Black and Latinx hermeneutical resources, hip hop music and white supremacy

Abstract

The argument that I will present partly depends on insight and understanding that I gained over the course of my twelve years in the music business.¹ This insight and understanding concerns not only how record labels cater to popular musical tastes but also how these tastes are shaped and molded by the almost entirely White executives who control the industry and also by hip hop music’s largest consumer block, young White men (Garofalo 1994; Negus 1999; Kitwana 2005; Watkins 2001, 383; Mitchell 2018).

Anglophone philosophers have attended to hip hop in small measure relative to its degree of influence on society (Darby and Shelby 2005; Shelby 2017; Taylor 2017). In the small philosophical literature that exists on hip hop, philosophers have examined political philosophical issues such as hip hop’s capacity to promote anti-racist ends (Pittman 2005; Shelby 2017), ethical issues such as whether hip hop artists misrepresent and thus wrong Black women (Belle 2005), philosophical issues of language such as what rap lyrics mean (Thompson 2005), and aesthetic issues such as whether hip hop is a distinctly Black and Latinx mode of expression (Taylor 2017). However, philosophers have not examined how hip hop relates to epistemic phenomena such as knowledge, understanding and true belief. I partly fill this gap in the literature by analyzing hip hop as a hermeneutical resource which can contribute to subjects’ understanding of the world.²

Philosophers of race and political philosophers have analyzed the political dimensions of hip hop (Lawson 2005; McPherson, Darby, and Shelby 2005) such as the ways that hip hop can promote both progressive and regressive outcomes (Gordon 2005; Belle 2005). But scant few philosophers or authors have analyzed how both white supremacy and market capitalism affect hip-hop’s content.³ I fill this lacuna in the literature.⁴

Most philosophers (Darby and Shelby 2005), though not all (Bailey 2014; Skitolsky 2020), in this literature on hip hop analyze it without distinguishing between mainstream hip hop or hip hop that is easily found on the radio or streaming platforms—which is what the overwhelming majority of hip hop consumers listen to—and less mainstream hip hop, or what is often called underground hip hop.⁵ Examples of mainstream hip hop include music by artists such as 21 Savage, Kodak Black, Drake, 2 Chainz, Jay-Z, Migos, Lill Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, Gucci Mane, Lil Durk and DaBaby. Examples of underground hip hop include music by artists and groups such as Madlib, Immortal Technique, MF Doom, Jedi Mind Tricks, Elzhi, Company Flow and Dead Prez.⁶ I contribute to this literature on hip hop because I analyze mainstream hip hop apart from underground hip hop. I take it that mainstream hip hop differs from underground hip hop largely because of differences in sales, streams, radio play and general publicity.

Some epistemologists in the hermeneutical injustice literature distinguish hermeneutical resources that both the dominant and non-dominant groups in a society share from hermeneutical resources that these groups do not share (Medina 2012, 2013; Fricker 2016).⁷ I contribute to this literature on hermeneutical injustice because I take up that hip hop was a hermeneutical resource that initially played a good hermeneutical role for Black and Puerto Rican persons in New York City but later played a diminished hermeneutical role because of white supremacy’s effect on it.

To shed light on the hermeneutical role that hip hop played for Black and Puerto Rican people I distinguish between what I call descriptive rap and prescriptive rap. Descriptive rap features content that makes claims about what obtains in the world, while prescriptive rap features content that makes claims about the way the world should be. This descriptive-prescriptive distinction commits the account that I present of hip hop qua hermeneutical resource to a form of aesthetic cognitivism because the picture I paint of hip hop is that hip hop songs can be viewed as aiming to convey the truth.

I will argue that the diminishment of hip hop music as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons by white supremacy promotes the ubiquity of ignorance of racial injustice in North America. To this end, I will defend what I call the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis. According to this thesis, white supremacy has diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons.

To defend this thesis, I will substantiate two sub-theses. The first is the prescriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, white supremacy has caused prescriptive rap to predominate the content of hip hop in comparison to descriptive rap. The second sub-thesis is the descriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, if (i) hip hop can have prescriptive or descriptive content; (ii) hip hop with prescriptive content is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people; and (iii) hip hop is dominated by rap music with prescriptive content; then (iv) hip hop is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people.

