be governed: “I didn’t interview for the job. I was drafted by 22 million hitherto unaffiliated souls into serving as full-time Svengali and foster parent to an abandoned people. I spoon-feed them grueled futility, unveil the oblivion that is black America’s existence and the hopelessness of the struggle” (1).

Thus, Gunnar nihilistically views black leadership as a burden instead of a privilege. His lack of enthusiasm as a leader indicates his distaste with romanticized notions of black leadership he deems obsolete in the post-Civil Rights era. Gunnar understands that messianic black leadership is not the answer to the ills facing contemporary blacks in the United States. Gunnar’s observation of blacks following him with “avian obedience” nods towards a lack of agency for blacks in the post-Civil Rights era to tackle the current challenges of a shifting social-cultural

U.S. landscape. Instead of taking initiative, blacks invest in outdated forms of nucleic black leadership. Beatty demonstrates this reality through paralleling Gunnar’s nihilistic outlook to the moment’s gangsta rap aesthetic. His push for suicide signifies blacks’ social and physical death being inextricably linked, as suggested in gangsta rap aesthetics.

Most telling of Beatty’s interweaving of hip hop sensibility and blacks’ lack of agency is

Gunnar’s speech during an anti-apartheid rally at Boston University. Gunnar, only on the docket to promote his latest book of poetry, initially approaches the podium with intentions to fulfill the

65 textbook definition of a black revolutionary: “I wanted to address the crowd like a seasoned revolutionary, open with a smooth activist adage, ’There’s an old Chinese saying…,’ but I didn’t know any Chinese sayings, old or new. My hesitancy grew embarrassing” (198). Gunnar’s embarrassment lies in his realization that he could not fulfill the expectations of previous leaders partly because he did not possess a desire to fulfill those expectations. Upon looking at the abstract piece of art dedicated to Martin Luther King and its mistreatment, Gunnar realizes the peculiarity of trying to lead those present who did not appreciate the efforts or sacrifices made by previous black leaders like King. In an explicit tirade – or, to pull from his hip hop sensibility, a freestyle – Gunnar calls out the crowd’s misread of complicity as agency and protest:

‘Who knows what it says on the plaque at the base of the sculpture?’ No one spoke. ‘You

motherfuckers pass by that ugly-ass sculpture every day. You hang your coats on it, open

beer bottles on it, meet your hot Friday night dates there, now here you are talking about

freedom this and whitey putting-shit-in-the-game that and you don’t even know what the

plaque says? Shit could say ‘Sieg Heil! Kill All Niggers! Auslander Raus!’ for all you

know, stupid motherfuckers. African-Americans my ass. Middle minorities caught

between racial polarities, please. Caring, class-conscious, progressive crackers, shit.

Selfish apathetic humans like every body else (199).

In this explosion, Gunnar points out how contemporary blacks, especially black youth, rest on the laurels of past victories – and traumas – of past black agency. Gunnar’s tirade asserts the belief of Post-Civil Rights blacks that they have achieved racial equality and reached King’s vision of the racial mountaintop. What is lacking, however, is knowledge about King’s sacrifice outside of being a figurehead of the Civil Rights era. Contemporary blacks’ complicity is signified in the rally attendees’ inability to recite King’s quote at the base of his statue. Gunnar’s

66 classification of contemporary blacks as “selfish, apathetic humans like everybody else” follows the pursuit of Daryl Dickson Carr’s observation of post-Civil Rights blacks’ unwillingness to sacrifice material comfort for racial empowerment.

It is important to note that as Gunnar blisteringly critiques contemporary blacks’ lack of agency, he also recognizes his own limitations as a leader by pointing out his own complicity:

Now, I’m not going to front, act like the first thing I did when I got to Boston University

was proceed directly to the Martin Luther King Memorial and see what the goddamn

plaque says. Only reason I know what it says is that I was coming out of Taco Bell on my

way to basketball practice when I dropped my burrito deluxe at the base of the

monument. When I bent down to wipe the three zesty cheeses, refried beans, and secret

hot sauce off my sneakers, I saw what the plaque said. It says, “If a man hasn’t

discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Martin Luther King, Jr. (200).

Gunnar’s humorous recalling of how he learned about King’s quote creates a brief comedic break from the stark reality of black leadership as a failed discourse in the post-Civil Rights era.

Yet King’s quote provides context for Gunnar’s own mullings about death and black agency.

Gunnar concludes his speech by pointing out his inability to name anything worth dying for while poking fun at King’s death: “So I asked myself, what am I willing to die for? The day when white people treat me with respect and see my life as equally valuable to theirs? No, I ain’t willing to die for that, because if they don’t know that by now, they ain’t never going to know it.

Matter of fact, I guess I’m just not fit to live. In other words, I’m just ready to die. I’m just ready to die” (200). Realizing his unwillingness to stand – or die – as a messiah for complicit blacks,

Gunnar relays his disinterest by emphatically proclaiming, “I’m just ready to die.” In using gangsta rap as a critical lens for Gunnar’s speech, an underpinning notion of Gunnar’s nihilism is

67 therefore the possibility of physical violence. Although Gunnar calls for self-inflicted violence via suicide, there is also the potential for a mob outbreak of violence, which Gunnar seemingly embraces.

This embrace of violence as normative is an extension of Beatty’s recognition of hip hop sensibility framing contemporary black identity. Invoking violence also makes Gunnar’s

‘leadership’ antithetical to that of the heavily celebrated – and watered down – representations of

King as a pacifist. When a white woman asks Gunnar ‘what about nonviolence,’ Gunnar’s best friend Nick Scoby replies “who said anything about nonviolence?” Thus, the rally provides

Beatty an opportunity to complicate post-Civil Rights common sense by troubling popular notions of black identity and racial politics via exaggerated methods of self-definition like suicide, and invocations of violence similar to those found in gangsta rap narratives. While

Gunnar insists his comments were directed towards “the negroes,” he realizes “the white folks were listening in, their ears pressed to my breast, listening to my heart” (199). Gunnar’s realization of white attendees’ interest in his contextualization of racial politics parallels whites’ consumption of gangsta rap as authenticated contemporary black experiences.

In “Punked for Life: Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Radical Black

Masculinities,” L.H. Stallings suggests that the meme of suicide throughout the novel provides an unorthodox reckoning of blackness and death, avoiding conformity to monolithic – and

Westernized – understandings of mourning and trauma blacks currently face. In her contextualization of the suicide of Scoby, Stallings writes of it as a revolutionary act, paralleling his death to the revolutionary suicide theory invoked by Huey P. Newton. A revolutionary’s ability to be ever-ready for death – and willing to die – is also applicable to the death meme frequently broached in gangsta rap. Stallings’ observation of “Scoby’s act refus[ing] to separate

68 life from death” bridges the sensibilities of past and present, embodying both a seemingly inherent inner city normality and idealism of a Black Nationalist agenda (115). Yet contextualizing Beatty’s inversion of death as gangsta rap aesthetic suggests his treatment of hip hop as a doubly bound agent of capitalism and resistance. Although Scoby transcends stereotypical representations of inner city black youth in the 1990s – i.e., being a well read jazz aficionado – he is still affiliated with the ‘hood and ‘hood sensibilities because of their

(re)presentation in gangsta rap as the epitome of urban black youth. Like Gunnar, Scoby signifies treading the increasingly blurry line struck between fetishizing hip hop’s inner city aesthetics and one’s lived experience. It is from this perspective that Beatty arguably introduces hip hop sensibility as a framework for navigating post-Civil Rights racial identity politics. Beatty complicates gangsta rap’s position within mainstream popular culture as a gauge of black authenticity by acknowledging it as a commodity. Thus, Beatty’s satiric parallels of minstrel- esque gangsta rap group The Stoic Undertakers with the antics of Hillside’s local gang the Gun

Totin’ Hooligans presents hip hop as a lens of analysis that demonstrates an awareness of hip hop’s commodification while rendering it useful in complicating a post-Civil Rights black experience.

3.2 The Stone the Building Refused: Postracial Identity Politics in The Boondocks

Almost immediately following Chappelle’s abrupt departure from Chappelle’s Show, Aaron

McGruder’s The Boondocks first aired on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim in November 2005. An adaptation of McGruder’s same titled comic book series, The Boondocks grappled with similar themes as Chappelle’s Show but primarily existed within overarching tropes of race, class, and exaggerations of popular culture and current events. Engaging and overindulging in what Nicole Fleetwood calls the

“troubling presence of blackness,” The Boondocks cartoons grapple with conflicting expressions of racial progress, essentialism, and complexities of black humanity that exist in the current American landscape. These warring ideals are embodied in the show’s main characters: Huey Freeman, a budding neo-black nationalist; Riley Freeman, a wannabe thug; Robert “Grandad” Freeman, Huey and Riley’s grandfather “from the old school;” Uncle Ruckus, a black white supremacist who blames his black skin on “re-vitiligo;” Tom and Sarah DuBois, the mixed race couple living next door; and Jasmine DuBois,

Tom and Sarah DuBois’ daughter. Perhaps most evident of McGruder’s subversion of hegemonic privilege is his simultaneous illustration and critique of this deemed moment of postracialism. McGruder recasts racial discourse through ‘mixing’ races both advertently – the DuBoises and their daughter – and intuitively – lending ‘black’ voices to nonblack characters. Aside from subverting primary schools of

20th century black political thought, signified through the character’s last names, The Boondocks teases out impositions and explications of race and power in the imaginary suburb of Woodcrest. Because the boondocks are defined as “nowhere,” McGruder privileges himself space to overstate race and popular culture in any fashion he chooses. The Boondocks presents a series of 21st century events that are situated within a satiric framework to annotate the peculiarities of shifting and intersecting discourses of race and popular culture that frame a post-Civil Rights black experience.

