It was black female bodies she used as minstrel props in her 2013 VMA performance and her video for “We Can’t Stop”. Even those like Miley Cyrus whose appropriation of blackness (to the point of caricature) was seemingly less offensive because it took gendered form. Relatively speaking, hip-hop has been a safer space for white women to enter.
Certainly not Karrine Steffans (aka “Superhead”) who was ruthlessly slut- shamed after authoring the Video Vixen series, which divulged the details of her sexual (and abusive) relationships with black men in hip-hop. Or Azealia Banks when T.I took to Instagram, calling her a “monstrosity of a maggot ass bitch”. Virtually no one came to Nicki Minaj’s defense when rapper Gucci Mane spread sexually denigrating rumors about her on Twitter. Rather, than challenge black male misogyny, it was more often an opportunity for it to become more formidable.
If Snoop Lion and Iggy Azalea will represent the figurative marriage between black men and white women in America, this beef might as well be the divorce.Įven in the marital aftermath, black women had to be ones to ask the more pertinent question: where had black men in hip-hop been when we needed them? Or, as said on Twitter, “show me one time anyone (other than black women) stood up for a black female rapper when she was being dragged.”Īs if the epistemological history of hip-hop was lost on them, black men seemed to have forgotten that it was never been a safe space for black women. Black women were effectively erased in tug-of-war of gender or racial loyalties. Black men derailed conversations about Snoop’s sexism turning legitimate callouts into rants which seemed to imply that if we couldn’t handle the dog-eat-dog nature of the rap game, we shouldn’t grab the mic. White feminists fell over themselves writing lazy think pieces about the misogyny in hip-hop that ignored the racial and cultural context of the music. A critique that seemed to be lost amidst bad memes and misguided analysis. More importantly, I found it to be crucially demonstrative of the ways in which black women inevitably lose in the context of these dynamics. On a symbolic level, however, I found it to be emblematic of the political dynamics of black men and white women in hip-hop and beyond. On a personal level, I was mostly disinterested in the recent beef between hip-hop artists Snoop Dogg/Lion and Iggy Azalea.
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