The defense that I present of the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis will take the following form: If the prescriptive-rap sub-thesis is true and the descriptive-rap sub-thesis is true, then the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis is true. I here show that both sub-theses are true, and therefore the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis is true. I assume that during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s hip hop was at its apex in terms of the hermeneutical role it played for Black and Latinx persons.

I. HIP HOP AS A HERMENEUTICAL RESOURCE

I now develop the idea that hip hop is a hermeneutical resource that has helped Black and Latinx persons to communicate to each other about, and understand, their reality.

A hermeneutical resource enhances subjects’ capacity to understand or communicate about their world and their experiences (Alcoff 1998; Fricker 2007, 149; Medina 2013, 90). Concepts can serve this hermeneutical function, as can be seen in the case of Carmita Wood (Fricker 2007, 149). Wood was an administrator in the physics department at Cornell University during the 1970s. A senior faculty member regularly behaved in ways towards Wood that we would today call sexual harassment, but during the 1970s, the term had not yet been coined. Wood eventually quit her job due to the stress of dealing with this behavior, but when she applied for unemployment insurance, she could not use the concept of sexual harassment to concisely explain why she quit and as a result she was denied unemployment insurance. Here, Carmita Wood lacked a concept—the concept of sexual harassment—and as a result she could not successfully communicate to others the immoral and disturbing behavior that she underwent. The concept of sexual harassment for subsequent women has played a hermeneutical role because it enhances their capacity to communicate about their reality to others (150).

Literature from authors such as Toni Morrison or Shakespeare can also enhance a subject’s understanding of her world and experiences. Suppose that a Black subject and White subject have both read Ralph Ellison’s (1995),The Invisible Man. That both of these subjects have read this novel will elevate the likelihood, even if only slightly, that the Black subject can successfully convey features of what it is like to experience racial oppression in North America to this White subject. This novel, and others like it, such as Toni Morrison’s (1993)The Bluest Eye, serves a hermeneutical function because if the White subject had not read this novel, then the likelihood that this subject would understand her is resultingly depressed. Like concepts, novels can serve as hermeneutical resources because they enhance a subject’s capacity to either understand their own experience or to communicate their experience to other subjects. Novels are works of art. So, at least some works of art can serve as hermeneutical resources.

Many modes of artistic expression can serve as hermeneutical resources, but I here focus on hip hop. Hip hop is a mode of expression that was developed largely by Black and Puerto Rican people in the South Bronx during the mid-to-late 1970s (George 2004). Hip hop can be expressed though graffiti art, break dancing, DJ’ing and rapping (Light 1999; Neal and Forman 2004), but I focus here on rap music.

If someone raps, then she rhymes words over an instrumental in a way that is synchronous with or bears a musically felicitous relation to the instrumental. One thing that makes musical rhyming or musical poetry differ from rapping is that things such as the cadence, speed, and delivery of the rhymes will differ depending on the features of the instrumental over which a rapper rhymes. Hip hop can serve as a hermeneutical resource largely, but not exclusively, because of this particular mode of expression that obtains when a rapper rhymes over an instrumental.

Rap can serve a hermeneutical function partly because of its descriptive power. On The Message, Melle Mel, the lead rapper of the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, manifested this descriptive power when he rapped, “It’s a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under/broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs, they just don’t care” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five 1982). Here, Melle Mel was describing the features of his world, namely poverty in the resource starved Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood of the South Bronx during the 1970s and 1980s. By Michael Eric Dyson’s lights, The Message was representative of rap’s descriptive and analytic capacity. He says,

As it evolved, rap began to describe and analyze the social, economic, and political factors that led to its emergence and development: drug addiction, police brutality, teen pregnancy, and various forms of material deprivation…this new development was…expressed and precipitated…by the most influential and important rap song to emerge in rap’s early history, “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash… (Dyson 2004, 61)

Melle Mel’s delivery of these lyrics, in combination with the instrumental track provided by Grandmaster Flash, communicate content that the mere lyrics alone do not. Or, at least, I will assume that the descriptive power of rap is a function of how rappers deliver their lyrics over particular instrumentals. Here, this song’s descriptive power partly depends on the urgency that the underlying instrumental evokes in relation to Melle Mel’s lyrics. But the instrumental does not do this alone; the way the lyrics are delivered in relation to the urgency evoked by the instrumental contributes to the song’s descriptive and communicative power. So, here, the whole is not a mere sum of its parts. Put differently, there is something it is like to hear The Message for the first time that does not reduce to either the sounds that compose the instrumental or the song’s lyrics (Nethery, IV 2011).

