And doesn’t it bother you even a little that these big chain stores selling all those Biggie and Tupac and Cypress Hill and ODB and Tribe Called Quest and not even employing non-white models? Doesn’t that make your penchant for irony seem petty and insulting? Because it is. And if you don’t know, now you know.
I have two major issues with Williams' position: 1) she's painting cultural expropriation with a brush so wide that it deflates the term; 2) she's unwittingly tethering the 'ghetto' image to, what, any race but Caucasian? Putting aside what it suggests that Williams drops into her article the most cringeworthy and ironically used ghettoisms (like 'yo' and 'street cred') intermixed with mean-girl-isms like 'fug' (this is the linguistic equivalent of Forever 21's marketing campaign), her argument only reinforces a backward divide between popular culture that white people are allowed to consume and popular culture reserved for everyone else.
First of all, a white person wearing an NWA t-shirt is not an instance of cultural expropriation. I can see why knowingly marketing this stuff to a white suburban consumer audience grates--I'm outraged by all kinds of marketing tactics too--but we're not talking about cherrypicking, distorting, and ethnicizing a minority culture here (the way that, for example, the 'Harlem Shake' meme, or the hawking of 'Native American' headdresses along the interstate, do). We're talking about jumping on the bandwagon that has been the hip-hop mega-industry for decades now--a bandwagon that got rolling when urban artists tried desperately to break out of predominantly local, black clubs, parties, radio stations, tv stations, and into 'mainstream' American discourse so they could get their stories heard. There was a time when the Grammy Awards didn't televise the hip-hop awards section of the show--just cut it right out of the national programming. These artists have been fighting for a long time to bring hip-hop from the margins to the center of the musical universe, and in many ways (not all certainly) they've accomplished this, quite impressively.
It might occur to Williams that Notorious B.I.G., NWA, and Lil' Wayne actually have broad fan-bases and lots of completely un-ironic white fans, in the same way that many people in London follow the New York Yankees despite having never set foot in New York beyond Time Square, or kids wear Ramones shirts despite having never been authentically part of the punk rock scene that came of age before these kids were born. Williams' move is to essentialize the 'authentic hip-hop experience,' disturbingly along racial lines; yet I wonder if Williams is as offended by the examples of inauthenticity I gave above, or by Urban Outfitters' marketing of the California bear t-shirt to lots and lots of people who aren't from California? Would she have a problem with me teaching Jay-Z's memoir, Decoded, to my predominantly white college students, or must this artifact of the ghetto only be taught and marketed to those with enough 'street cred' (g-cards?)? The double standard people like Williams apply when it comes to rap--the only genre for which we demand some kind of authentic, essentialized tie, while we're happy to excuse a white audience at a performance of Dreamgirls, or a white audience at a Basquiat gallery--suggests to me a more troubling attitude about race and art in those who embrace it than in the targets of its criticism.
Should marketing be a more ethical, culturally sensitive, and culturally responsive practice overall? Yes (though I'm not holding my breath). Should chains like Forever 21 veer clear of the Abercrombie and Fitch model model and include a greater diversity of models in their marketing, giving a greater diversity of customers the chance to imagine themselves in the clothes? Yes, absolutely. But why, pray tell, must hip-hop apparel in particular appear on black models? We already know that authenticity can't be a viable test for what's an acceptable screen-printed t-shirt to wear (we're not talking about Benetton-style marketing of dashikis to white girls, though perhaps we should be): widespread acceptance of Londoner Yanks fans, millennial Ramones fans, preppy Metallica fans, etc. all disprove the authenticity standard for what t-shirts we can wear without being taken to task for being poseurs (or worse). So all that's left to justify Williams' argument is the essentializing of the 'ghetto' experience along racial lines. The ghetto experience (the one we're talking about here) could be considered a black experience historically; but why should this be essentialized in a way that only reinforces ghettoization (in the literal sense: to isolate or segregate a group to a confined space or cultural field)?
In other words, I put the question back to Williams: what does it mean to single out black bodies for the burden of representing 'ghetto' rap culture?
Cultural expropriation is a tricky phenomenon, and not all instances of 'crossover' are also instances of appropriation. There's political potential in dwelling on the margins; but as Williams seems to forget, keeping that potential on the margins is the very definition of marginalization.