McGruder ventures into crafting a post-Civil Rights and postracial black identity through identifying shifty markers of race and privilege during the presidential campaign of Barack

Obama. Obama’s biracial ethnic background and the awkward experiences attached to it initially situate Obama as a (tragic) mulatto figure. Yet the popularity of his memoir Dreams of My

Father and a racially ambiguous draw for political power in his presidential campaign slogan

“Yes We Can” prompts a reconsideration of Obama as the epicenter of what McGruder contextualizes as Americans’ common sense. McGruder uses Obama’s campaign to tease out the

70 angst and peculiarities of American racial politics and blackness in this most recent moment of post-Civil Rights, post-9/11, and post-Hurricane Katrina American society. McGruder highlights the peculiarity of Obama’s agenda of racial ambiguity and expectations imposed upon his blackness.

Mark Anthony Neal observes Obama’s performances of black masculinity as the inability to function within white American society: “black men do not live in polite society – however effectively they earn their keep within those spaces.” Obama painstakingly maneuvers American racial politics through various performances of his blackness and masculinity. McGruder exaggerates Obama’s performances and his characters’ reactions focus not only the peculiarity of

21st century public scripts of race and their (dis)advantages. McGruder acknowledges Obama’s character in multiple discourses – political, racial, and generational – but grounds him in a hip hop sensibility to identify Obama’s limitations as a messianic figure for contemporary black leadership. A manifestation of the hip hop trope of H.N.I.C. – Head Nigga in Charge – Obama’s likeness and fervor during the 2008 presidential elections provided an opportunity for rappers to engage ideals and discourses outside of their commercial dispositions.11 Obama provided hip hop with affirmation that, to pull from Tupac Shakur, he was “heaven sent” and that America was ready for a black president.

McGruder acknowledges Obama as a domestic and international phenomenon through an episode of The Boondocks entitled “It’s a Black President, Huey Freeman.” A mockery of the comic strip Peanuts’ animated television specials and a nod towards the idea of blacks being the

‘peanut gallery,’ the episode takes the form of a documentary narrated by German filmmaker

Werner Herzog. McGruder uses Herzog to acknowledge the global attention on America’s

11 For further information on the H.N.I.C. meme in hip hop, see Todd Boyd’s The New H.N.I.C.: the Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (2004). 71 highly visible push for a postracial agenda, treating blackness as an extension of American identity which toys with the peculiarity of colorblindness as a signifier of contemporary

Americanness. The construction of Americanness and, to an extent, blackness from the lens of foreign spectatorship that Herzog represents opens up space for McGruder to critique presumptuous and often misrepresentative racial tropes in America. Herzog’s interviews with the cast speak on multiple levels: the surface cynicism of a foreign spectator about American racial politics, McGruder’s cynicism about African American investment in social agency and

“change,” and the aloofness in black America’s blind support of Obama because of his blackness. McGruder’s frustration with black political agency is illuminated through Riley,

Grandad, and rapper Thugnificent’s perceptions of Obama’s presidential campaign. Because of his oversaturated presence in the public spectrum, Obama is embraced as a friend or family member by black Americans. These perceptions, seemingly doting, help McGruder remove and de-fetishize Obama as a messianic figure of the (black) American community.

Riley, for example, ‘blackens’ and claims Obama and parallels his blackness via hip hop sensibility by nicknaming him ‘Obeezy,” a nod towards the whimsical wordplay of rapper Snoop

Dogg. Riley, like many black Americans, shares the belief that Obama is easily accessible and befriends him. “I know if I need something I can count on Obeezy,” Riley asserts. Granddad

Freeman shares similar sentiments, revealing his reason for voting for Obama was his perceived blackness and access to singer Beyonce. Herzog’s interview with Thugnificent (taken from an actual XXL Magazine interview with rapper DMX) reveals his initial unfamiliarity with Obama and shock that he is black and running for president:

Herzog: You don’t know there is a black man running for president named Barack Obama?

Thugnificent: His name is Barack? For real?

Herzog: Barack Obama. Yes.

Thugnificent: Get the fuck outta here. Barack?

Herzog: Yes, Barack.

Thugnificent: Where’s he from, Africa?

Herzog: His dad was African, yes.

Thugnificent: You can’t be serious, man. There ain’t no nigga running for president

named Barack Obama…I don’t believe you. Stop fuckin’ with me!

After finding out Barack Obama is indeed a black man running for office, Thugnificent becomes a staunch Obama supporter. He releases music in support of Obama’s campaign – the single

“Dick Riding Obama” collaborates with artist will.i.am – and redresses himself literally and figuratively as a ‘socially conscious’ rapper. He drops his diamond crusted chains and baggy clothes for sweater vests, cardigans, and too-tight skinny jeans. He also dons a pair of thick black-framed glasses, signifying what he believes to represent intellectual and political prowess.

Instead of calling black men “niggas” and black women “bitches,” Thugnificent asserts he will start calling men “Obamas” and women “Michelles.” Initially, Thugnificent’s change seemingly positions Obama as a catalyst for the resuscitation of commercial rap as a medium of social- political activism. Considering the staunch support of rap stars like Ludacris, Jay-Z, and Young

Jeezy, the hip hop community indeed pulled together to corral support for Obama’s initial campaign. Still, hip hop capitalized off of Obama’s campaign and election, especially Sean

“Diddy” Combs’ and his “Vote or Die” campaign. The logo “Vote or Die” signifies previous efforts of blacks who literally died for the right to vote while attempting to attach agency to the current moment of (black) American politics. Purchasing the shirt or other paraphernalia visibly demonstrated one’s ‘awareness’ but did not necessarily indicate an actual vote being cast.

Nevertheless, “Vote or Die” shirts and wristbands were heavily visible and high selling items, sustaining hip hop’s ‘consciousness’ as a commodity.

It is also important to note that hip hop’s embrace and depiction of Obama as ‘down’ does not correlate with Obama’s use of hip hop as a political tool. Simply put, rappers forget that

Obama is not just a black man, but a black man who is a politician. As Michael Jeffries asserts,

Obama sets up boundaries between himself and the hip hop community to avoid loss of confidence from those outside of the hip hop realm, particularly older, middle and upper class whites: “the president consistently displayed enough knowledge of hip-hop events and personalities to build connections with young voters, all the while maintaining a politically astute detachment from the hip-hop generation” (202). Consider, for example, Obama’s calling out

Kanye West as “stupid” for his hijacking of country singer Taylor Swift’s grammy acceptance speech in 2009. Unlike the rappers who idolize him in their music, Obama does not romanticize hip hop as the ‘be all end all’ for winning the 2008 election. This stance would become more evident in his 2012 re-election, where Obama used fewer hip hop references and utilized more

‘traditional’ representations of American popular music like Bruce Springsteen and Stevie

Wonder. When Obama does demonstrate a hip hop sensibility, however, it filters through the most recognizable representations of commercial rap success, particularly Jay-Z. Likewise, visible support of Obama’s second presidential campaign dwindled, possibly from lack of interest or the realization that Obama, indeed, is a strategizing politician and not just “a brotha in the white house.”

There is also the possibility that rappers’ romanticizing of Obama reflected their limited knowledge of and investment in mainstream politics. McGruder aptly reflects this realization in a scene where Thugnificent takes part in a panel on comedian Bill Maher’s show Real Time with

Bill Maher. Mocking the iconic photograph depicting Malcolm X deep in thought, Thugnificent announces himself as a black leader. Maher, already aware of Thugnificent’s political ineptitude, asks him to name the three branches of government. In a painfully awkward moment,

Thugnificent falters and stumbles over an answer, to which Maher emphatically asserts, “if you are what black leadership is, I’m glad I’m a white man.” Thugnificent’s stance as a rapper- turned-political activist is trumped by Maher’s political acuteness and white privilege. Using

Maher’s character, McGruder deflates the romantic notion of commercial rap as politically aware and capable of contributing to the resuscitation of black agency and leadership previously seen during the Civil Rights era. Instead of learning and acknowledging the stark realities contemporary African Americans face, Thugnificent parallels himself to the celebrity whirlwind surrounding Obama’s blackness. The notion of hip hop as a vehicle of post-Civil Rights black leadership is critiqued by McGruder as “in name and image only.”

Although part of the racialized common sense surrounding Obama is grounded in hip hop sensibility, a brief yet extremely penetrating moment of the episode aptly portrays the murkiness of contemporary race politics. Amidst the excitement of Obama’s election, Huey unenthusiastically mutters “ehh.” After his apathetic response, Huey is aggrandized as a “hater” and ostracized from Woodcrest’s black community. McGruder pushes senses of racial trauma and violence by presenting a multi-ethnic mob of Huey’s detractors burning an effigy of his likeness. An instant yet horrifying frame that blurs into McGruder’s larger narrative, the multiethnic lynch mob suggests a peculiar revisionist history of 20th century lynching as a racially traumatic discourse. Koritha Mitchell’s discussion of lynching dramas from the late 19th and 20th centuries is applicable to McGruder’s 21st century rendering of lynching as a subversion of white privilege. “Blacks understood lynching as a white response to their success” (8). By

75 satirizing Huey’s pseudo-lynching, McGruder highlights the instability of racialized common sense, suggesting the mob as a twisted realization of colorblindness via access to lynching, a historically white privilege. In the wake of Obama’s election, Huey’s lynch mob is a horrifying realization of Obama’s colorblind political slogan “Yes We Can.” McGruder’s revision of historical lynching forces the viewer to confront blacks’ hand in their own complicity as voters and American citizens.

In another way, Huey’s dull response to Obama’s election is perhaps most telling of

McGruder’s treatment of race and common sense.. When probed about his lack of happiness,

Huey sighs and says “what is the point of talking if no one ever learns?” I suggest Huey’s responses are an extension of McGruder’s own jilted outlook of Obama’s election as a signifier of America’s Postraciality. For a brief moment, McGruder drops his satiric context and speaks from his personal viewpoint, hinting at frustration with an increasing inability to articulate his critiques of (black) America’s viewpoints while treading the line between social criticism and entertainment. Similar to Chappelle, McGruder abruptly pulled out of the animated series and comic strip and went on an indefinite hiatus.

