Mixed Race Studies

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America

SUNY Press
April 2018
194 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6945-4
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6946-1

Kyle T. Mays, Assistant Professor
Department of African American Studies and American Indian Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing “traditional” beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their “traditions.” Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the “politics of authenticity” by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of “tradition” and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.

Table of Contents

• Preface: A Note on Language: Black English and Uncensored Mode
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Can We Live and Be Modern and Indigenous?: Toward an Indigenous Hip Hop Culture
• 1. #NotYourMascot: Indigenous Hip Hop Artists as Modern Subjects
• 2. The Fashion of Indigenous Hip Hop
• 3. Indigenous Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture: Or, How Indigenous Feminism Can Reform Indigenous Manhood
• 4. “He’s just tryna be black”: The Intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity in Hip Hop Culture
• 5. Rhyming Decolonization: A Conversation with Frank Waln, Sicangu Lakota
• Conclusion: “It’s bigger than Hip Hop”: Toward the Indigenous Hip Hop Generation
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

The Shifting Definition of Mixed-Race in America

Zora
2019-09-23

Kristal Brent Zook, Professor of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

Radical changes in U.S. demographics are reinventing what it means to be multiracial

“Raise your hand if you would see me on the street and think I’m Black?”

Several hands went up in an auditorium full of college students.

“Okay. What about biracial?”

More hands.

“Hmm… And what if I wore my hair in an Afro?”

Still more hands flew into the air.

What are you?

Multiracial people field that question daily.

Not long ago — before, during, and just after the civil rights era — there was often an unspoken understanding that those of us who are biracial should answer to only one race. One reality. One allegiance. Even today, a majority of adults who are multiracial choose not to identify that way.

But others are beginning to question that arrangement…

Read the entire article here.

The New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918

Northern Illinois University Press
2002-07-23
222 pages
6 x 9 in
ISBN 13: 9780875802930

Edited by: Kenny Williams

Fannie Barrier Williams made history as a controversial African American reformer in an era fraught with racial discrimination and injustice. She first came to prominence during the 1893 Columbian Exposition, where her powerful arguments for African American women’s rights launched her career as a nationally renowned writer and orator. In her speeches, essays, and articles, Williams incorporated the ideas of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois to create an interracial worldview dedicated to social equality and cultural harmony.

Williams’s writings illuminate the difficulties of African American women in the Progressive Era. She frankly denounced white men’s sexual and economic victimization of black women and condemned the complicity of religious and political leaders in the immorality of segregation. Citing the discrimination that crushed the spirits of African American women, Williams called for educational and professional progress for African Americans through the transformation of white society.

Committed to aiding and educating Chicago’s urban poor, Williams played a central and continuous role in the development of the Frederick Douglass Center, which she called “the black Hull House.” An active member of the NAACP and the National Urban League, she fought a long and successful battle to become the first African American admitted to the influential Chicago Women’s Club. Her efforts to promote the well-being of African American women brought her into close contact with such influential women as Celia Parker Woolley, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Accompanied by Deegan’s introduction and detailed annotations, Williams’s perceptive writings on race relations, women’s rights, economic justice, and the role of African American women are as fresh and fascinating today as when they were written.