Photo of Iggy Azalea: www.iamhiphopmagazine.com
According to one of her critics - and she has many - Australian-born rapper and model Iggy Azalea is hip hop's nightmare; a privileged blonde white girl who plays with African-American identity and exploits black culture and history, reinforcing the very worst racial and sexual stereotypes in the process of making mega-bucks for herself and the corporate-media pimps she hustles for.*
Now, whilst I understand and sympathize with this position - which is not simply based on personal hostility, so much as it is rooted in a long and shameful past that only an idiot would seek to deny - I'm wary about sharing or supporting it. Because in order to share and support this view one would have to understand race as an essential categorization.
And that's tricky for me, as I see blackness in terms of artifice and attitude, not authenticity; as a question of style, not soul. I also believe it to be performative; that is to say, a way of walking and talking, as well as dressing, thinking, laughing and loving.
In other words, negritude, because it is culturally constructed, is something that can be legitimately assumed by anyone - even a pale-faced young woman from Down Under. She might be wearing a mask and playing a role - but so are the rest of us - and despite some rather depressing and regrettable aspects of her persona it is important to recognize also the complexity of her performance as a postmodern minstrel.
* See the essay by Aimee Valinski; Hip Hop's Nightmare - Iggy Azalea, (www.iamhiphopmagazine.com)