This picture of hip hop’s descriptive capacity involves commitment to the view that music can express “cognitively complex emotions” (Robinson 2005, 305). For Jenefer Robinson, emotions are non-cognitive appraisals of the world that involve various physiological responses. Emotions serve to focus subjects’ “attention on those things that are important to our wants, goals and interests” (126). Fear, for instance, can make us attend to what might be a rattlesnake in tall grass. For Robinson (97), emotions are processes in which subpersonal affective appraisals not only rapidly result in physiological responses to the world that involve “motor changes, action tendencies, changes in facial and vocal expression,” but also result in “cognitive monitoring” of these rapid physiological responses.

Music can convey emotions because, for Robinson, music consists in processes that mirror emotional processes. She describes the capacity of Brahms’s ‘Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’ to mirror emotions in the following way:

…the figure is heard as a sigh of misery (a vocal expression), a syncopated rhythm is heard as an agitated heart (autonomic activity), a change from tonic minor to parallel major is heard as a change of viewpoint (a cognitive evaluation)… (Robinson 2005, 320)

I submit that a similar mirroring obtains not only through the underlying instrumental on which Melle Mel raps, but also through the cadence and timing that his rhymes take in relation to the instrumental. Thus, the descriptive power of “The Message,” and many other hip hop songs, depends on the instrumental’s capacity to mirror emotional processes, its lyrics’ semantic content and the way the lyrics are delivered over the instrumental.

“The Message” qua artwork conveys information about the world in several ways. First, it conveys such information at the “surface” level through its lyrics’ semantic content (Sesonske 1956, 349). Further, “The Message” transmits information that is “embedded” through its use of metaphor (350), such as the metaphor of a person being pushed to a precipice. This embeds the truth of the exasperating nature of dealing with poverty and police brutality in the South Bronx where dealing with this on a daily basis ‘pushes’ Melle Mel closer to his psychological limit. Third, “The Message” also conveys information that is “embodied” in the song (Sesonske 1956). “The Message” embodies a truth about the experience of living in the South Bronx that is a result of the mutual reinforcement of the surface truth in the song’s lyrics, the embedded truth communicated by its use of metaphor and the communication of emotions through its underlying music. Regarding the way that works of art such as poetry and novels can embody truth, Alexander Sesonske says, “…we find…truth embodied in a work of art, but not simply as the mere truth which is a familiar item in our stock of knowledge. [Instead], we find it presented in a complex poetic structure—a structure which commands and controls our attention, which is rich in sensuous detail, in imagery and emotion” (1956, 352). Even though the picture that I present of hip hop’s descriptive power involves commitment to Sesonske’s view of the way that truth can be embodied in art, it is also committed to the notion, that Jenefer Robinson develops, that instrumental music can play an important role in conveying this sensuous detail through imagery and, of course, emotion.

But the information that a subject actually receives from hip hop songs such as the “The Message” can depend on one’s relation to places such as the South Bronx. If one is from a place such as the South Bronx, then one may notice that this song puts in new relief one’s experience of living in an impoverished community that is starved of resources and opportunities. On the other hand, if one is not from such a community, one’s experience of the song will likely differ because one does not have the relevant background experiences, concepts and knowledge to have this experience.

Rap songs such as “The Message” served as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons because these non-dominant group members share the relevant background experiences, concepts, knowledge or understanding such that The Message can play this hermeneutical role. That is, Black and Latinx persons from places such as the South Bronx are more likely than, say, White persons to have the requisite information and experience for rap to play this hermeneutical role.

