Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture

263 Pages·2015·2.62 MB·English

by  Tamara L. Brown and Baruti N. Kopano

CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY
Manning Marable, Founding Series Editor
Peniel Joseph (Tufts University) and Yohuru Williams (Fairfield University), Series Editors
This series features cutting-edge scholarship in Contemporary Black History, underlining the importance of the study of history as a form
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Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Biko Lives!: The Contested Legacies of Steve Biko
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Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story”
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Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: Scholarship and the Transformation of Public Policy
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Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama
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Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya
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Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement
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Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle
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Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture
Edited by Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano
Black Power Principals
By Matthew Whitaker (forthcoming)
The Congress of African People: History, Memory, and an Ideological Journey
By Michael Simanga (forthcoming)

Soul Thieves
The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African
American Popular Culture
Edited by
Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano

SOUL THIEVES
Copyright © Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano, 2014.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
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ISBN: 978–0–230–10891–2 (hc)
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First edition: December 2014
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Soul Thieves: White America and the Appropriation of Hip Hop and Black Culture
Baruti N. Kopano
2 The Appropriation of Blackness in Ego Trip’s The (White) Rapper Show
Carlos D. Morrison and Ronald L. Jackson, II
3 Cash Rules Everything around Me: Appropriation, Commodification, and the Politics of
Contemporary Protest Music and Hip Hop
Diarra Osei Robertson
4 I’m Hip: An Exploration of Rap Music’s Creative Guise
Kawachi Clemmons
5 Foraging Fashion: African American Influences on Cultural Aesthetics
Abena Lewis-Mhoon
6 In the Eye of the Beholder: Definitions of Beauty in Popular Black Magazines
Kimberly Brown
7 Neutering the Black Power Movement: The Hijacking of Protest Symbolism
James B. Stewart
8 A Silent Protest: The 1968 Olympiad and the Appropriation of Black Athletic Power
Jamal Ratchford
9 Imagining a Strange New World: Racial Integration and Social Justice Advocacy in Marvel
Comics, 1966–1980
David Taft Terry
10 So You Think You Can Dance: Black Dance and American Popular Culture
Tamara Lizette Brown
List of Contributors
Index

Preface
Culture is the beliefs, values, norms, traditions, and artifacts shared among the inhabitants of a
common society. Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual validates culture in the
African American tradition by directly linking and interlinking it with politics and economics.1
Popular culture is that culture literally of the people. It is distinguished from high culture or that
which is of, or reflective of, the elite. Its value for mass consumption and entertainment purposes
distinguishes it from the more “legitimate” artistic pursuits. Music, movies, television, fashion fads,
slang, magazines, and the like are examples of popular culture. Today’s popular culture will be
tomorrow’s cultural history and a means by which to analyze society at a given moment. Popular
culture as a general term is “used to distinguish the mass of the people—not ‘people’ in general—
from the titled, wealthy or educated classes of people.”2 It can include both folk and mass objects, as
well as traditions and beliefs. Such material culture manifests itself as readable objects—open for
evaluation and interpretation.3
Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture is
an analysis of the misuse and, in some cases, outright abuse of African American popular culture
through various genres. Hip hop is, and has been, one of the most dominant African American popular
culture creations and is denoted in many of the offerings in this volume; however, Soul Thieves is a
historically inclusive documentation of the misappropriation of black popular culture, thus spanning
other areas and genres besides the contemporary and current craze. This book documents that
historically African Americans have been in the forefront in the creation of American popular culture.
As scholar Harry Shaw demonstrated in Perspectives of Black Popular Culture, black popular
culture traditionally has been synonymous with American popular culture, but not credited with the
innovation. “To look at Black popular culture . . . through any medium is to get a glimpse of the
essential Blackness. It is the DNA that affects all Black—and, to a great extent American—artistic
achievements.” Such shared experiences and artistic pursuits form the foundation of African
American culture and identify, explain, and retain Africanisms (cultural traits that can be traced to an
African foundation) and the intrinsic essence of that blackness that emanates from the everyday lives
of African American people. Moreover, emerging from this base, “[o]nly Black culture has retained
identifiable Africanisms and Black culture traits in a culturally competitive environment while
making innumerable significant contributions to American and Western Culture [sic].”4 In the use of
the term African American, the editors acknowledge the African diaspora and its inherent cultural
implications, but pay particular attention to the African American impact on American popular
culture.
Nearing the end of the twentieth century, historians Robin D. G. Kelley and Lawrence Levine
debated the interpretations of popular culture in the pages of the American Historical Review. Levine
lamented that in its current state scholars were not adequately assessing this mass medium that he
pitted as a battle, at times, between consumers and producers over the construed meaning and intent,
and suggested a varied approach to studying the field, since scholars tended to focus on the intent of