{"id":30092,"date":"2013-04-03T17:19:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T17:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30092"},"modified":"2016-06-04T21:34:11","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T21:34:11","slug":"poetic-justice-drake-and-east-african-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30092","title":{"rendered":"Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Feminist Wire<\/a>
\n2013-04-03<\/p>\n

Safy-Hallan Farah<\/strong>, Guest Contributor<\/p>\n

I am an East African Girl. A couple years ago, one of my friends told me that being an East African meant I\u2019m not really black. A visibly mixed-race girl with a \u201chigh yellow\u201d complexion and sandy brown hair telling me I\u2019m not black didn\u2019t sit well with me. I wanted to tell the girl, in the words of CB4<\/a>, I\u2019m black y\u2019all. I\u2019m black like the back of Forrest Whitaker\u2019s<\/a> neck. I\u2019m black like Snoop Dogg\u2019s<\/a> lungs. I\u2019m black like some Helvetica font against a white backdrop trying to sell you stuff.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a black woman. But my nose, my loosely coiled curls and my fivehead make me black in a way that extends the colorism debate, creating this hierarchy of aesthetic value where I\u2019m not just black, I\u2019m also acceptably black.<\/p>\n

Back in the day, white people went to East Africa to find Iman<\/a>, their acceptable black girl. When white people did this, former Essence<\/em> Editor-in-Chief Marcia Gillespie called East African model Iman Abdulmajid \u201ca white woman dipped in chocolate,\u201d\u00a0 highlighting Iman\u2019s acceptable blackness while also lamenting the fact that black women\u2019s beauty is often measured in their proximity to whiteness…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…In \u201cPoetic Justice<\/a>\u201d by Kendrick Lamar<\/a> ft. Drake<\/a>, Drake does it again: \u201cI was trying to put you on game, put you on a plane\/Take you and your mama to the motherland\/I could do it, maybe one day\/When you figure out you\u2019re gonna need someone\/When you figure out it\u2019s all right here in the city\/And you don\u2019t run from where we come from.\u201d But couched between another lazy description of a faceless, nameless East African Girl, and Drake\u2019s assertion that that East African Girl is busy ignoring him for another man, is a story of afrodiasporic identity, which is what sets Drake apart, narratively, from other rappers.<\/p>\n

While Drake\u2019s definition of black beauty may seem limited, his definition of black identity is what Tour\u00e9<\/a> would call \u201cpost-black,\u201d and Michelle Wright would call \u201cpostwar diasporic black.\u201d Drake\u2019s flow in \u201cPoetic Justice\u201d facilitates a broader discussion of black identity and black authenticity, a discussion that implicitly critiques Marcia Gillespie\u2019s \u201cwhite woman dipped in chocolate\u201d statement, positing that East African Girls \u201ccome from\u201d the same city Drake does, Toronto. The underlying message is that Drake considers us black like him. Drake, as a black Jewish man whose Degrassi<\/em> character Jimmy Brooks dated a fake East African Girl, occupies a similarly hybrid space like East African Girls. For many East African Girls, that feels like poetic justice because the definition of \u2018authentically black\u2019\u2014 descendants of Africans brought here as slaves\u2014 is a limited definition that doesn\u2019t even include Barack Obama<\/a>, much less East African Girls…<\/p>\n

…East African girls are generally not mixed race, yet this idea that we are is deeply embedded in the minds of white racialists, leading some to believe we\u2019re an entirely different, special, exotic breed of people.<\/strong> This goes back to the pseudoscience of Carleton S. Coon\u2019s \u201cThe Races of Europe.\u201d Anthropologists and white racialists, which are often one in the same, have been claiming we are of majority Arab or white or \u201cAfro-Asiatic\u201d descent for years. And while that isn\u2019t the sentiment of Drake or Nas\u2019s lyrics, our alleged mixedness underpins their lyrics by virtue of the sheer selectiveness of the East African Girls shouted out in hip-hop lyrics. When Drake or Nas reference East African Girls, it can be easily inferred that they mean Cushites representing the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia). \u201cCushite,\u201d a term derived from \u201cCush\u201d of the Hebrew Bible and Quran, is in reference to our shared \u201cAfro-Asiatic\u201d language classification, which is often mistakenly typified as a shared racial identity. This little mistake triggers a big mistake: the conflation of biology and genetics with race and ethnicity as a social fact, which reifies the racial categories…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls The Feminist Wire 2013-04-03 Safy-Hallan Farah, Guest Contributor I am an East African Girl. A couple years ago, one of my friends told me that being an East African meant I\u2019m not really black. A visibly mixed-race girl with a \u201chigh yellow\u201d complexion and sandy brown hair telling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,1196,8,20],"tags":[10399,14271,14272,1392,14273,6846],"class_list":["post-30092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-drake","tag-feminist-wire","tag-kendrick-lamar","tag-music","tag-safy-hallan-farah","tag-the-feminist-wire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47316,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30092\/revisions\/47316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}