Quoted: Reggaeton and Race
Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

In a January 2006 article published by the Village Voice, Jon Caramanica ended a largely celebratory piece on reggaeton with a somewhat sudden, cryptic remark: “Fuck a Slim Shady,” he quipped, “Hip-Hop’s race war begins here.” Caramanica thus suggests that the most prominent “racial” tensions around hip-hop are not between African Americans and whites (represented by prominent white rapper, Slim Shady, a.k.a. Eminem) but between African Americans and Latinos. Similarly, blogger Bryan Crawford’s tongue-in-cheek March 2006 post for XXL magazine’s website, “Ban Reggaeton: Fight the Real Enemy of Hip-Hop,” makes one wonder how exactly -snide and enigmatic remarks aside – the perceived rivalry between hip-hop and reggaeton is informed by extramusical tensions between African Americans and Latinos.
—From the introduction to Reggaeton, edited by Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez

Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Arroz Con Beans | Reggaeton vs Hip Hop? on 01 Jul 2009 at 1:51 pm
[...] An interesting post from Racialicious. [...]