You may have seen the change.org petition circulating around Facebook asking Harvard to cancel Tyga’s appearance at Yardfest. Here are some quick thoughts in response to the torrent of news feed reactions I’ve seen:
There seem to be two valid sides to this debate (ignoring all the dumb stuff like, “Can’t Harvard students just have fun and stop critically analyzing everything?!?!?”): One is that critiques thrown against the hip-hop industry of misogyny, sexualization, and general lewdness have often been veiled attempts by whites to delegitimize black culture. Much black art throughout American history has been intentionally subversive, meant to agitate against the white status quo as a means of rebelling against blacks’ oppressed status within it. Black artists, recognizing they would never be seen as complete equals by conforming to white culture, have often chosen to intentionally conform to racist stereotypes of themselves in defiance of the system. To use this common trend to merely show that blacks prove the stereotype is, to some extent, an abdication of our common responsibility to address the root causes behind it. And thus whites critiquing hip hop as offensive can be a de facto racist gesture.
On the other hand, black male artists and their defenders have often used the excuse that they were rebelling against racism to deny allegations of (intentional or unintentional) oppression of black women. Because generally, these songs are about the black women most “urban” black men interact with, not white women. So this is a question not of “reverse racism” or whatever, which may be seen as a revolt against racist structures, but rather of sexism within the black community. And indeed, when black women have spoken out against their over-sexualized portrayal in black male art, they have often been accused of betraying the cause of their race-in effect subordinating feminism to anti-racism. For an example of this phenomenon, see Kimberle Crenshaw’s analysis of the 2 Live Crew arrest in 1990.
So no, not all “offensive” hip-hop is truly offensive when viewed in the correct cultural and historical context. But some of it is. Specifically, much of Tyga’s lyrics are. That’s why I support this petition.