In conclusion, contemporary black satire provides space for mapping out the trajectory of post-Civil Rights racial politics. Because of its position as a site of both capitalism and social criticism, black satire invokes hip hop sensibility in order to investigate blackness as a commodity and as a site of complicity. An additional challenge for post-Civil Rights satirists is the navigation of its multicultural audience. By indicating black satire as a site of racialized common sense framed by hip hop sensibility, room is made to navigate the frequently conflicting representations of blackness, capitalism, and agency presented in a contemporary American cultural landscape.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLACK CULTURAL TRAUMA, SLAVERY, AND HIP HOP SENSIBILITY IN THE KNOWN WORLD

“Black people have always been dispensable” --Edward P. Jones

In August 2003 rapper Snoop Dogg arrived at the MTV music awards accompanied by two black women in chains. The incident raised questions about women’s bodies as cultural currency and inadvertently connected hip hop to slavery. A month later, author Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World debuts and sparks further conversation about the displacement of slavery in a post-Civil Rights popular imagination. The Known World chronicles the history of slavery in fictive Manchester County, Virginia, and includes the narratives of black slave owners. It is important to note that, unlike previous renditions of slavery found in novels like

Beloved, Flight to Canada, Corregidora, or Dessa Rose, The Known World forces the reconsideration of slavery within the black community as strictly a site of victimization.

Although the Snoop Dogg incident precedes Jones’ novel, his response in a 2008 interview with

Maryemma Graham speaks to the incident and spurns my discussion of grounding The Known

World within what I’m calling a hip hop sensibility:

It is as if slavery were legal. Something happened to black people in the ‘80s. We see

it all the time: You can pick out some of the worse rap stars and you know what they

would do. . .you can see it now. It would be one of those BET or MTV music awards.

There is a runway outside, red carpet, and since slavery is legal, some guy would

show up and there would be a strap, and chains would be connected to black people.

He would have a turban on, dressed with all his fine clothes, and gold everywhere,

the bling-bling; the gold chains are connected to his ten slaves. Then somebody says,

“Silver P, you are good looking tonight.” Then Silver replied, “I got all my niggers

here. See Sam here, he cost $25,000, but he’s worth it. He shines shoes like I don’t

know what” (427).

While Jones does not elaborate on the “something [that] happened to black people in the ‘80s,” his example points to the inculcation of hip hop on black cultural consciousness during that decade.

It is Jones’ description of hip hop slavery within the hypervisible mediums of BET and

MTV, however, that solidifies the need for reconsideration of slavery in this contemporary moment. While BET continues to signify black essentialism, Jones’ inclusion of MTV – which, again, likely demonstrates his awareness of the Snoop Dogg incident – also demonstrates hip hop’s crossover as a multicultural commodity. His description simultaneously blends and destabilizes slavery and hip hop as two primary keystones of a black American experience. Both slavery and hip hop serve as spaces of collective memory and capitalism, contextualizing them as sites of (racialized) common sense. Invoking Ron Eyerman’s discussion of intellectualism and cultural trauma helps segue Jones into this project’s discussion of hip hop sensibility and organic intellectualism. Eyerman describes cultural intellectuals as “socially constructed, historically conditioned role[s] rather than. . .a structurally determined position or personality type” (2). I read Eyerman’s definition of intellectualism as an extension of Gramsci’s organic intellectualism. Indeed, this chapter will build upon and expand Eyerman’s ideas of cultural intellectualism to situate Jones as a type of “culture trauma intellectual” – that is, an intellectual that invokes the messiness of contemporary cultural sensibility to destabilize historic traumatic discourse. As a cultural trauma intellectual Jones is a keeper of collective cultural memory and

78 adds historic credence to the contemporary expression of racialized common sense. His rendition of slavery within hip hop and inclusion of black slaveowners in The Known World create space to bridge slavery’s present and historic tensions. As Susan Donaldson points out, “such a critical shift. . .also requires a new kind of historical novel, one that underscores its own provisional status by calling attention to its literary operations – that is, how it goes about representing the past – and that also problematizes history by unearthing discontinuities, anomalies, and multiple possibilities and by posing alternative content and alternative forms” (270). While I do not suggest Jones set out to write a hip hop slave novel, I posit hip hop sensibility informs his negotiations of slavery as a reflection of contemporary racialized common sense. As Salamishah

Tillet argues, “the past is neither stable nor fixed but a malleable subject that present-day writers and artists can reappropriate, reconstruct, and reclaim. In many ways, the post-civil rights depictions of slavery are examples of a post-modernist practice, for they employ the formal techniques of fragmentation, intertextuality, and discontinuity, while also engaging in the deconstructionist critiques of the totalizing narratives embedded in American law and civic culture” (12). Thus, using hip hop to situate slave narratives like The Known World creates room to renegotiate slavery as a (a)historical discourse that reflects the limitations of racial politics currently in place.

As other recent popular depictions of slavery like Django Unchained suggest, present day versions of slave narratives occupy an ahistorical popular space where race and identity politics collide with historic truths. Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of “roots tourism” highlights the messiness of situating slavery through voyeuristic depictions in post-Civil Rights popular culture:

Yet, what does it bode for our relationship to the past when atrocity becomes a

commodity and this history of defeat comes to be narrated as a story of progress

and triumph? If restaging scenes of captivity and enslavement elide the distinction

between sensationalism and witnessing, risk sobriety for spectacle, and occlude the

violence they set out to represent; they also create a memory of what one has not

witnessed. The reenactment of the event of captivity contrives an enduring, visceral,

and personal memory of the unimaginable” (760).

The danger in recreating the “unimaginable” aspects of slavery without proper context is the risk of losing the agency associated with that culturally traumatic memory. Paralleling Hartman’s discussion of “roots tourism” is a similar tourism of the black American working class that continues to be an underlying facet of hip hop. These types of voyeurism blend when discussing

Jones’ work within a post-Civil Rights framework. While Jones uses hip hop to critique the danger of voyeurism and moral bankruptcy attuned to slavery within this current historical moment, filmic depictions of slavery like Django Unchained use hip hop aesthetics to make slavery a (voyeuristically) multicultural experience. Yet these polarized narratives coexist. A common thread within both examples of slavery is the use of hip hop to make those accounts visible. These types of (re)revisionist slave narratives use hip hop to reflect a murky social- historical moment where the venom and trauma of slave life are far removed. Hip hop can be used to “witness” slavery to an audience far removed from the slave era, invoking the memory of slavery as accessible to a multicultural audience.

In his example of contemporary slavery, Jones utilizes hip hop – particularly rap music – because of its messiness in navigating social consciousness and profitability. Hip hop’s hypermasculinization parallels the hypermasculinity that informs historic slave discourse. Jones’ emphasis on “the bling-bling,” “gold everywhere,” and the rapper/slave owner’s name Silver P

80 provides hip hop as a contemporary context in situating black slaves as a by-product of materialistic pursuits of racial enterprise. Sarah Mahurin Mutter’s theorization of “thingness” and slavery in The Known World can also provide insight into framing Jones’ conceptualization of slavery within commercial hip hop. She writes: “Thingly humans are best understood in their relation to everyday material items, to other commodities. . .when people are equated with commodities – objects to be used by other people – the elusive qualities that comprise

‘humanity’ fall away; their conversion to thing is solidified” (127). Mutter’s conceptualization of slaves as “thingly humans” translates as a double entendre within a commercial hip hop premise; the thingness of slaves correlates with the commodification of rappers. A particularly striking example of this duality is the description of Sam, Silver P’s shoe shiner. Sam’s thingness as a shoe-shiner parallels the commodification of Silver P’s blackness within commercial hip hop. Jones annexes Sam’s working status as a slave within the hip hop working class aesthetics that dictate contemporary black authenticity. For Silver P, owning Sam is the ultimate representation of the bootstrap logic while maintaining a connection to the black working class narrative. Silver P’s declaration “I got all my niggers here” subverts a commonly used phrase of camaraderie heard in rap “I got all my niggas with me.” In this context, a rapper’s success and popularity is validated by the size – and visibility – of the entourage. Purchasing one’s entourage as equivalent to buying their loyalty is sustained by the belief an entourage’s fickleness once the

“money and the fame” are depleted. This coincides with the historicized belief that the amount of slaves a white slave owner owns validates his worth. This fear manifests in slavery as a master’s fear of slaves “turning” on him or her. Yet the underlying thread between both understandings is the commodification of black bodies and the inherent factor of paying for these entourages to exist.

In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet argues post-Civil Rights black artists attempts to reclaim the right to “formally remember slavery” and “democratize U.S. memory” (5). In shaping slavery as a tangible cultural memory, it transcends its historical context and bridges slavery with more contemporary challenges like poverty and other forms of socio-economic displacement seen in hip hop. My reading of The Known World through a hip hop sensibility lens reflects the complications of treating slavery as a monolithic traumatic discourse. The Known

World remises slavery and exposes the racial anxieties that blacks currently face in this imagined postracial era. The search for inclusion in the national narrative or what Tillet calls a “democratic aesthetic” allows us to see how hip hop and a novel like The Known World are in political conversation. Although hip hop is the most visible and commodified form of blackness to date, the subjectivity and malleability of black bodies within the U.S. social-cultural landscape highlights the extant marginalization of and disenfranchisement of blacks. Tillet writes:

“Because racial exclusion had become part and parcel of African American identity since slavery, it cannot simply be willed or wished away. This protracted experience of disillusionment, mourning, and yearning is in fact the basis of African American civic estrangement. It’s lingering is not just a haunting of the past but is also a reminder of the present day racial inequalities that keep African American citizens in an indeterminate, unassimilable state as a racialize ‘Other’” (9). This peculiarity is historicized in The Known World, as the novel provides a nuanced lens of the implications of slavery upon one’s self and a black collective conscious. Henry Townsend’s narrative, for example, points to the inaccuracy of imagining slavery as a polarized site of white privilege and black victimization.

