Asher Roth and the Politics of Race in Hip Hop

[F]rom a certain angle, there’s just a shade of difference between white people rapping and white people telling nigger jokes. (I know that this framework, though immediately clear to a certain number of Black people, if only on a gut level, isn’t obvious to others, and is completely offensive to many white people. I elaborate on it, more, in two other works: (1) “White People and Hip-Hop,” which I recorded with both Racialicious‘ Carmen Van Kerckhove and writer Jason Tanz (Other People’s Property) for Van Kerckhove’s “Addicted to Race” podcast, and (2) “The Unbearable Whiteness of Emceeing: What The Eminence of Eminem Says About Race,” which I wrote for The Source. [As well, I also spoke about this during an episode of Oprah I taped with Michael Eric Dyson, Sister Souljah, Sister 2 Sister's Jamie Brown, and others in the fall of 1997, though Harpo never aired the piece.]) Both behaviors form a set of inadequate, insufficient white responses to the system of white supremacy, formatted, here, as “entertainment,” or “fun.” Of course, any fun, carried out over a long enough period, starts to look like making fun of to the one not in on the fun, as does any insufficient response, carried far enough, in the midst of a dire situation.

In spite of, or maybe because of, the generally unsatisfactory artistic role white rap has often played when considered this way, I’ve gotten far more out of it by studying the social networks around it; i.e., how it makes white people act. (To a great extent, this is what “The Unbearable Whiteness of Emceeing” is about.). Toward this end, a few choice details jump out of the Asher Roth New York Times piece and land in my lap:

1) It never fails to amaze me how much better white people’s jobs are than Black people’s jobs. In the piece, Asher Roth’s father, whose name is David, is described as “the executive director of a design firm.”

It just sticks out. First of all, so many rappers grow up without fathers at all that to hear of an artist with one is unusual. But, here, there is a father, in the home, and he executive directs a design firm.

2) That a rapper is white is often enough to get them major media coverage. One sees this over and over in the coverage of white rappers, from at least the Beastie Boys to the present. Take away Asher Roth’s whiteness, and is there a story here? Even more, is there a career here? Roth’s now famous XXL cover, as one of ten “freshmen” rappers expected to do great work in 2009, is often mentioned, but Wale and Charles Hamilton sure aren’t.

Which reminds me:

3) White rappers frequently appear as though being handed off from one set of white hands to another. Here, narratively, Roth is handed from his parents, first, to his manager, Scooter Braun, who discovered him, to Steve Rifkind, his label owner, to the Times author, Jon Caramanica, to the fans.

And, most of all:

4) History is often rewritten in the interest of prizing white people, of which white rappers are, of course, a subset. In the piece, Caramanica, who, as a former editor at VIBE and a long-time writer covering hip-hop, should know better, says this: “Whether they talk about it or not, plenty of rappers are from the suburbs, but not one has created an aesthetic around it until Mr. Roth.”

Really? What did De La Soul do, then? What did the Dungeon Family do? Heck: What did Public Enemy do? (I wrote about P.E.’s suburban roots and worldview at length for The Village Voice in a 1988 piece, “Strangers in Paradise.”)

Jeremy R. Levine, Social Science Lite – Asher Roth is the Anti -”White Guilt”

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