So after a few hours of work, heres’s what I’ve come up with:
It’s important to think about who benefits from scholarship on rap music and how they benefit. Rap music emerged as a field of study in university music departments in the mid-1990s. Since then, an increasing number of scholars have devoted their careers to researching and teaching this uniquely American art form. Music departments are historically white, not just in terms of faculty and students, but also in terms of the texts and techniques that they study. Consequently, the ways that we study rap music often reinscribe whiteness, a whiteness (or at least an anti-blackness) that has been present in the genre since it became mainstream in the United States in the 1990s.
The alleged “postracial” turn following Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 in tandem with the neoliberal turn have accelerated rap’s assimilation by whiteness (or its use in antiblack racism). “Rap” has become both a racial code word and by extension, a commodity that can be exchanged in the service of diversity initiatives. As white educators and researchers we stand to benefit greatly from engaging with rap music: we earn prestige and occasionally money from publications and teaching, tenure, speaking engagements, etc. However, the only way we can ethically continue working with rap music is by adapting an explicitly antiracist approach to teaching and research. This book offers some potential pathways toward achieving that end.
This book represents an intervention into the field of music studies as it examines how the research and teaching of predominantly white scholars on rap appear on the surface to be equity driven but often end up reinforcing the white power structures that the music historically has sought to dismantle. White scholars of rap music must be careful how they engage with the music both inside and outside of academic settings so as not to uphold the systems of oppression that gave rise to rap music in the first place. White scholars of hip hop must practice elevating the voices of minoritized scholars and examine not only the repertoire that we study but how—and most importantly why—we study it.