Five Times That “Post-Racial White Allyship Rap Music” Failed The World

This is what happens when “keeping it real” goes wrong…

The involvement of what oftentimes appeared to be white allies to historically African-American driven rap music in the now ended “post-racial” era was, in retrospect, simultaneously criminally misunderstood and/or undeniably deplorable. Yet intriguingly enough, this just-passed era’s white rap performers were extraordinarily dominant in music’s mainstream. Sadly though, rap’s white allies-as-leaders ultimately showcased that they didn’t know how to, or just plain didn’t carry the struggle of black people via rap music as largely a device to further the positive and/or honest evolution of the black cultural narrative at-large. Thus, it can be argued that we are right now as an American and worldwide society on some level because rap’s white allies didn’t know how to “keep it real” and dropped the ball.

Google defines the phrase “keep it real” as an “informal” phrase meaning to be “genuine, unaffected, or honest.” The phrase is best when alongside rap music, aka hip-hop music’s most culturally potent musical offspring that, since DJ Kool Herc threw a house party in an apartment building in a low-income African-American working class community in the Bronx, NY in August 11, 1973, is best when contextualized alongside people, places, things, and socioeconomic conditions best related to the goings on at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue nearly five decades ago.

However, in the midst of the belief that America ironically was somehow “post-racial” in the era following the election of the very much racialized (by none other than our 45th President Donald Trump) African-American Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, we allowed a very surreal moment to occur wherein the people who arguably defined rap — a music, mind you, that as mentioned prior, is best when directly attached to the history and traditions of low-income working class African-Americans — were well, at best directly attached in the most remote of ways to the genre’s unique sociopolitical construction.