Soul Thieves

The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture

T. Brown, B. Kopano

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137071392
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

Considers the misappropriation of African American popular culture through various genres, largely Hip Hop, to argue that while such cultural creations have the potential to be healing agents, they are still exploited -often with the complicity of African Americans- for commercial purposes and to maintain white ruling class hegemony.

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Soul Thieves: White America and the Appropriation of Hip Hop and Black Culture

Baruti N. Kopano

You should . . . use the same manner of resistance as would have been just in our ancestors when the bloody foot-prints of the first remorseless soul-thief was placed upon the shores of our fatherland.

Henry Highland Garnet’s “An Address to the Slaves of the United States in America” delivered at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, 1843

Speaking passionately at the National Negro Convention in upstate New York in 1843, Henry Highland Garnet presented a plan to abolish European enslavement of Africans. Much to the chagrin of the moral suasionists and Garrisonians, Garnet sounded the call to arm enslaved Africans to end the peculiar institution. Garnet described the perpetrators of the greatest forced movement of people in world history as “soul thieves.” Six decades after Garnet’s historic address, one of Africa’s brightest children on American soil, W. E. B. Du Bois, released a sociological treatise and literary classic that sought to explain The Souls of Black Folk.¹ He offered an examination and explanation into the innermost parts of black women and men—their spirit. The essence of black folk is marked by triumph and pain, and that pain has been channeled into artistic expressions where “we [blacks] transformed our suffering into an opportunity to express spirit.”² Those spiritual expressions are at the crux of what soul is.

Soul music was an official designation for some of the music African Americans created during the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, soul radio was the appellation bestowed upon the delivery style of the African American disc jockeys and the music they played on the airwaves during the 1960s and early 1970s. These labels are befitting, for the characteristics of these genres match with the features found within the definition of soul, at least black soul. Improvisation, call, and response, and blending of the spiritual with the secular dominate soul music as well as soul radio. In their pioneering work Roots of Soul: The Psychology of Black Expressiveness, Alfred Pasteur and Ivory Toldson identify soul as black expressiveness that is characterized by vital emotionalism, spontaneity, and rhythm.³ It is this vital emotionalism that overcomes inhibitions about expressing one’s feelings. A clear example is the traditional black church experience that allows and encourages participants to embrace and to accept their emotions. Soul encompasses spontaneity that inspires the ability to go off script, to ad lib, to free style. Rhythm is more than synchronized movement of naturally flowing related elements. Rhythm is “the thread that runs through the fabric of black culture; it is therefore at the base of black expressive behavior.”⁴ The soul of black folk is the essence of their being. It is their thoughts and feelings conveyed in their music, dance, fashion, language, humor, and in other aspects of their lives. These cultural expressions serve as conduits for the regeneration of black folks and for all who would partake.

While no racial or cultural group can claim exclusivity on soul it is hard to dispute the idea that blacks have given “America and the West a cherishable facet of their African heritage—soul—a medium for the attainment of increased happiness.”⁵ A major objective of the work here in Soul Thieves is not only to answer Public Enemy’s question “Who Stole the Soul?”⁶ but also to posit an explanation for this pilfering.

It is tempting to determine that the continued pattern of white exploitation of black music and culture is simply for white financial rewards. However, that conclusion is too simplistic. Leon Wynter is partly correct in connecting white appropriation of black culture to the “institution of whiteness [that] requires dissociation from much of the essence of the American experience, if not the human experience. . . . From the beginning this dissociation created a vacuum that people and cultures of color have been conscripted to fill and in which they have voluntarily sought opportunity under conditions of white political hegemony.”⁷ Wynter’s point is that black cultural creations helped the white American need for identity and expression. Much of what America has presented as uniquely American—“music, dance, fashion, humor, spirituality, grassroots politics, slang, literature, and sports—was uniquely African-American in origin, conception, and inspiration.”⁸ How can this apparent contradiction exist? How can a society with such rigid and punitive policies entrenched to reinforce racial boundaries prioritizing the supremacy of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness establish its mass cultural forms on the culture of the group it so despises?

Jared Ball’s discussion of the “hip-hop nation” offers some understanding of white America’s general approach to the music and culture of people of color.⁹ Couched within internal colonialism theory, Ball proffers that black America exists as an internal colony (or colonies) within the United States. Ball identifies the “hip-hop nation” as an extension of black America, an internal colony in itself. There are “a number of strategies for securing the obedience of the colonized through a manipulation of popular culture including the control of political media, the development of popular stereotypes, and the use of the natural tendency to be creative as a semiotic weapon against a population.”¹⁰ The effect of this colonized relationship is that

popular representations of Black people (African people), First Nations people, Latinos, and certainly women of all backgrounds are incomplete, mythological creations designed to stand in for the more complex realities experienced by these people. Black people are not what is imaged in popular culture. The popular image is determined by the role they are meant to play in society (that of colonized people).¹¹

To be clear, colonial masters are committed to preserving a role for colonized people as dominated, controlled, and exploited subjects. Although the culture of black America is the foundation for much of American popular culture, black art forms are offered in the popular imagination to marginalize blacks and other nonwhites and to reaffirm white supremacy. Popular culture and the media that are used to disseminate its messages are arsenals of the hegemonic class.

M. K. Asante uses similar analogies of colonialism in his analysis of the rise of what is often referred to as the post–hip hop nation. Quoting rapper Immortal Technique, Asante observes that corporations sponsor colonialism.¹² Just as England, Portugal, France, and Spain were the four dominant colonial powers that pillaged Africa, Latin America, and Asia, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Group, and Warner Music Group “according to Nielsen SoundScan, account for 81.87 percent of the U.S. music market and supply ‘retailers with 90 percent of the music’ that the public purchases.”¹³ In continuing his comparisons, Asante reminds us that colonial powers are called “mother” countries while the “Big Four” of the music industry are called “parent companies.”¹⁴ Finally, in the colonial system raw materials were extracted from the colonies and sent to the mother country to be “finished and commodified for the marketplaces of the mother country. Additionally, these products were often sold back to the same colonies from which the raw materials were extracted in the first place.”¹⁵ In the case of hip hop, citizens of the parent companies are “45 million Hip-Hop consumers between the ages of 13 and 34, 80% of whom are white and has [sic] $1 trillion in spending power.”¹⁶

Asante’s argument, then, is that the relationship that most black rappers have—most black entertainers in general—is one where the raw sources (talents) of black performers are pillaged to provide products for the black and particularly for the white masses. Certainly, black dollars matter, too. However, as Ball forcefully argues the greatest objective of this pilfering is not merely for the financial rewards; the booty is but one objective.

There are far greater rewards than “the simple extraction of material wealth and goods from the colony. This process also assured control over the popular form the colonized cultural expression would take.”¹⁷ Controlling the messages and the values emanating fr...