Ebook: A Guest in the House of Hip Hop: How Rap Music Taught a Kid from Kentucky What a White Ally Should Be

Born in rural Kentucky, Mickey Hess grew up listening to the militant rap of Public Enemy while living in a place where the state song still included the word “darkies.” Listening to hip-hop made Hess think about what it meant to be white, while the environment in small-town Kentucky encouraged him to avoid or even mock such self-examination. If it weren’t for hip-hop, Hess could have slipped into a lifetime of small-mindedness and casual racism. Instead, he teaches Hip-Hop and American Culture at a university in New Jersey.

With America’s history of cultural appropriation, we’ve come to mistrust white people who participate deeply in black culture, but backing away from black culture is too easy a solution. As a white professor with a longstanding commitment to teaching hip-hop music and culture, Hess argues that white people have a responsibility to educate themselves by listening to black voices and then teach other whites to face the ways they benefit from racial injustices.

In our fraught moment, A Guest in the House of Hip-Hop offers a point of entry for readers committed to racial justice, but uncertain about white people’s role in relation to black culture.