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February 2025

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	May 14th, 2009 - 07:37 am

Oh, gosh, I'm honored by the code offer, but I honestly don't know if I should take you up on it -- I've not really thought about DW in any serious way because it's a rare day I can even pretend I'm managing to make an effort of keeping up with LJ (I'm a crusty old Usenet/BBS geek who still finds web-based fora deeply annoying in a lot of ways). So I'd feel kind of bad about snagging a code and space that I'm not likely to *do* much with, beyond adding a little extra convenience and shiny icons to rare flurries of comments, when there are lots of other people with their nose pressed up against the virtual window glass hoping to get in...

Anyway, the thing with NDN hip-hop, and let's see if I can manage to condense this into something not too unwieldy when this is a subject that's very rant-inducing, isn't so much about outside accusations of cultural appropriation (because frankly, NDN rap isn't even on the map for most non-native folks). And while there are some indeed some native musicians who are emulating the worst materialism-and-misogyny aspects of the most stereotypical sort of gangsta rap, and I would heartily get behind them being called out on putting forth such negative messages that are incompatible with traditional cultural values...but all too often, the criticism is couched in terms of "acting black", as if the negativity of one subgroup of the hiphop scene was emblematic of black culture as a whole; and what's even more troubling, those same sorts of accusations of "trying to be black" are aimed at native rappers who are putting forward positive, culturally and politically aware messages in their music. I've seen this crop up over and over again for years, and it's troubling; all the more so when held up against the comparative rarity in which folks playing, say, country-western, or punk, or indy rock, get accused of "acting white", or blues players getting similar accusations of "trying to be black". Some of it's likely to be generational, I'm sure, blues and rock and country have all established themselves while hip-hop is still a young enough genre to be getting a lot of fogeyish "dang kids, that's not *real* music!" disdain; but it's still an ugly pattern of too many native folks speaking as if blackness were something intrinsically bad in and of itself, or equivalent to the most negative rap stereotypes.

This bothers me on so many levels -- there's a long history of close, positive black/Indian relations that's largely been erased from the history books and public consciousness, and some really recent ugly money-and-power-grubbing political attempts at disenfranchising some of the few formally recognized black subpopulations of particular native nations, and it's all just really discouraging and rage-making to see how the racist attitudes of the dominant culture, and the historic divide-and-conquer tactics and historical erasures used against us, are playing out here. And it's not just a distant, abstract rage at injustice, because that doubly invisible black NDN population includes folks I'm honored to call friends, and artists I've deeply admired for years; so hearing about the snubs and prejudice they've encountered from folks who should welcome them as family just gets me furious on both the personal and political levels. And the sort of phrasing that crops up from other Indians in the "they're trying to be black" sneers at native rappers reeks of that sort of ugly attitude.