Ebook: A guest in the house of hip-hop: how rap music taught a kid from Kentucky what a white ally should be

Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Foreword; Introduction: What Should a White Ally Do?; One: Don't Push It Too Far; Two: Why White Kids Should Listen to Hip-Hop; Three: "It's About Class, Not Race" (No It's Not); Four: Hip-Hop Comes to Campus; Five: Political Correctness and White Identity; Six: Racial Essentialism; Seven: Professors and Rappers; Eight: "Where We Are Is Who We Are"; Nine: Sit Down-Censorship, Grandstanding, and Shutting Your Mouth; Ten: Who Will Tell Hip-Hop's Story?; Eleven: Revisionist History; Twelve: Education Is the Apology; Acknowledgments; Notes;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. 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.