Valenti’s White Feminist Legacy: How to erase people of colour from a genre they created
MCA’s Feminist Legacy: How the Beastie Boys brought hope to female hip hop fans
For one of the first times, the music I loved loved me back.
GROSSSSSSSSSSS TO THE MAX.
WHAT THE FUCK.Like, please. Fuck off, Valenti.
“For one of the first times, the music I loved loved me back?” Is that some kind of bullshit dig at the rest of the rap music, the “big, black scary misogynistic” kind you white feminists love to shit on? Is that some kind of not-that-subliminal message that you couldn’t stomach rap music unless it was at the hands of three white men who occasionally said some shit about abuse because it’s not like black rap artists never talked about sexism? I guess the other topics discussed in rap/hip-hop never really spoke volumes to you, huh?
For you to elevate the Beastie Boys as some kind of representatives for “the music you loved” (rap) when in reality they were and have always been a minority in said genre, like. You are showing your ass real good. Real fucking good.
Let’s be real: the Beastie Boys were great to some people and that’s fine. But you know what bugs me about them and subsequently this article? The fact that all it took for them to make a name was being white boys in a black genre and speaking up. I’m not even going to talk about their anti-sexist ideals—wonderful things were done and I won’t deny that, but people stay acting like the Beasite Boys were some kind of feminist island in a genre full of black men who like talking about bitches. Fuck that. Y’all can keep trying to erase the efforts of anti-sexist black rappers, but I won’t.
I’m glad it took the Beastie Boys speaking up about shit only you care about for you to realize that “[rap] loved you back,” Valenti—but it’s whatever.
also a commentor of the nation blog post wrote this, which sums up the whole problem quite neatly:
…while I appreciate the sentiment quite a bit, the way it seems like you’re giving cookies to the one white hip hop group while talking about how the rest of the genre is so misogynistic is kind of making me a bit uncomfortable.
What about all the feminist female MCs of color? What about the black and Latino MCs who had similar messages about respecting women?
(via arulpragasams)
![cihuatlicue:
“You can take my falafel and hummus, but don’t f***ing touch my keffiyeh,” declares 26-year-old British-Palestinian MC Shadia Mansour from a New York stage as she introduces her song, “El Kofeyye 3arabeyye” (The Keffiyeh Is Arab), written when she discovered that an American company had created a blue-and-white version of the iconic Arab scarf with stars of David on it. Then she starts rhyming. Arabic words emerge like a burst of machine-gun fire.
Rolling Stone Middle East | The Passion, Politics and Power of Shadia Mansour
Mansour only became an MC by chance. But today she’s regarded as one of the luminaries of the Arab hip-hop scene, a platform she has used to declare a musical intifada [uprising] against oppression – be it the occupation of her people’s land, the repression of women, or conservative opposition to her music.
“I’m like the keffiyeh/However you rock me/Wherever you leave me/I stay true to my origins/Palestinian,” she raps from the stage.
In response, numerous red-and-white and black-and-white checked scarves appear above the crowd at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, where Mansour is performing. This is the first concert on a fundraising tour for the organization Existence is Resistance, which organizes hip-hop tours in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Mansour is part of a crew of MCs from the Arab diaspora performing both their own songs and collaborations with each other.
“This is how we wear the keffiyeh/The Arab keffiyeh,” she sings. Her voice, so uncompromising and stern just a second ago, has switched to soft velvet. The audience is rapt. “Every single man, woman and child that the Israeli government kills will give birth to another rapper/Because we are the new generation,” Mansour shouts.
The keffiyeh has become an important focus of Mansour’s image and her music, as it has for many Arab MCs. She received her first keffiyeh from her grandfather in Nazareth. Originally, it had purely personal, sentimental connotations for her. “Now when I put it on, it’s like a statement. It’s Arab,” she says. “Our image is still being distorted, and I am not going to allow that.”
“The keffiyeh represents struggle now more than ever before,” says Mansour’s friend Yassin Alsalman, the Iraqi-Canadian rapper who goes by the stage name The Narcicyst, with whom Mansour collaborated on the track “Hamdulilah” (Praise God.) “At first it represented nationalism, but for our generation it represents the oneness of nations.” That explains the anger Mansour expresses in her lyrics:
Now these dogs are starting to wear it as a trendNo matter how they design it, no matter how they change its colorThe keffiyeh is Arab, and it will stay ArabThe scarf, they want itOur intellect, they want itOur dignity, they want itEverything that’s ours, they want itWe won’t be silent, we won’t allow itIt suits them to steal something that ain’t theirs and claim that it is.“It’s cultural appropriation,” says Alsalman, of the current clamor for keffiyehs among non-Arabs. “There is a thin line between showing respect to a culture and appropriating it because you assume it is cool or hot or chic.” Both artists agree that wearing the scarf and singing about it is their way of reappropriating and reowning it.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrqyey67X31qaaipdo1_500.jpg)
