Hip-hop and whiteness in post-race America.

Abstract

This thesis argues, as its point of departure, that the pre-emptive characterization of America as ‘post-race’ has become an increasingly naturalized ethos through which to impede anti-racist dialogue and, as such, sustain the normative privilege of whiteness. An extension of the rhetoric of color-blindness that upholds white privilege by reimagining race as an elective identity, the post-race seeks to historicize and hence contain race and racism as struggles now overcome. With attention to the critical race and whiteness theory that challenges post-race ideology, this dissertation focuses on the role of hip-hop, a culture resolutely invested in questions of race and positionality, for the ways in which it problematizes post-race politics. Grounded in an understanding of the particular role of positionality in hip-hop’s uneasy relationship to questions of authenticity and realness, I interrogate the ways in which white rappers and other performers mobilize hip-hop in twenty-first-century America, and contend that hip-hop’s unique capacity to present whiteness as visible and its sustained investment in the performative critique of race and gender positionalities are invaluable to the broader anti-racist project of critical whiteness studies. Existing scholarship on the relationship of whiteness and hip-hop has focused overwhelmingly on the phenomenon of white male hip-hoppers and their particular attractions to hip-hop culture. While I recognize the significance of masculinity to hip-hop’s interconnected investments in blackness and ‘realness’ – concerns to which I dedicate Chapters One and Two – I am also interested in the seldom-considered ways in which white women mobilize hip-hop. In this way, my dissertation presents both an update to whiteness and hip-hop discourse in the so-called post-race Obama era, and an important intervention into the existing literature, in its attention to not only hip-hop masculinities, but female artists and their various engagements with black female sexuality through hip-hop.