Colorblindness and the Appropriation of Hip Hop-Presenter post

In this article, the author interviews young white men that he finds at hip hop concert to explore the relation between racial colorblindness and the appropriation of hip hop. He only finds one who acknowledges there may be something wrong with white kids over-running the hip hop scene. Others seem perfectly fine with taking out anything explicitly racialized--in one instance, for example, a rapper talking about the emancipation of black people--and redefining it in a way that better suits them, the white viewer. Even implicitly racialized things, such as the genre itself, the subjects seem to think that avoiding the topic of race altogether is more politically correct than to address that white people are appropriating African-American culture for the sake of looking "cool," and painting over anything that black performers or listeners may be saying about what they experience because of their race with a white privileged perspective.

-Alexandrine Garcia