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Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 6,
645-668 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241606286997
Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop
Jason Rodriquez
University of Massachusetts–Amherst
This article examines how white youths culturally appropriate hip-hop by adhering to the demands of color-blind ideology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on racial ideology by analyzing how it is put into action by individuals in a specific local context in which race is salient. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.
Key Words: color-blindness • hip-hop • whiteness • cultural appropriation • ideology
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