During the 1980s, rap partly functioned as a hermeneutical resource for communities of color at first, largely, in New York and its surrounding areas and then throughout communities of color in the US such as Houston, Dallas and Los Angeles. Rap artists and groups such as Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, Eric B and Rakim, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo, The Geto Boys, The D.O.C and N.W.A. described their realities through rap largely for communities of color.

Often the information that these rap artists conveyed involved features of life in impoverished communities of color such as the South Bronx, Harlem or Queensbridge in New York City and other places such as Oak Cliff in Dallas and Compton outside of the City of Los Angeles. For example, on Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid In Full (1987), Rakim raps, “I used to roll up, ‘this is a hold up, ain’t nuthin’ funny/stop smiling, be still, don’t nothin’ move but the money.” Here, Rakim conveys what he resorted to to secure money for basic needs due to the lack of opportunity in his community. Before this line he raps, “so I dig in my pocket, all my money is spent/so I dig deeper but still comin’ up with lint/so I start my mission—leave my residence/thinkin’ how could I get some dead presidents.” Here, Rakim partly clarifies a condition that increases the odds that someone would commit robbery, namely lacking the means to satisfy one’s basic needs. Later in the song, Rakim describes how he ultimately refrained from robbery because he became apprised with the Five Percenters or the Nation of Gods and Earths’ teachings about righteousness and morality (Knight 2014). The basic idea here is that in rap’s early stages it served a hermeneutical role for communities of color because rappers described their realities in ways that not only involved facts they already knew, but descriptions of these realities that helped non-dominant subjects grasp features of their worlds they had not yet fully grasped.

Hermeneutical resources can be shared by societies as a whole and they can be shared by groups that compose societies such as non-dominant groups. But hermeneutical resources that are shared by a whole society will tend to be influenced by and serve the hermeneutical needs of dominant groups (Fricker 2007; Medina 2013). As a result, non-dominant groups often develop hermeneutical resources that speak and respond to their particular hermeneutical needs, which often differ from the needs of the dominant group (Medina 2013, 90; Fricker 2016). Black and Puerto Rican people in New York City developed hip hop qua hermeneutical resource in response to phenomena such as de facto white supremacy (Omi and Winant 1994; Mills 1997; Taylor 2013; Taylor 2019).

II. HIP HOP AND AESTHETIC COGNITIVISM

This account of hip hop as a hermeneutical resource involves commitment to the idea that hip hop can function as such a resource because it can accurately represent reality. The representational feature of this account of hip hop makes it an aesthetic cognitivist account of hip hop as an artistic medium. Aesthetic cognitivism is the view that works of art can aim to tell subjects about the world such that they hold accurate beliefs about it, know or understand it (Goodman 1978, 102; Graham 1995; Gibson 2008).

Aesthetic cognitivism faces challenges (Stolnitz 1992; Gibson 2008). Gibson (2008) helpfully distinguishes four. The first challenge is that art merely appeals to true claims about the world, rather than asserting them. For example, the fictional film The Godfather involves a great number of true claims about Italian migrants’ experience in the US, such as that Sicilian immigrants formed alliances with Jewish people in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 20th century. Even though the fictional story portrayed in this film depends on appealing to these truths to create its fictional world, the film aims at communicating a fictional and thus false story. This film as a fictional story does not aim to make true claims about the world and thus artistic media that tell such stories are not properly understood as telling us about the world.

According to this challenge, hip hop songs merely appeal to facts about poverty in places such as the South Bronx in the service of telling a false story. Consequently, the account I present of hip hop’s capacity as a hermeneutical resource is false because this account is committed to the false claim that hip hop asserts claims about Black and Puerto Rican communities. This challenge fails because a significant number of hip hop songs aim to describe the world. But even in the case of hip hop songs that merely aim to create a fictional world for listeners, often such songs will cause subjects to imaginatively see their actual world in new ways with the result that they provide a new or deeper understanding of it (Gibson 2006; Elgin 2014).