Henry is born a slave but after his freedom is purchased by his father falls under the tutelage of his former master William Robbins. Ironically, Henry’s slaveowning does not

82 supplement his own ownership by his father Augustus: “Augustus would also not seek a petition for Henry, his son, and over time, because of how well William Robbins, their former owner, treated Henry, people in Manchester County just failed to remember that Henry, in fact, was listed forever in the records of Manchester as his father’s property” (15-16). Because Henry’s view of slavery relies upon his blindness to the (im)morality of slavery – “Nobody never told me the wrong of that” – Henry does not consider himself nor slavery to be corrupt (137). Henry’s outlook on slavery not only reflects Robbins’ influence but the impossibility of his corruption by slavery because of his status as a former slave. He vows to “be a master different from any other, the kind of shepherd master God intended” (180). Katherine Clay Bassard writes of Henry: “That

Henry grows up in a system where property relations are recognized above family relations constitutes the construction of his identity and his world. While Augustus’ ‘ownership’ of

Mildred and Henry are of the benevolent kind, Henry grows up ‘free’ to participate in commercial slave owning. In Henry’s world, the categories of bond and free, while often racially connected, also constitute the power line that at times renders the color line problematic and moot” (413). Clay Bassard’s theorization of the power line, a remix of DuBois’ “problem of the color line” from The Souls of Black Folks, is a palpable lens in understanding Henry’s investment in power as a racially neutral discourse. Clay Bassard defines the power line as “a slippage in subjectivity that occurs when identities shift from one side of the social text of power to the other in such a way as to cause a temporary destabilization in the coordinates of the oppressor and the oppressed” (408; original emphasis). In this sense, Henry’s previous subjectivity as a slave destabilizes his narrative as a slave owner. Grounding Clay Bassard’s discussion in hip hop sensibility, Henry is comparable to a rapper in search of a slot within commercial hip hop. He reflects the hip hop adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” His

83 performance of blackness is dictated not by his or his parents’ narratives as slaves but the possibility of transcending slave narratives by becoming a slaveowner.

Henry’s outlook of slavery as a subversive narrative of power is substantiated by

Robbins’ perceptions of slavery that he imposes upon Henry during his “tutelage.” Upon buying his first slave Moses, for example, Henry initially treats him as an equal, a member of his entourage. Henry’s treatment of Moses can be read similar to that of a rapper’s treatment of his crew early in his career. Fellowship between the two men, i.e. “tussling,” exhibits a mutual appreciation. Yet in a defining moment of Henry’s mastery, Robbins deflates Henry’s affection for Moses after viewing the two men “playing like children in the dirt” (123). Appalled, Robbins summons Henry to him – like a master beckons a slave – and Henry obliges. Without direct eye contact Robbins reprimands Henry on his ignorance of the slave/master dichotomy, giving a brief monologue on the powers and limitations of slave ownership:

“Henry,” Robbins said, looking not at him but out to the other side of the road, “the

law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects

you. . .but the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does

not matter if you are not much darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You

are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and

stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and

your property turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will

not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you need. . .You are

rollin around now, today, with property you have a slip of paper on. How will you

act when you have ten slips of paper, fifty slips of paper? How will you act, Henry,

when you have a hundred slips of paper? Will you still be rollin in the dirt with

them? (123).

Robbins depicts slave law as colorblind and non-partial. Unlike Henry, however, Robbins’ status as a wealthy white slave owner does make the law impartial to him. He has no difficulty discerning his narrative from property because he owns and dictates both narratives. White

(patriarchal) privilege is only rendered visible to him through Henry’s misuse of power Henry, however, must still combat his identity as “Nigger Henry” and fight past slave experiences to rise to the bar of the law’s colorblindness. Indeed, Henry must be willing to invoke white supremacist privilege in order to distinguish himself as slaveowner, not a black slaveowner.

Therefore, after Robbins’ rebuke, Henry performs what he views as “good ownership” by physically assaulting Moses. He repeatedly slaps Moses for “talking back” about the amount of work that could be done for the day by both men. In “White Supremacy Under Fire” David Ikard speaks to the his racial calculus of ownership:

Jones casts light on and attacks normative white supremacy in the contemporary

moment by resituating it within established historical narratives as a pandemic of

the perverse. Through this narrative prism, Jones demonstrates that the small

pocket of the novel’s African American characters who willingly participate in

slavery are a reflection, in large part, of the tenacity and corrupting apparatus of

white supremacist ideology on African American consciousness. In such an

ideologically warped milieu where African Americans are socially conditioned to see

white dominance and the brutal exploitation of black bodies for cultural gain as

natural, the emergence of African American slaveholders becomes a radical

indictment against white supremacist ideology (65).

Ikard’s identification of slavery as “warped milieu” of white supremacist discourse locates where these traumatic racial experiences take place. He invokes the cultural trauma of slavery within the novel’s setting, frequently utilizing the setting as a nuanced complement to the literal critique of white supremacy Jones provides throughout the text. After leaving Moses to work by himself for the rest of the day, for example, Henry listens to his surroundings: “he heard the sounds of

Moses working. The birds of the day began to chirp, and in little more than a mile, the bird songs had replaced completely the sound of the man working behind him” (125). The description of birds chirping while Moses worked sonically reifies Robbins’ interpretation of normative slave/master discourse. Chirping birds, a signifier of a bright and normal day, drowns out

Henry’s abuse. This scene literally and figuratively speaks to Ikard’s observations of “the brutal exploitations of black bodies for cultural gain as natural.” As Ikard observes, Henry’s complicit understanding of slave/master discourse desire to be treated as an equal using slavery as a stepping stone. It is in this passage Henry attempts to distinguish himself as Moses’ superior, leaving him behind as a slave instead of a peer.

Yet it is Moses’ reaction to Henry’s assault that best illustrates the lopsidedness of the novel’s fault lines of power: “Moses felt himself beginning to sink in the dirt. He lifted one foot and placed it elsewhere, hoping that would be better, but it wasn’t. He wanted to move the other foot, but that would have been too much – as it was, moving the first foot was done without permission” (124). We can read the sinking ground as a metaphor for slavery. Moses’ response demonstrates his inability to think outside of a white supremacist construct – he’s “world stupid”

(268). The action of lifting one foot and placing it elsewhere alludes to Moses’ belief that Henry would, indeed, be a better master because of his blackness and past slave experiences. Moses’

“sinking feeling,” however, illustrates his disappointment in Henry’s inability to actually achieve

86 a different, improved standard of slaveownership. After Henry slaps him, Moses is jolted back to the harsh reality that Henry may be black but his treatment of him as a slave and equal was not any better than Robbins, his first and white master. Slavery supersedes race and gender because of blacks’ and whites’ investment in it as a site of white supremacy.

4.1 Walking Mad: Hip Hop Feminist Politics in The Known World

Jones most striking use of cultural trauma intellectualism is his development and use of women’s narratives in the novel. His treatment of slave women in The Known World points to an awareness of the unspeakable sexual and psychological trauma black women endure during slavery as well as in hip hop. Jones knowingly subverts the representation of black women in chains – like the women accompanying Snoop Dogg – to bridge these cycles of trauma together.

He aptly binds the patriarchal abuse of slave women with hip hop’s misogyny. Jones’ construction of powerful, independent black female characters like Alice Night (Walker), for example, provide black women the opportunity to move past slave women as strictly traumatic figures. Thus, he positions himself as cultural trauma intellectual by constructing slave women as messy organic intellectuals.

Alice’s worldview best encapsulates the complication of the novel’s title; she manipulates constructions of consciousness to exist in a space nestled between a dominant worldview and her own self-awareness. Her worldview speaks not only to Jones’ awareness of gender in slavery and hip hop but also the ideology of the writer Alice Walker. Walker’s construction of strong black women characters and her concept of “womanism” is Jones’ lynchpin between slavery and hip hop aesthetics. Walker describes womanism as “outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is

87 considered ‘good for one’ . . .Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: ‘You trying to be grown.’ Responsible. In charge. Serious” (xi, original emphasis). Alice reclaims her self-worth and identity by taking on the “willful” and

“courageous” performance of madness in order to cope with the patriarchal restrictions of slavery. Similarly to Walker’s character Sophia feigning weakness in the wake of her imprisonment due to racism in The Color Purple, Alice feigns madness as a method of survival.

Alice’s devout performance of insanity reflects the risks of her being found and the literal and figurative loss of her freedom.

It is in through Jones’ articulation of womanism that I situate Alice as a messy organic intellectual. Described by other slaves as having “half a mind,” Alice exhibits messy organic intellectualism because she feigns madness in order to exist on the fringes of society while maintaining awareness of the world around her. As previously introduced in my discussion of hip hop messy organic intellectualism and Nicki Minaj in chapter two, Alice fulfills the category of a “Madwoman/Madhatter” trope that allows her to exist outside of normative slave women personas while acknowledging the subjectivity of her identity. As Katherine Clay Bassard observes, Alice’s insanity “has served as a mask for her shrewdness as well as a signifier of another world and alternative vision” (417). Her performance as a Madwoman/Madhatter allows her to maneuver the peculiarities of slavery as a hypermasculine, heteronormative space. Alice’s occupation of slavery as a gray social-cultural space highlights the “unrecognized, unacknowledged stories, alternative scripts” overlooked in conventional slave narratives

(Donaldson 272).

Alice’s segue into the novel represents the displacement of slave (women) bodies; she is introduced as a sad, mentally ill figure because of being kicked in the head by a mule. Her

88 incident provides the foundation for Alice’s mobility as a wanderer: “No one questioned her because her story was so vivid, so sad – another slave without freedom and now she had a mind so addled she wandered in the light like a cow without a bell” (4). Purchased for “$228 and two bushels of apples not good enough to eat and only so-so enough for a cider that was bound to set someone’s teeth on edge,” Alice’s status as a “thingly human” and “damaged goods” provides her the opportunity to construct her own narrative, one that challenges the inferiority of slave women (13). Like the bushel of apples used to buy her, Alice embodies the opportunity to “set someone’s teeth on edge,” juxtaposing the sexual stigmas attached to her slave woman identity with the fears of her performed madness.

