Selling Blackness Back to Black People:

How the Music Industry Turned Racial Stereotypes into Cultural Identity, Celebrating Black Degradation

There was a time when Black Americans sang about being Black and proud. We celebrated Black beauty, Black love, Black identity, and the right to define ourselves in a country that had spent centuries defining us through racial inferiority.



Music was an important part of that declaration. It communicated who we were, what we valued, and how we wanted to be seen. Somewhere along the way, however, the commercially dominant representations of Blackness began moving in another direction. The language of Black pride increasingly shared the commercial stage with the language of bitches, hoes, gangsters, drugs, and vivid sexual conquest.



In this essay, I want to explore, interrogate, and analyze that progression because it raises a question far beyond whether contemporary music is better or worse than the music of previous generations.



Of the many questions I have, and without personal indictments on the Black people affected, just how did a culture that publicly celebrated Black dignity become commercially associated with many of the same degrading characterizations that Black Americans had spent generations resisting? And who controlled the commercial machinery that made those characterizations so…