Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection Undergraduate Scholarship 2016 Stealing the Mic: Struggles of the Black Female Voice in Rap Miranda Flores Butler University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses Part of the Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons Recommended Citation Flores, Miranda, "Stealing the Mic: Struggles of the Black Female Voice in Rap" (2016). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection. 347. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/347 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Undergraduate Scholarship at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Stealing the Mic: Struggles of the Black Female Voice in Rap A Thesis Presented to The Honors Program of Butler University In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for Graduation Honors Miranda R. Flores May 5, 2016 “You’ve taken my blues and gone-You sing ‘em on Broadway-And you sing ‘em in Hollywood Bowl- And you mixed ‘em up with symphonies-And you fixed ‘em-So they don’t sound like me. Yep, you done taken my blues and gone” -Langston Hughes From Langston Hughes to hip hop, African Americans have a long history of white appropriation. Rap, as a part of hip hop culture, gave rise to marginalized voices of minorities in the wake of declining employment opportunities and racism in the postindustrial economy beginning in the 1970s (T. Rose 1994, p.