So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

Think of artists like Elvis Presley who have been canonized in the annals of music history for work that was lifted almost wholesale from the backs of black musicians whose names most Americans will never know.

Rap has been long vilified by many in “respectable” white America. It is the language of “thugs” and is responsible for numerous societal ills from “black-on-black” crime to single-parenthood. Rap music is the reason why your teenager is suddenly disrespectful. Rap music is the reason why kids don’t go to church anymore. Wife leave you? Pretty sure rap music told her to.

Rap is, in reality, a difficult and beautiful art form that requires not only musical and rhyming talent, but a mathematically complex sense of timing. Rap is a very diverse art form that c...

Continuing to look at rap as an example of cultural appropriation verses cultural appreciation: if you really love rap, you love more than just the beats. You love the artists, the pioneers, the science, the history of it all. You love the meaning and the significance of rap—not only what it has meant to you, but what it has meant to the artists and its fans. If you love rap you love the strength it has provided black people. If you love rap you understand that it is an art form that has been lovingly grown and nurtured in a hostile world. You also understand that the pain and adversity that helped shape rap is not something you’ve had to face. When you look at the history of rap, the heritage of rap, the struggle of rap, the triumph of rap—it may inspire you to want to rap yourself. But when all you can take is the art, and you can take the enjoyment and the profit and the recognition—and you can’t take any of the pain or the history or the struggle, can you do so and honestly call it rap if you love it at all?

I love taking selfies of my hair and talking about my hair, and if you ask, I will probably let you touch it because it’s very, very soft. But I wasn’t prepared to be talking about my hair on the first day of my new job.

I didn’t want my stiff, coarse hair that didn’t move in the breeze. I didn’t want my hair that kids called nappy and ugly.

But I love a project, and I made loving my hair a personal goal. I set to it and succeeded. And as my hair grew out into fluffy coils I was finally proud of what I saw when I looked in the mirror. My hair still wasn’t what I saw in commercials or in magazines, but it was mine—no longer dictated by the preferences of White America—and it was beautiful.

after finally breaking free from the expectations, after resisting the pressure to conform, my hair was still a source of shame. Here was my director singling me out, in front of my coworkers, not to shame me, but to shame other black women for making different choices than I was now making. To shame other black women for spending a lot of money to not have to have the embarrassing and demeaning conversation I was now being forced to have. He wanted me to know that he approved of my hair, hair that, finally, was existing outside of his beauty norms. But still, he thought that my hair, growing on my head, from my body, was within his jurisdiction. Still, my hair would be a tool of oppression, even if it was to belittle other black women. My hair still existed for his use. Even then, even in a state as removed from whiteness as it could be, my hair was not my own.