Color-Blind Ideology

Today in class we talked about race relations and how that comes into play in the realm of hip-hop. We also discussed the implications of stereotyping and what it means to be black and what it means to be white.

Our lesson was based on Jason Rodriquez’s article “ Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop”

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

For me Eminem is the best White rapper and I think that he changed the whole idea of white rappers. “Eminem is one of the best-selling artists in the world and is the best selling artist of the 2000s. He has been listed and ranked as one of the greatest artists of all time by many magazines, including Rolling Stone magazine, which ranked him 82nd on its list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. The same magazine declared him The King of Hip Hop.^”

There are a few other White rappers that impress me for example Asher Roth.

He scored a huge hit with his first single "I Love College," a rather deceiving verse to laid-back life on campus.

There are many other good White rappers that made a big change in the whole stereotype of rapper being “black” but I still think that most of the rappers are black and that unless white people are really good they will look ridiculous if they start rapping and where baggy jeans with a cap.