THE BACKBONE OF HIP HOP
Met within the crossroads of different sectors of oppression, black women in the United States have been mobilizing around dominant culture since and beyond documentation. However, this survival tactic has not come easy and it has become just as difficult to utilize when victimized within their own backyard; hip hop culture. Just as hip hop has been engrained in the lives of black boys and men within and outside America, black girls have also fallen in love with the MCing, DJing, and break dancing that makes hip-hop its own sub-culture within black America. The difficulty now lies within the dynamic identities black women hold within the black community as peacekeepers, and how problematic it has become for black women in hip hop to continue to lead these critical conversations as if it is expected of them. I have begun to question whether or not it is black women’s responsibility to critique hip hop when like most things in the black community, we have been left to pick up the pieces.
When critically engaging with black feminist texts, I hold a red flag out to the problematic and yet essential positionality black women hold within hip hop when sparking political conversation. As stated by Patricia Hill Collins, “effective Black mothers (and black women in general) are sophisticated mediators between the competing offerings of an oppressive dominant culture and a nurturing Black value structure” (Collins 313). With that being said, black women have naturally been put in the position to become the “fixers” of the black community and are therefore held highly within the black family in America. This can easily be seen through the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement, the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement, and now the political conversation of Hip-Hop feminism. Within Jessica Care Moore’s poem she states, “I’m a hip hop cheerleader carrying hand grenades and blood red pom poms…I see you growing in me looking out from my belly” (Moores). Through the graphic use of deadly weapons and the insinuation that hip hop is in fact a child within black women, both hint at the dual identity held by black women in America; warriors and caregivers of the black community.
In contrast, it is also problematic to believe black women should not have agency in sparking critical conversations in hip hop when their bodies are scrutinized within it. To emphasize, Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University, Gwendoyn Pough discusses the relation and impact video vixens in hip hop music videos have on the lives of black women; “As a black female, you go to a party…you are expected to want to be touched, to be grabbed, to be fondled…as if they’re reenacting a rap video or something” (Pough 84). It is evident that hip hop holds a very difficult relationship with black women because of the negative stigmas it has given them as hypersexual beings. Thus, it does become essential for black women to talk critically about hip hop, but to ignore its exhaustion on black women is also naïve. Joan Morgan’s notion in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down to have a feminism “brave enough to fuck with the grays” hints to me at this underlying position black women hold as caregiver and having agency (Morgan 59). Imagine having to constantly defend your counterpart from police brutality to mass incarceration and being preferred to by them as "females" and "bitches"… we all know you do not speak to your black mother that way.
The origin of Hip-Hop feminism by black women does not at all seem abnormal and it becomes frustrating to continuously feel as if black men have abandoned us within the community we hold on our back. There is obviously no clear solution to the underlying disappointment black women, myself included, have within the discourse of hip hop, but allowing oneself to work within “the grays” is a start. It now becomes somewhat laughable to think that black men could have survived without the strength of black women and their support of hip hop on and off the stage. With female rappers making their way back to the top of the Billboard charts and the backbone rappers like Nipsey Hussle had with women like Lauren London, I too have the right to be mad at my own community and yet still hold it close to my heart. -
Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems, vol. 33, no. 6, 1986, doi:10.1525/sp.1986.33.6.03a00020.
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: a Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017.
“The Feminine Voice in Hip-Hop.” Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere, by Gwendolyn D. Pough, Northeastern University Press, 2004.
I own no rights to any of the images used within this post. Originally a paper on black woman's positionality in hip hop.
