Abstract
In Jim Crow to Jay-Z, Miles White interrogates the performativity of black masculinity within the context of rap music and culture. In broad and sweeping strokes that traverse perspectives from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Bill Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, the text builds an interdisciplinary treatise that connects the unadulterated white supremacist logic of years gone by to the contemporary construction of black masculine hip-hop identity. In so doing, the book destabilizes the reductionist tendency to portray black styles of hip-hop as little more than bastions of misogyny, criminal deviance, and capitalistic excess without dismissing their presence and import.
The text consists of five chapters that examine the marginalization of blackness in early popular music, the political implications of racialized rap performances, the aesthetics of hip-hop, the supposed authenticity of black male machismo, and the role of white masculine interlopers within rap music. These chapters combine to “ … make critical links between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity that … shape ideas around masculinity and race in general and blackness and maleness in particular” (p. 6).
Chapter one begins where many analyses of the black masculine hip-hop subject end—with the political economy of commodity racism in the minstrel show. However, White does not just highlight white appropriation of problematic stereotypes, as this narrative is well rehearsed. Rather, White uses it as a plank from which to dive into the uneasy waters of how minstrel shows enabled black performers (also in blackface) to use their bodies as sites of resistance against white supremacist expectations. Instead of simply performing the happy-go-lucky “Sambo” figure, many black performers adopted styles that have “historically been reserved for white males, a posture of confident masculinity in which one must project powerful emotions if one is to gain respect” (p. 18). Yet, White does not romanticize these supposedly resistive performances and ends the chapter with how modern hip-hop can be thought of as a “… reinscription of aspects of the minstrelsy practice” (p. 18).
Chapter two steps into rather shallow explorations of the political implications of black masculinity, desire, and commoditization. The 13-paged chapter—the title drawn from Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time—neither delves into race and religion, nor does it tread upon particularly new ground. It is a recapitulation of how signifiers of black masculinity are hotly politicized subjects that others co-opt and redeploy to re-produce pejorative understandings of black men. Chapter three, however, redeems the previous chapter by wading into the undertheorized (until now) import of affective gestures and aesthetic dispositions that underscore the lyrics and beats of hip-hop. In particular, White emphasizes how the mannerisms, dress, speech, and attitudes of black male rappers transmit the knowledge of the underclass just as much as the “mix tapes of words and music videos” (p. 33). Black male creators and users of hip-hop use their affective and emotive power to transform their lived experiences into an “artifice of art” (p. 62) that in turn reveals how the situational and relational inequalities of shared race, gender, and class backgrounds shape common dispositions and gestures.
Chapter four explores the contentious rise of “gangsta rap” as it relates to violence and misogyny and their intersection with black male performativity. White argues—drawing from diverse examples such as N.W.A. and Jay-Z and theorizing from John Roberts’ From Trickster to Badman—that black male rappers often oscillate between the “bad black man” (a heroic figure who upsets white sensibilities) and “the bad nigger” (who exerts power by resisting all social and moral control). White then argues that the latter holds allure for its supposed authenticity and is now revered as a sort of “noble outlaw” (p. 69) by which many rappers, and rap aficionados, measure their worth and “realness.” Chapter five delves into white folks’ historically entrenched voyeurism into, and co-optation of, black popular culture. From Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” and Elvis, to Eminem and Brother Ali, the book covers different forms of white appropriation and pays close attention to how such cultural tourism can propagate the fetishism of black masculinity as well as undermine the reification of black men as one-dimensional subjects.
In sum, Jim Crow to Jay-Z makes a concerted effort to highlight the import of style and nuance often marginalized in other studies of hip-hop. Such an effort is not parochial but links the import of racial, gender, and class inequality to the political economy of an art form that trades as much on improvisation, creativity, and counter-hegemonic discourse as it does on masculine posturing, conspicuous consumption, and racism. Read this book to consider how “ … hip-hop music and culture continues to have profound implications for understanding how race is constructed and negotiated in popular culture” (p. 6).