Indiana University Bloomington Eminem Selling Whiteness in Hip Hop Essay

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Bakari Kitwana provides a kind of preface to his chapter, “Why White Kids Love Hip Hop.” In that preface, he recounts British host of the reality show American Idol Simon Cowell’s engagement with one-time Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly over the significance of hip hop music and the rap artist Eminem. Cowell responds to O’Reilly’s vilifying of hip hop by invoking Eminem. Cowell calls Eminem a a genius insofar as Eminem understood the changing dynamics of race in America and made his entry into the field of hip hop premised on those changed dynamics. After recounting the Simon Cowell-Bill O’Reilly exchange, Kitwana says, “Yes, a white kid engaging in the predominantly Black medium of hip-hop is going to be deemed cool by his peers — if he can pull it off, especially in a climate where hip-hop is mainstream youth culture. By doing so, however, that kid is not committing race suicide. Eminem is not seeking to become Black and abandon whiteness. Instead, his being white is what makes him so attractive to the marketplace. . . . “Part of what Eminem is selling is whiteness” (15).

And then, toward the end of the article, “The Woke Slim Shady,” an article that aims to account for Eminem’s supposed turn to politics in the Trump era, writer Alexis Petridis offers a searing question. She asks, “Did [Eminem] merely mirror — or, with the ridiculous slim shady, even satirize — the rise of the angry white man or did he drive it? Either way, he’s the hip-hop figurehead most likely to have ardent Trump supporters and alt-right wingnuts among his audience.”

This week’s reading material and lecture on hip hop and race provides you with intellectual resources to interpret the Eminem phenomenon. Your short writing assignment is this: Please draw on that material and explain how it can be the case that Eminem, as claimed in the Kitwana reading, has been selling whiteness. You have 2–3 pages, which is to say 500 – 750 words, to work this out. Remember, support your claim with material from this week’s reading and lecture. Use pages numbers (or as the case may be, timestamp on the video lecture) to document your support for your argument.