This juxtaposition is best described through Alice’s initial encounters with slave patrollers:

From the first week, Alice had started going about the land in the night, singing and

talking to herself and doing things that sometimes made the hair on the backs of the

slave patrollers’ necks stand up. She spit at and slapped their horses for saying

untrue things about her to her neighbors. . .She grabbed the patrollers’ crotches and

begged them to dance away with her because her intended was forever pretending

he didn’t know who she was. She called the white men by made-up names and gave

them the day and time God would take them to heaven, would drag each and every

member of their families across the sky and toss them into hell with no more

thought than a woman dropping strawberries into a cup of cream (12).

Alice’s performance of madness allows her to navigate between slave women and (white) women’s politics of respectability. She dictates the terms of sexuality to the men patrollers. Her willingness to grab at the patrolmen’s crotches alludes to that hypersexuality and easy access

89 surrounding slave women’s bodies. Alice’s description as a “night walker” illustrates not only the sexuality of her body but the inability to stabilize her within slave discourse because of her inherent wandering at night. Yet her madness saves her from her possible rape. She literally and figuratively becomes part of the night, “worthy of no attention than a hooting owl or a rabbit hopping across the road” (12). Alice’s performance of madness simultaneously propels her existence outside of a traditional slave narrative while sustaining her ‘thingness.’ The patrollers attempt to find humor in her craziness but remain aware of her bewitchment as a night walker:

“when the patrollers had tired of their own banter or when they anticipated getting their pay from

Sheriff John Skiffington, they would sit their horses and make fun of her as she sang darky songs in the road. This show was best when the moon was at its brightest, shining down on them and easing their fear of the night and of a mad slave woman. . .the patrollers heard from other white people that a crazy Negro slave in the night was akin to a two-headed chicken, or a crowing hen.

Bad luck. Very bad luck, so it was best to try to keep the cussing to themselves (13). Alice’s performance of (in)sanity is a coping mechanism, providing her space to critique the normative sexual and racial politics surrounding her.

In addition to her madness, most demonstrative about Alice’s critique of those sexual and racial politics is her creative expression which includes her chanting, akin to freestyling in hip hop culture. Alice’s chants are renegotiations of slave songs. Her subversive chants – repetitive, simple, and metaphoric – provide further insight into Alice’s (in)sanity.

Consider how after the death of a neighbor’s baby on Christmas morning Alice chants

“Baby dead baby dead baby dead/Christmas oranges Christmas oranges Christmas oranges in the morning” (61). Alice’s parallel of the baby’s death with the gift of oranges signifies her understanding of slaves as chattel property and little distinction between the ‘thingness’ of the

90 oranges and the slave body. Sarah Mahurin Mutter raises the question of thingly humans as capable of emotion because of their status as commodities: “in the world of ‘human property,’ the world of ‘thingly’ personas, how can the act of love pass between objects, between commodities?” (142). Alice’s chant signifies the inherent belief of black bodies as commodities incapable of enduring trauma. The chant is a double entendre that demonstrates Alice’s acknowledgment of the infant’s death and the trauma in the inability to recognize the loss of the baby – and herself – outside of commodified slave discourse.

Still, Alice’s re-rendering of Manchester County and Townsend plantation in a multi- modal map described by Alice’s former owner Caldonia’s brother Calvin as “a map of life,” best reflects how to ground her in hip hop sensibility (384). Alice’s use of art is connected to her critical memory of slavery vis-à-vis her nightly wandering. She renders art as a site of

(re)definition and access to her humanity. Alice’s maps juxtapose the woodcut map labeled “The

Known World” hanging in Sheriff Skiffington’s office. This map, described as “browned and yellowed” signifies the peculiarity and rigidity of slavery – and white supremacy – within

(hetero)normative discourse. The outdated map, hardly “wondrous,” does not dictate Alice’s known world. Alice’s maps remix the realities of slave life unavailable – and frequently unknown – within white supremacy. This realization is made by Calvin, who declares the maps invoke “matters in my memory that I did not know were there until I saw them on that wall”

(386). The maps, stemming from Alice’s mad performance, are her (re)entry into human respectability. They render what Susan Donaldson articulates as “brief glimpses of the diminished sense of self and world allocated to enslaved people” (271).

In a letter to Caldonia, Calvin’s vivid detail of Alice’s artistic masterpieces is quoted at length:

people were viewing an enormous wall hanging, a grand piece of art this is part

tapestry, part painting, and part clay structure – all in one exquisite Creation,

hanging silent and yet songful on the Eastern wall. It is, my Dear Caldonia, a kind of

map of life of the County of Manchester, Virginia. But a ‘map’ is such a poor word for

such a wondrous thing. It is a map of life made with every kind of art man has ever

thought to represent himself. Yes, clay. Yes, cloth. There are no people on this ‘map,’

just all the houses and barns and roads and cemeteries and wells in our Manchester.

It is what God sees when he looks down on Manchester. At the bottom right0hand

corner of this Creation there were but two stitched words. Alice Night. . .

I noticed over her [Priscilla] shoulder another Creation of the same materials, paint,

clay, and cloth. I had been so captivated by the living map of the county that I had

not turned to see the other Wonder on the opposite wall. . .this Creation may well be

even more miraculous than the one of the County. This is one about your home,

Caldonia. It is your plantation, an again, it is what God sees when He looks down.

There is nothing missing, not a cabin, not a barn, not a chicken, not a horse. Not a

single person is missing. I suspect that if I were to count the blades of grass, the

number would be correct as it was once when the creator of this work knew that

world. And, again, in the bottom of the right hand corner are the stitched words

“Alice Night” (384).

The positioning of her artwork – the map of Manchester County on the Eastern wall and the map of the Townsend plantation on the Western wall – further signifies Alice’s rebirth. The Eastern wall signifies Alice’s new beginnings after slavery – i.e. “the sun rises in the East” – and the

Townsend plantation art on the Western wall signifies the end of her life as a slave – i.e. “the sun sets in the west.” Calvin’s description of Alice’s art as “wondrous” and “miraculous” signifies her self-reclamation while maintaining awareness of her memories as a slave. Calvin’s recognition of Alice’s art removes her from a ‘thingly human’ to a creator. As Muhrin Mutter observes:

It is through art that Alice, the ‘Crazy Alice’ who spends the largest part of the novel

wandering over the Townsend plantation and muttering incoherently, becomes a

person of ‘wondrous thing’ variety instead of a caricature, a commodity, an object

whose worth is measured in apples. As the plantation and Manchester County are

reduced so they may be contained within canvas rectangles, Alice is elevanted. . .It is

not until she finds art – and, through her art, her first real human condition – that

Alice may be said to have fully ‘gotten over’ – to a new Jerusalem of her own

creation” (143).

Alice’s creation of art provides her a means to transcend slavery while remaining aware of its existence. It is from this perspective that reading Alice’s art satisfies hip hop sensibility: she fulfills the fifth pillar of hip hop which is the inherent knowledge of self. Her mastery of staple mediums of artistic expression – clay, painting, and weaving – signifies the complexity of her existence. Her status as creator is multi-layered: she is the creator of the art, creator of her new life, and creator of the narratives of those she encountered in her past life. The stitching of her name – not a mere signature – subverts slave ownership and reifies Alice’s self-ownership. The first map’s lack of people signifies her solitary status and wandering. Yet it is through this solitary existence that Alice is able to discover herself and translate those experiences into her artwork.

Using hip hop sensibility to explore 21st century depictions of slavery creates space to reconceptualize the impact of social-cultural trauma on the contemporary black American experience. Jones’ hip hop consciousness and rendering of slavery as a far reaching cultural trauma situate Jones as what I theorize as a cultural traumatic intellectual. He willingly engages the messiness of bridging historic and contemporary cultural traumas within an unstable social- cultural landscape. This instability is signified through the U.S.’s racialized common sense.

Blending hip hop sensibility and cultural discourse provides a plausible framework that postracial era writers like Edward P. Jones use to complicate slavery - and popular notions of slavery – as a strictly historical discourse. While Jones does not set out to write The Known

World as a hip hop slavery novel, his awareness of hip hop as a commodity and its

(hyper)visibility as a framework for black identity renders a hip hop framework useful in teasing out the complexities that take place in the novel. The novel’s complexities parallel the murkiness of this current moment of racial politics.

CHAPTER FIVE

MESSY DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND THE DEATH OF TRAYVON MARTIN

“Can we all get along?”

Rodney King

The March 1991 beating of Rodney King at the hands of Los Angeles police officers forced renegotiations of race politics in the post-Civil Rights era. King’s assault rehashed the

LAPD’s sordid discriminatory past and the United States’ attention to the racial tensions framing southern California’s daily experiences. Similar to previous interest in Civil Rights and Black

Liberation protests from the 1960s, national news outlets and magazines’ interest in the case and its underlying racial tensions become a priority only after the trauma surrounding the events was considered peculiar and out of sync with the ideals of a colorblind national narrative. Particularly relevant to situating the King case as a context for late 20th century race politics is George

Holliday’s amateur video capturing King’s assault. Awakened by screams outside his home,

Holliday videotaped police officers beating King. The video arguably ushers in the significance of social media as a contemporary means of disseminating information. Building up on that idea,

I contextualize new social media as a highly accessible multimedia platform of communication and (race) performance accessible across social-economic and cultural discourses. Holliday’s home video is a form of new social media as it offers a recognizable visual that permanently signifies the police brutality associated with post-Civil Rights minorities.

Holliday’s taping of King’s assault parallels the sonic witnessing of police violence heard in gangsta rap. Anthems like the group N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police,” Ice-T’s hybrid rock/rap

95 group Body Count’s “Cop Killer,” and Ice Cube’s tracks “Who Got the Camera” and “Wicked” from his sophomore album Predator (1992) permeated American popular culture as registers of contemporary black cultural trauma at the hands of law enforcement. A verse from Ice Cube’s song “Who Got the Camera,” for example, re-enacts King’s beating:

No lights no camera no action

and the pigs wouldn't believe that my slave name was Jackson

He said, "Don't lie to me. I'm looking for John, Matty, or Spike Lee"

The motherfuckers called for back up

I guess they planned to beat the mack up

He called me a silly ass thug

and pulled out his billy ass club

Tearin’ up my coupe lookin’ for the chronic

goddamn nobody got a Panasonic

Found an empty can of old gold

came around and put my ass in a choke hold

Fucked around and broke my pager

Then they hit a nigger with a Taser

The motherfucking pigs was trying to hurt me

I fell to the ground and said, "Lord, have mercy!"

