White politicians gave a perfunctory nod to the stories of black Americans; this, they believed, made them look compassionate and worthy of voting for. But theirs was a self-congratulatory form of white enlightenment; it didn’t fool the black voters, and it frustrated those white voters who remained convinced that the better black people did in this country the worse the white people would do. Watching the perfunctory nods of compassion, my Kentucky neighbors came to see a conspiracy in which one class of white people (wealthy, educated in college rather than church) turned on the other white people for speaking in racist terms. They came to see a white liberal urban coastal elite bent on controlling the very language working-class white people can use. We made it, they might have heard the white elites saying, so something must be wrong with the people we left behind. We left home and got smarter and richer, so we can look back and shake our heads at the people still stuck in Kentucky, even as we pride ourselves on our ostensible dedication to the plight of the black people they look down on. People in my part of Kentucky saw the whites who had everything using perceived prejudices as a reason to look down on the whites who had nothing. They were certain the problems of this country were rooted in skin color, and they were tired of being told they were the wrong kind of white.
The white elites who gave so much lip service to racial justice were the ones who had benefitted the most from our country’s racism. They got the best pools, schools, and neighborhoods—and did little to nothing to invite in more black people—while poor whites in rural Kentucky resorted to baseless grudges and racist jokes. I wouldn’t say all, or even most, rural whites or Southern whites or even small-town Science Hill, Kentucky whites thought this way, but it was a mentality I saw and one that undoubtedly influenced my own. I certainly don’t speak for the state I left a decade ago, or the small town I left two decades ago, but I can’t escape the fact that growing up there shaped my outlook as a young man. In telling my Kentucky stories, I don’t mean to advertise my humble origins so much as show how the place I came from shaped the way I approach hip-hop and the way I think about my own role in relation to it. Some whites growing up in the Eighties and Nineties were taught that overt racism would no longer benefit them; I was shown that it would. I didn’t just hear racist jokes; I repeated them. I invented my own. In a place where these jokes served as social currency, I couldn’t help seeing In Living Color and my bootleg Eddie Murphy cassettes as an extension of the same brand of humor. I counterbalanced my love for what some of my neighbors called “nigger music” with a healthy dose of laughing along with those neighbors at our ignorant notions of what it meant to black.
I wish I could forget that part of my past, but to do so seems dangerous. Americans are fascinated with stories of overcoming poverty, but the more important success story is overcoming the mentality of the place in which we were born. I was taught racist thinking from such a young age that I could have easily fallen into a lifetime of casual racism. I was born in a Kentucky town so insular and sure of itself, but thanks to the dual influences of hip-hop and higher education, I ended up in a job that gives me the luxury of time to think, read, and write about the ways I relate to black culture. I look back at the mentality of my Kentucky upbringing as something I’ve studied enough history to overcome; I make a living teaching this history to college students, even as this history very likely gave me my job—a job that a more just society would have given a black person.
Three
“IT’S ABOUT CLASS, NOT RACE”
(NO, IT’S NOT)
Americans are tied to the idea that we’ve earned what we have. I belong here because I fought hard to get here, say the rappers and the politicians alike. It is our American mythos of overcoming the circumstances of our birth and escaping the place we came from, our American dream that a kid from Kentucky, no matter the hopelessness of his neighbors, can “one day leave those worthless hicks behind while still using their story to enhance my own credibility.”1 America tells me the stories I was most ashamed of growing up should become a point of pride now that I’ve made some money, that the value in these experiences is in looking back at them to congratulate myself on how far I’ve come. It benefits me to use these stories to brand myself a particular kind of white who still had things easy but not as easy as the white people who grew up rich. But having grown up on food stamps doesn’t qualify me to write about hip-hop, even if it does affect the way I look at its stories of rising out of poverty to buy your mother a mansion.
The more I read and write, the more I question the role of my race in relation to my subject matter. I used to find some solace in the fact that I’d spent more on hip-hop than I’d made from it, but with the hiphop class paying a piece of my salary that is likely no longer the case. Not to say I’m getting rich. I’m not making money like Lyor Cohen or Jimmy Iovine, the white record executives who’ve made millions from hip-hop. Tuition has skyrocketed, but students’ dollars haven’t exactly ended up in their professors’ pockets; by one estimation, tuition rose 72% more than the rate of inflation between 2001 and 2011, while faculty salaries at the end of that decade stayed right where they were when the decade began.2 Still, the money was good enough to lure me away from Kentucky for a move to my job at Rider. My wife and I rented an apartment in nearby Philadelphia, in a neighborhood where the tattooed twenty-somethings lived their lives like Kentucky grandmothers: they make and sell beeswax candles and butterscotch pies; they weed rooftop gardens and run knitting workshops. Many of them had degrees from elite colleges, but weren’t putting them to any vocational use other than to lean on theories they’d learned about late capitalism to rationalize their conviction that people should know how to make something other than money.
When faced with the birth of our first child, my wife and I turned to the Internet to ask where we should raise her. Our search began logically enough, with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Murder Map and the National Sex Offender Registry, but—scared out of Philly—we found ourselves studying the standardized test scores and median household incomes of the South Jersey suburbs. How quickly the Internet presented me a pie chart of the racial makeup of each school. I’d like to picture a Mexican-American family seeking this information to assure their daughter she won’t be the only Chicana in her class, but I know it’s probably white people using it to make sure the whole school looks just like them.
I see myself as the kind of person who’ll send my daughter to public school. Philly schools were bad, so I moved to the small town of Haddonfield, New Jersey, where the schools were good. Friends of mine see themselves as the kind of people who live in the city; they want their daughter to grow up around diversity, so they stayed in Philly and sent her to a pricey private school where she met her best friends, that diverse body of kids whose parents can afford to send them to a pricey private school. Another couple I know found a lower tuition rate at a Catholic school, so they send their kids there, even though they aren’t Catholic and don’t want their kids to be. What a lot of effort we expend to protect our children from the other children whose parents can’t afford to choose where to send them to school.
Where we live is who we are, or at least who we look like to other people. I have set aside aspects of my identity in order to live in a small town where the schools score high on standardized tests I don’t even believe in teaching to. When I told a friend I was moving to Haddonfield, he frowned and asked, “But aren’t they all Republicans?” A whole town of Republicans: the prospect frightened me. What would they be like? What would they do to my daughter?
I’ve never voted Republican. I’ve barely voted at all, considering the countless opportunities I’ve ignored in state and local elections. But as an eleven-year-old boy in Kentucky I wore a T-shirt with Ronald Reagan drawn, boardwalk-caricature style, as an Old West gunslinger: sheriff’s badge, sagging holster, spurred cowboy boot kicking the ass of a turban-headed Muammar Gaddafi. The shirt was an adult large, big as a nightgown on me, but I begged my mother to buy it. “Why?” she asked. I had never expressed an interest in politics. My knowledge of President Reagan came almost entirely from “Ronnie’s Rap,” a novelty record I played incessantly. One verse, in particular, made me laugh:
Met with Gorbachev in ’85
To