Never Been a Front/ Never Been a Fraud: Hip-Hop and Whiteness (Top Paper).

Hip hop is evident is all aspects of popular culture and Eminem has achieved a level of success unmatched in the world of hip-hop. Conscious of his race, Eminem stresses that he is not to be placed in the white rapper category but should be respected for his skills. Despite this yearning, his emergence in a musical genre linked to blackness furnishes a point of entry to outline strategies white MCÂ’s use to construct a non-racist form of whiteness. Popular culture and media are implicated in the social construction of race by providing texts reinforcing and maintaining essentialized notions of blackness and whiteness. Furthermore, the power and privilege of whiteness resides in its non-naming and in response, hip-hop clearly marks whiteness, and provides a space to critically interrogate and question its normalcy. With relatively few discussions pertaining to white participation in rap music this paper links the struggle for authenticity in the hip-hop world to the social constructions of race, and specifically whiteness. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]