Stuff Black People Hate

is not black.

It’s difficult for me to express exactly what about this makes me incredibly angry, but I think number 2 on the list is what causes the most conflict between myself and other people. Hiphop scholars take a lot of pride in the fact that they’ve ‘discovered’ the music to me more than just gangster rap, but as soon as they make that discovery, they take the shit way too damn far. They’re suddenly under the impression that since they understand hiphop more than pretty much everyone else on the planet, then they also understand black people – effectively equating hiphop to black people and the black experience.

This sets up an incredibly tense situation when, inevitably, I make some offhand (and usually exaggerated) claim about hiphop in the presence of a hiphop scholar. For example, I’ve been known to say things like “I don’t need to listen to hiphop. I grew up in DC and lived through the violence and put up with the drug dealers first hand.” I say these things jokingly, and most people get it.

But not the hiphop scholar. This fucker will blindly LUNGE at the chance to defend hiphop – even from black people – and tell me exactly how I’m wrong, why I’m wrong, and how I’ve failed to understand hiphop. The irony of this behavior is what gets under my skin, because it takes a lot of nerve for someone who isn’t black to presume that a.) a black person from the inner city (me) could misunderstand hiphop which, at its core, is an expression of black people and the black experience, and b.) that they could ever in a million years understand that expression better than I could.

I could sit here for the next ten years listening to Fado – but no matter how much I studied it and learned about it, it would never occur to me to ‘correct’ the interpretation of this music by someone from Portugal. That would reflect a combination of rudeness, presumption, and flat-out wrongheadedness that was driven from me in my childhood by occasional smackdowns and yellings at delivered skillfully by my parents. I suppose when it comes down to it, hiphop scholars just don’t have any home training, or perhaps they were gifted children and aren’t accustomed to shutting the fuck up when they should.

With all that said, let me state that I don’t actually have a problem with the hiphop scholar studying the ins and outs of the music and the culture that surrounds it. Furthermore, feel free to light a fire under anyone who isn’t black and presumes to make blatantly false claims and misguided interpretations about hiphop. But when you’re around black people…do yourself a favor and keep your fucking mouth shut.