Then they hit me in the face ya'll

but to them it ain't nothin’ but (a friendly game of baseball)

Crowd stood around I said, “god damn ya!”

Who got the camera?

Cube’s rendition of King’s beating highlights the significance of recording the beating on camera in order to validate its occurrence. The initial line of the verse “no lights, no camera, no action” suggests the blurred understanding of police brutality as performance and reality, with Cube identifying himself as an emcee as well as a (possible) victim of the same police brutality King endured. His speaking to the crowed signifies Cube’s awareness of a local and national audience of witnessing police brutality against black men and their complicity in ending it.

Cube’s verse suggests a parallel of the complicity of the crowd exposed to police brutality on a daily basis and the aloofness of the crowd that considers police brutality a feature of the rap they consume. Cube’s frustration with the complicit crowd – “Crowd stood around and I said ‘God- damn ya!” – highlights the fickleness of popular culture as a site of agency, a challenge frequently seen in addressing social media as a form of (black) activism. Indeed, reading

Holliday’s video through a hip hop sensibility suggests the videotape as a visual vindication of gangsta rap’s claims of crooked police and their unfair treatment of blacks.12 It precedes director

John Singleton’s debut film Boyz in the Hood, the cornerstone film of what would come to be known as the hip hop infused “hood film” genre of the early 1990s. Thus, Holliday’s recording of King’s beating – grainy, violent, and amateurish – arguably sets precedence as the first ‘hood film’ and parallels the conflicted existence of working class blacks in southern California.

It is important to note, however, that Holliday witnessed this violence outside of the working class communities made notorious in gangsta rap. From this perspective, Holliday’s witnessing of King’s beating in the suburban San Fernando Valley parallels Americans’ fascination with the gangsta rap aesthetic. Holliday’s observance of King’s beating provides a visual demonstration of understanding police brutality as a working class normality framed via

12 Please see chapter two’s discussion of Hip Hop sensibility for clarification.

97 middle class sensibilities. Elizabeth Alexander’s analysis of black bodies in American visual culture suggests it as a communal space of contemporary ‘witnessing’ of black trauma. Her analysis can be applied to the consideration of the videotape as a predecessor of current social media serving as social commentary. Alexander writes:

In the 1990s African American bodies on videotape have been the site on which

national trauma – sexual harassment, date rape, drug abuse, AIDS, racial and

economic urban conflict – has been dramatized…black bodies and their attendant

dramas are consumed by the larger populace. White men have been the primary

stagers and consumers of the historical spectacles…but in one way or another,

black people also have been looking, forging a traumatized collective historical

memory which is reinvoked at contemporary sites of conflict (79).13

Violence serves as an empathetic lens through which Rodney King’s beating and ensuing racially motivated traumas, including Hurricane Katrina, the ‘Jena 6,’ and the murders of

Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Oscar Grant, can be accessed through social media. This space, predominantly visual, informs blacks’ collective memory through ‘witnessing’ the historicized trauma that Alexander argues is sustained through narratives and storytelling. Yet grounding the multicultural spectatorship of late 20th century black trauma via cultural venues like hip hop helps situate Holliday’s videotape as a springboard for thinking about contemporary black trauma as a messy intellectual space. The most recent form of this messy intellectual discourse takes shape with the Internet, a digitized space of witnessing framed by the historicized discourse

13 Alexander includes Marion Barry’s crack smoking, Mike Tyson’s rape trial, Clarence Thomas’ senate hearings, and Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe’s press conferences announcing their AIDS status as representations of contemporary black traumatic experiences and sites of conflict caught on videotape.

98 of violence endured by blacks.14 This chapter investigates the ways in which trauma extends past

Ron Eyerman’s contextualization of cultural trauma and explores how it is redefined and commodified as a cyber space of messy intellectual discourse, embodying not only visual

(re)appropriations of black agency like avatars, but its intersections with hip hop aesthetics available on the internet. This chapter raises certain critical points of inquiry, including: 1) defining new social media’s role in calling blacks to action today; 2) the challenges of that role; and 3) whether and how it helps blacks maneuver traumatic experiences in the post-Civil Rights era.

5.1 Contextualizing the Internet as a Messy (Hip Hop) Intellectual Space

It is important to note that the Internet as a communal space reflects similar sliding social-cultural politics of the “real life” 21st century American cultural landscape. However, it is not a postracial space even with its multicultural accessibility. As Robert Entman and Andrew

Rojecki aver, “the media operate[s] both as barometer of cultural integration and as [a] potential accelerator either to cohesion or to further cultural separation and political conflict” (206). It is through Entman and Rojecki’s contextualization of media as a cultural litmus test of America’s social-racial conflicts and anxieties that I render the Internet as a messy (hip hop) organic intellectual space. Seemingly concrete markers of race, class, and gender problematically collapse. As discussed in chapter two, hip hop’s messy organic intellectualism is a popular gray space that allows for creativity, capitalism, and consciousness to coexist. Like hip hop, the fickleness of the Internet – wavering based on what is popular, profitable, and readily identified

– further speaks to its position as a gray space of popular expression and social consciousness.

14 See also Houston Baker’s discussion of historical cultural memory in Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (2001). 99

Thus, my reading of the Internet is grounded in hip hop sensibility, in that it is a gathering space of experiences, exchanging of ideas, conflicts, cultural expression, and witnessing.

Multi-modal platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook provide Internet users a capability to create and witness a post-Civil Rights black experience. Adam Banks, for example, identifies the possibility of the Internet as a site of collective black resistance. Blacks’ use the

Internet as a “highlight [of] African American skepticism of white, western reverence – even worship – of technology and the fierce determination that black people have always had to be free, to assert their own individual and collective humanity in relationship with technology and in resistance to systems of domination” (18). Banks states that cyberspace provides a

“semipublic and a counterpublic space of engagement with and resistance to mainstream narratives, policies, and actions” (25). Banks’ reading of the Internet as a social-political space parallels the origins of hip hop culture as a site of protest and black empowerment. The popularity of the Internet in tandem with the digitization of hip hop culture – i.e., sound production, distribution, and online hip hop periodicals like AllHipHop, RapGenius, and

HipHopDX – point towards a symbiotic relationship between these spaces.

Still, the aggregation of hip hop and the Internet is situated within enterprise. Hip hop’s commercialism is heightened within digital spaces. The commodity of the identities associated with hip hop are staples of a digital black existence. The Internet, then, can be useful as a site of racial interrogation while also operating hegemonically to reinforce the status quo.

The romanticized understanding of the Internet as an “open” space and its frivolous nature are best signified by the construction and engagement of racial identities as fictional characters called avatars. Lisa Nakamura theorizes these digital performances as “cybertypes,” the “distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race

100 and racism…[it] is the process by which computer/human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online interacts with the ‘cultural layer’ or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace (3). Nakamura argues that the context in which these avatars or “cybertypes” exists is one of (white) privilege and entitlement, digitally manifesting the social-political tensions in which America currently exists:

Cybertypes are created in a peculiarly collaborative way; they reflect the ways that

machine-enabled interactivity gives rise to images of race that both stem from a

common cultural logic and seek to redress anxieties about the ways that computer-

enabled communication can challenge these old logics. They perform a crucial role

in the signifying practice of cyberspace; they stabilize a sense of white self and

identity that is threatened by the radical fluidity and disconnect between mind and

body that is celebrated in so much cyberpunk fiction. Bodies get tricky in

cyberspace; that sense of disembodiment that is both freeing and disorienting

creates a profound malaise in the user that stable images of race work to fix in place (6).

The ‘trickiness’ of creating and sustaining a plausible body invested in both cyber and social- cultural discourse is highlighted in the treatment of the black body. Similarly, André Brock recognizes this messiness of cyber race and identity politics as “a paradox of constructing an embodied identity in a virtual space…an ontological [re]consideration of racial identity – that is a social constructed artifact with more to do with social and cultural resources than with skin color” (32). Black bodies’ lack of importance in postracial America is heightened within cyberspace. The signifying of cyber and literal violence against black bodies demands new

101 discourse and critical frameworks to reflect how blacks’ self-definition and calls to action are treated within new social media.

5.2 Trayvon Martin, Race Performance, and Digital Activism

A case in point regarding the need to identify changes in contemporary black activism within digital spaces is the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Martin’s death takes place in a moment where racial trauma is considered nonexistent and mobilization for racial justice is considered irreverent. The Martin case exemplifies these current anxieties.

His murder sparked national debate that jarred Americans’ investment in an American postracial agenda that worked. He represents the failure of claims of post-raciality while simultaneously bolstering the drive to claim a post-racial American society. Much of this discoursetook place on

Internet discussion forums, Twitter, and online periodicals. Martin’s death spurned a call for racial justice that bridged the Civil Rights Movement and contemporary calls to action seen in the reaction to Rodney King and Jena 6. Unlike the Jena 6 or King, however, Martin’s death stirred a multicultural response embedded in reaction to what was available to people online. In this sense, Martin is likened to Emmett Till, the young black man lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. At the insistence of his mother Mamie Till

Mobley, photos of Till’s badly beaten and water-bloated body in an open casket were plastered throughout various newspapers and magazines, particularly black periodical fixtures Jet and

Ebony magazines. Similar to Till, Martin is eulogized through pictures: family photos of a smiling Martin’s face in a red American Eagle t-shirt, pictures of Martin with his father Tracy

Martin or mother Sybrina Fulton, or a photo of Martin taking a knee in his football jersey with a football in hand. His youth and ‘innocence’ are embodied in his pictorial narrative, making his

102 body valid and the violence against him validated as wrongdoing. And, like Till, Martin’s visual narrative is a response to the engrained pathology of black male bodies imbedded in American culture.

