Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop
- 1 December 2006
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
- Vol. 35 (6), 645-668
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241606286997
Abstract
This article examines how white youths culturally appropriate hip-hop by adhering to the demands of color-blind ideology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on racial ideology by analyzing how it is put into action by individuals in a specific local context in which race is salient. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.Keywords
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