Further solidifying the initial parallels between Till and Martin’s deaths is a middle class sensibility: both boys are portrayed as clean-cut, baby-faced, and respectable. Martin’s portrayal as a middle class “child” helps garner sympathetic attention to his death and the surrounding cries for justice while countering white supremacist narratives of black male pathology. Yet when pictures showing him as a rambunctious teenager surfaced – sporting gold fronts, tattoos, and baggy clothes – his image tred the thin line of what Brittney Cooper registers as an

“appropriate” victim. Cooper writes: “Part of the reason folks rallied in reaction to Trayvon

Martin’s murder has to do with ideas about who is an appropriate or worthy victim. He was shot by a vigilante, he wasn’t armed, he was a good student, had some class privilege, he was doing something mundane…He was ‘innocent’ and killed in cold blood. We have an idea of who is deserving of support en masse and who is not…if anything, the murder of Trayvon Martin shows us once again that there is no such thing as an ‘appropriate’ victim.” Appropriate victimization penetrates hip hop and cyber discourses. Class informs negotiations of appropriateness and gendered respectability within the African American community, thereby reserving mourning and acknowledgement of trauma for respectable black bodies.

Consider, for example, the case of Crystal Mangum. Mangum accused members of the

Duke Men’s Lacrosse team of rape in 2006. The frenzy surrounding the case attempted to navigate the unspeakable and historicized traumas of black women, rape culture, and white respectability. The explicitness of the case and Mangum’s occupation as an exotic dancer problematically situated her within hip hop aesthetics. In other words, the heavily commodified

103 understanding of black women’s bodies as sexually disposable within hip hop permeates a national white imagination as a register for their respectability (Sharpley-Whiting 2007, Rose

2008). Mark Anthony Neal highlights a correlation between the Duke rape case and hip hop, writing “The message is clear: black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them. Thus it should not be surprising that a generation of young white men, for whom the consumption of hip-hip has been second nature, would find a black exotic dancer desirable or in the worst case scenario, sexually available to them, even if she resist[s] their advances.” Although it would later be made public how Mangum muddled her accounts of the incident – which is still behavior demonstrative of a sexual assault – the heavy presence of video dancers and (hyper)sexually explicit women rappers in commercial rap helps establish Mangum as a sexual commodity, and greatly reduces the perceived possibility, and thus the appropriateness, of her being a victim of sexual assault.

Still, hip hop provides a space of acknowledging less-than-respectable black male bodies, while consistently treading between morality and commodity.15 Hearkening back to Rodney

King, his assault and its connections to the LAPD were initially memorialized in popular spaces vis-à-vis gangsta rap. Even with a “sketchy” background as a drug addict and an assault stemming from refusing arrest after driving under the influence, King was recognized as a victim. Hip hop aesthetics allow King’s pathology and victimization to co-exist. And, once King attempted to distance himself from his checkered past – a signifier of his working class background – pockets of the hip hop community called him out. Most well known is Rapper

Willie D’s diss track “Fuck Rodney King.” The track emphatically strips King of his victimization because of his calls for peace in an effort to appeal to a multicultural, middleclass

15 This occurrence is rarely the case for women of color within hip hop. As previously discussed, women’s bodies in hip hop often exist as sexual commodities, which voids any opportunity for consideration as a victim. 104 audience. Willie D raps:

I'm tired of you good little niggas

Saying increase the peace and let the violence cease

When the black man built this country

But can't get his for the prejudiced honky

Rodney King, God-damn sellout

On TV crying for a cop

The same muthafuckas who beat the hell outcha

Now I wish they would've shot cha

Although undoubtedly problematic in its violent retort, Willie D blurs boundaries of respectability and victimization by dubbing King’s call for peace as selling out. Particularly interesting are the parallels Willie D draws between King’s call for peace, Martin Luther King,

Jr., and the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement as a classed discourse. Another verse of the song parodies lines from the hymn “We Shall Overcome,” which for many people signifies the marches during the Civil Rights period. Willie D’s militant reprimand not only suggests an awareness of Black Nationalism but complicates the gangsta rap aesthetic as a tool of contemporary political engagement.

The messiness of hip hop as a social-political space extends to the Internet and its consumption within these digital spaces. If Martin were initially introduced on the Internet with a similar criminal or working class background as Chavis Carter, for example, would the response have been as immediate or justified? Chavis Carter was a 21 year old black man suspiciously shot in the back of the head while sitting in the back of a police car. His image was shown to the public with dreadlocks and his death was situated within criminality. Carter does not fit the

105 middle class respectability model that signifies those crying out over Martin’s death. His dreads and criminal record position him as a ‘thug,’ placing him within the black pathological narrative frequently present – and sold – in hip hop. Like Carter, Martin’s social media image sparks questions of his (in)humanity, resituating him as a “perp” rather than a “respectable” victim. In that way, Martin became a cybertype of the understated racial anxieties and unfamiliarity with the proper treatment of sustained acts of violence against black bodies. Initial ‘disembodiment’ of Martin’s body from the physical realities of pathological discourse surrounding black men and boys forces the understanding that Martin’s death is tragic.

Yet, like in hip hop Martin’s black masculinity problematically collapses him as a black

(man)child into the widely recognized archetype of a thug. David Leonard highlights the peculiarity of justifying Martin’s rowdy behavior as a catalyst for his death: “The focus on his suspension is particularly revealing not only in Trayvon’s case, but also in the larger fabric of

American racism. For the defenders of [George] Zimmerman and much of the media, the reports of multiple suspensions, of a connection to an ‘empty marijuana bag,’ are evidence that at best

Trayvon was ‘complicated’ and at worst he was a ‘thug’ who therefore deserved to be killed.”

Presenting Martin in gold fronts and highlighting his suspension from school robs him of his humanity – which is then (dis)embodied in the cyber body plastered across the Internet – in the only (digital) space where it existed. Tim Wise brazenly identifies the correlation between white privilege and the distorted representations of Martin’s black body as dysfunctional:

If the victim is young, and black, and wearing a hoodie, and has a tattoo (even if it is

a tattoo of his mother’s name), and a partial gold grill, and occasionally poses with

macho swagger on a webcam, and has been known to smoke weed. Although none

of these are officially listed as penalty enhancement within out nation’s justice

106

system, let the word go out from this point forward that they have been elevated to

virtual capital offense status on the streets, by a frightened, racially-anxious white

public, always seeking to rationalize every death of black men, at the hands of cops,

or just folks pretending to be cops (author’s original emphasis).

This ‘stabilized’ sense of white privilege exists in the treatment of Martin’s body because it sustains the virulent representations of black manhood while dismissing the violence against it as deserving. As Entman and Rojecki argue, “explicitly, media images deny White superiority and the legitimacy of white privilege. In their most obvious dimensions, they promote tolerance, inclusiveness, and (limited) acceptance by Whites of Blacks. At the same time, less overt media signals – and equally important, systematic absences from media content – may work against the development of greater interracial empathy and trust” (57). This shift in Martin’s cyber image damages Martin’s narrative without destabilizing the source of white privilege. In this sense,

Nakamura opines, “fluid identities aren’t much use to those whose problems exist strictly (or even mostly) in the real world if they lose all their currency in the realm of the real” (11).

Maintaining a disconnect between cyber ‘realness’ and actuality pivots on situating white supremacist understandings of black identity through seemingly harmless racial performance.

This disconnect is heightened in part because of the anonymity of online spaces; users’ anonymity and open access to the internet re-filters the white supremacy in ways that do not register as offensive.

One especially problematic meme in this vein of virtual performance stemming from

Martin’s death is the act of “Trayvoning.” Similar to the Internet craze of “planking” or stiffening one’s body like a board, Trayvoning was the performance of Martin’s death pose with

Skittles and a can of Arizona Iced Tea. The posted photographs of white youth, particularly

107 white young men, face down signify the anonymity of the Internet but also the detachment of performance of black trauma as a real experience. Black death does not register as traumatic in white mainstream popular culture. Thus, the spectatorship of black death – frequently consumed through rap narratives – lays foundation for the trivial perception of Martin’s death online. Lisa

Guerrero and David Leonard observe the act of Trayvoning as a digital means of coopting “black death as a souvenir” without speaking to the historical and cultural significance of black pain.

The reduction of Martin’s death to planking with Skittles and Iced Tea suggests not only the commodification of Martin’s death but also the frivolity of defining activism within cyberspace. Guerrero and Leonard write:

The examples of racialized disregard that have surrounded Trayvon Martin’s death, most

recently exemplified in the commodification and ‘meme-ification’ of the tragedy by

various White people. This marks a startling new mechanization of racism wherein there

has been a complete evacuation of humanity…on both sides, that of people of color and

other marginalized groups, the dehumanization of which is, sadly, no longer surprising,

but also that of dominant groups who willfully participate in acts of oppression like

‘Trayvoning’ whose humanity becomes increasingly and insidiously taken over by

consumption and performance. The joy historically, as well as contemporaneously, taken

by many Whites in the violence against and suffering of African Americans has become

nearly indistinguishable from the joy of consuming.

The Trayvoning meme calls attention to the messiness of the Internet as a postracial space. It parallels the performance of Martin’s death as a commodity with preconceived notions of black trauma imposed upon male bodies as normal. The images of white boys playing dead simultaneously exist with the reports and pictures of Martin’s death as well as the deaths of other

108 young black men. The performance and realities of black death messily intersect with white privilege in an ambiguous digital space. Unlike the attempt of racial empathy vis-á-vis memorializing Martin’s death with the declaration “I am Trayvon Martin,” Trayvoning subverts the act of memorializing/witnessing and represents the “fluid realities” of whites’ online experiences with their offline privileges. The loss of agency surrounding Martin’s death is hinged upon the invisibility of white privilege in digital spaces. “The ability to ‘act’ like a dead

Trayvon Martin only to get up and head back into White suburbia is illustrative of this same feeling of [white] power and privilege, but invisibly so,” Guerrero and Leonard assert. They conclude “White people don’t take part in ‘Trayvoning’ to declare White supremacy; they take part in it because the declaration has been rendered unnecessary by various sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic forces.”

Perhaps the most penetrating result of the proliferation of Martin’s case across the

Internet is people’s investment in trying to rectify what Martin’s case represents: a jarring wakeup call for Americans to reconsider racial anxiety and the revitalization of public mobilizations against racial injustice. The ability for Martin’s narrative to reflect current tropes of American cultural trauma suggests a continued anxiety about race politics in this contemporary American social-cultural landscape. Attempts to establish an empathetic response via cyberspace were reflected in Internet users plastering pictures of Martin as personal avatars and posting pictures of themselves donning hoodies in an effort to visually demonstrate solidarity with Martin and his family for the “Million Hoodie March” that took place March 21,

2012. Nakamura astutely observes:

the afterimages of [Martin’s] identity that users were creating by adopting personae

other than their own online as often as not participated in stereotyped notions of gender

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and race. Rather than ‘honoring diversity,’ their performances online used raced and

gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without ‘real life’ consequences.

Like tourists who become convinced that their travels have shown them real ‘native’ life,

these identity tourists often took their virtual experiences as other-gendered and other-

raced avatars as a kind of lived truth…the performances of identity tourists exemplify the

consumption and commodification of racial difference (13-14).

Nakamura’s discussion of online identity tourism highlights the ways in which hip hop can function as a voyeuristic and capitalistic space. Like the gangsta rap aesthetic embodying the outcry surrounding Rodney King, grounding the digital response to Martin’s death in hip hop teeters between visualizing the internet as a space of activism and displaying black cultural trauma as a commodity. The uncritical donning of hoodies across a digital community discounts the underlying detriments against black identity, particularly black masculinity, while highlighting the shortcomings of the U.S. justice system. The hoodie as a social-political fashion statement in hip hop doubly signifies a detachment of (working class) black masculinity from mainstream American culture, while sustaining it as a threat to the U.S. social-cultural landscape.

Many of hip hop’s visible figures, most notably slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious

B.I.G., donned hoodies as a signifier of the peculiarity of their blackness and masculinity in the world. Martin’s hoodie situates him within this hip hop aesthetic, and allows visual inference of his death as a notch in the trajectory of hip hop and black male violence.

The hoodie demonstrates the crossover of hip hop sensibility as a mainstream and popular digital aesthetic, with nonblacks – particularly white hipster celebrities – wearing hoodies in an effort to render themselves unavailable to the public. Discourses of undesirability and commodity blur, refocusing the hoodie as a social-political statement of class and agency

110 instead of fashion. Returning to earlier discussions of middle class sensibility and messy organic intellectualism in digital spaces, the hoodie in this instance best signifies the peculiar intersections of activism and class. The collapse of intersections of class sensibility with racial performance via Martin avatars and hoodie pictures omits the political and material realities of these experiences offline. The very thin line between donning a hoodie as a sign of racial empathy and the tourism of working class black narratives frequently validated in hip hop is blurred in the social media response to Martin’s death. The identity tourism that takes place is a surface level attachment to Martin’s death without acknowledging the historicized trauma against the black body that Martin’s death represents for many in the African American community. In this sense, whites, as well as blacks, ‘picturing themselves’ as Martin suggests a safe, virtual foray into what Leonard and Guerrero label “Living and Dying while Black.” As

Nakamura indicates, “the visual metaphor of the afterimage describes a particular kind of historically and culturally grounded seeing or mis-seeing, and this is important. Ideally, it has a critical valence of claiming the right to possess agency in our ways of seeing – of being a subject rather than an object of technology. In the bright light of contemporary technology, identity is revealed to be phantasmatic, a projection of culture and ideology” (12). The ability for whites and blacks to simply “recant” one’s avatar after losing interest in Martin’s case as well as the racial anxieties lingering after Martin’s death reveals the end of the tour. This performance of racial solidarity online is often a detached narrative framed by a voyeuristic understanding of black bodily harm as “a shame” but far from the performers’ day-to-day experiences.

Still, wearing a hoodie provides an alternative, ‘softer’ form of protest that cannot be easily identified as black activism in this cotemporary moment of American culture. The use of the hoodie as a form of ‘silent protest’ for black athletes, like members of the Miami Heat

111 professional basketball team, for example, suggests a different type of identity tourism. Rather, professional black athletes like Lebron James and Dwyane Wade are find a way to return to the ways in which their celebrity – a form of white privilege – somewhat shields them from the possibly horrific realities that young black men like Martin face. Black professional athletes, arguably the most visible representation of black masculinity, occupy a doubly bound space of racial performance and social consciousness. As Willliam Cohen observes, “[b]lack athletes have symbolically carried the weight of a race’s eternal burden of proof; their performances were among the most visible evidences that blacks, as a community, were good enough, smart enough, strong enough, brave enough – indeed, human enough – to share in the fruits of this nation with full citizenship and humanity” (3).

Expectations of black athletes to render themselves vessels of social protest are situated in the rebellious acts of athletes like Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Jack Johnson. Shifting race, gender politics, and increased opportunities for black athletes to compete, however, mark the downfall of the athlete as a politicized figure. Part of this shift is grounded in the increasingly visual presence of hip hop associated with younger athletes. For example, the University of

Michigan’s 1991 freshman basketball squad, popularly referred to as The Fab Five, drew attention to themselves with their athletic performance, baggy shorts, and pre-game ritual of listening to gangsta rap. In the ESPN documentary The Fab Five, rapper and political activist

Chuck D asks “who were these five basketball playing Muhammad Alis with no resume?”

Chuck D’s loaded observation suggests not only the Fab Five’s iconoclastic presence in college basketball, but their grounding in hip hop as a form of late 20th century protest. The Fab Five’s investment in hip hop as a cultural medium through which to express themselves was not only demonstrative of their youth but also their working class backgrounds. It allowed them to

112 maintain a connection to their lived experiences in a hyper white and elite space. Hip hop doubly bound the Fab Five in that it provided them with a means to combat the challenges of white supremacy while pitting their “thuggish” blackness against the “respectable” blackness embodied by other black basketball players, like Grant Hill at Duke University.

Maneuvering sports as a site of contemporary black performance for white consumption requires self-awareness and consciousness of the moment in which one is situated. As Cohen insists, the challenge is to “remember” the struggles of previous athletes and tensions between consciousness and capitalism. These struggles situate athletes as a representation of messy organic intellectualism in that they have the capacity to raise awareness to the traumas continuing to face blacks in America while sustaining their athletic brands and endorsements.

Contextualizing professional athletes like James and Wade as hip hop messy organic intellectuals suggests a parallel between visibility and enterprise as well as overlapping discourses of popular black masculinity. Particularly important to this connection is online social media, as spaces like Twitter and Instagram provide athletes with an opportunity to connect to a larger community and consumer base. Wade and James tweeting pictures of themselves and the team wearing hoodies to show their awareness of Martin’s death highlights the death of a fan and signifies their connection to the violence imposed upon his black body as their own. The

“branding” of black athletes via their use of social media suggests a means to politicize their celebrity for social causes in ways that are worthwhile while maintaining profitability. It is also representative of athletes like James and Wade’s cognizance of social media activism as ‘trendy,’ hence increasing their visibility and brand while aligning them with the underlying knowledge of the traumatic experience of being (young), black, and male.

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Trayvon Martin’s death provided an opportunity for a(nother) “Kum Bah Yah” moment to manifest across America’s cyberscape. What transpired instead is the attempt to maneuver messy dichotomies of racial privilege and identity – i.e., voyeurism/witnessing, race performance/race realities. Nearly a year after news of Martin’s death first broke across the

Internet, we continue to muddle through such efforts. Tragically, Martin’s death is not the last of its kind. It instead signifies a racialized Pandora’s Box of unexplained/unexplainable deaths of young black people. Rekia Boyd, Bo Morrison, and Chavis Carter have made national headlines as tragic deaths of similarly “unfortunate circumstances.” Yet their cases have not reached the same level of outrage as Martin’s death. It has yet to be determined why social media “tuckered out” in the aftermath of these other deaths of young black men and women and not with Martin.

In what ways is America’s investment in Trayvon Martin different than Boyd, Morrison, or

Carter? Indeed, as Charles Blow writes in his essay “The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” social media is a register of not only sliding performances of race politics but the currency in which these performances are situated.16 Are we, as Mychal Denzel Smith asserts, suffering from

“outrage fatigue”? Can we be outraged when a victim does not fulfill our idealistic portrayal of an appropriate victim?

Trayvon Martin’s case presents the possibilities of the Internet as a site of contemporary black activism while highlighting its shortcomings as a postracial space. The multiple discourses

Martin’s death crosses – hip hop, race, and class respectability – messily intersect in digital spaces that could not exist offline. Digital fault lines of “idealistic victimization” and activism can be demonstrated while speaking to the physical and cultural trauma that Martin’s body represents. In sum, Martin’s death publicly clashed and jarred America away from the lull of cyberspace as a postracially harmonious reality.

16 Please see Charles Blow’s essay in the 16 March 2012 New York Times. 114

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Regina N. Bradley is from Albany, Georgia. She earned her PhD in English from Florida State

University (2013), a MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana

University Bloomington (2008), and a BA in English from the Albany State University (2006).

Her research interests include post-1980 African American literature, black satire, race and sound, and Hip Hop. Regina is a two time recipient of the competitive FSU Edward F. and Marie

C. Kingsbury Graduate Writing Award and a 2012 recipient of the National Women's Studies

Association's Women of Color Leadership Project Fellowship. She is also recognized as an honorable mention/alternate for the 2011 Ford Diversity Dissertation Fellowship competition.

Regina presents and has been invited to present her work at the American Studies Association,

Association for the Study of African American Life and History, National Popular Culture

Association, and Northeast Modern Language Association. Two articles have stemmed from her dissertation project Race to Post: "Theorizing Sonic Cool Pose" in Current Musicology and

“Tupac Shakur and Messy Organic Intellectualism” forthcoming in Journal of Hip Hop Studies.

Her next project is revamping her dissertation into a research monograph.

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