In many of the rap artist Nas’ songs, he tells vivid stories of a hard-scrabble life in the Queensbridge Housing Projects. Many of the details he recounts in such songs are often true, even if the overall stories are sometimes fictional. But despite the fact that such songs merely feature facts rather than assert them, these fictional worlds that the songs convey can put subjects in new or deeper states of understanding of places such as the Queensbridge Housing Projects because the fictional story transmits understanding that involves factive components.⁸ So, if such a fictional story provides a subject with this new or deeper understanding and gaining understanding is one of this song’s aims, then this challenge fails because hip hop can be properly understood to achieve a cognitive aim.

A second challenge is that even if art asserts truth claims, it does not marshal reasons or evidence to support such claims. Resultingly, according to this challenge, art is improperly conceived as a cognitive pursuit. In contrast, cognitive pursuits are properly conceived as involving claims supported by reasons or evidence where science and philosophy are paradigmatic examples.

According to this challenge, hip hop songs are not properly considered cognitive pursuits because rappers in these songs merely make claims about, say, the police or their environment that are unsupported by evidence or reasons. But hip hop meets this challenge because its songs often feature reasons or evidence that support the truth claims they feature. In the Eric B & Rakim lyrics above, Rakim not only describes a robbery he committed, but he also explains his behavior by his appeal to the dire poverty which he endured. And by invoking the teachings of the Nation of Gods and Earths, or the Five Percenters (Knight 2014), he points to both (i) a fairly deep structural explanation of why Black people tend to commit crime and (ii) the notion that gaining this understanding can disabuse Black youth of their motive to perpetrate such crime.

A third challenge is that artworks of literature and film create fictional worlds that do not exist and thus that any claims made about these worlds must be false. Contrastingly, non-fictional works such as works of history portray worlds that have obtained. The claims made about the world of, say, Julius Caesar can be true if the historian succeeds at her task of getting things right vis-à-vis the past.

According to this challenge, hip hop artists portray fictional worlds through their songs and as a consequence the claims made about the world in these songs are false. According to a view in the philosophy of hip hop literature, rap artists take on personae which do not correspond to reality with the aim of creating fictional worlds (Thompson 2005; Hunter and Soto 2009, 181). This challenge fails because many prominent hip hop artists active during the 1980s have claimed that hip hop music during this era was judged by either an authenticity standard, an accuracy standard, or both (Laybourn 2018). For example, Public Enemy’s Chuck D famously claimed that “Rap is Black America’s CNN” (Light 2004, 141).

A fourth challenge is that art’s value in significant measure inheres in art’s capacity to allow its consumers to imaginatively liberate themselves from reality rather than being representationally tied to it. As a consequence, one misunderstands art’s value if one takes its primary or even one of its major aims to be cognitive.

According to this challenge, hip hop music’s value inheres in its capacity to put its audiences in a position to imaginatively move beyond reality. For example, when the rapper Scarface tells a story about life in inner-city Houston, he allows his audience to imaginatively experience a world that is not exhausted by reality. This challenge fails because audiences value Scarface’s songs precisely because they engage in what Murray Forman describes as hip hop music’s tendency to “[articulate] the details of place with ever greater specificity” (Neal and Forman 2004, 156).

III. THE DESCRIPTIVE-RAP SUB-THESIS

I now motivate the descriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, if (i) hip hop can have prescriptive or descriptive content; (ii) hip hop with prescriptive content is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people; and (iii) hip hop is dominated by rap music with prescriptive content; then (iv) hip hop is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people.

But first I will explain that some rap is descriptive while other rap is prescriptive. This distinction has been briefly discussed in the literature, but it has been discussed in the service of analyzing whether rap songs that involve drug dealing, materialism and misogyny harm or morally wrong non-dominant group members such as Black women, Latinas and Black and Latinx persons more generally (McGrath and Tilahun 2005, 135). I develop this distinction to determine whether rap music serves a better or worse epistemic function for Black and Latinx persons as a hermeneutical resource.

A basic feature of descriptive rap is that it conveys a rapper’s observations about their world and often explanations of these observations. The Melle Mel and Rakim lyrics cited above are both examples of descriptive rap. By contrast, rappers in prescriptive rap songs prescribe ways that one should be, act or even think. These rappers often convey their prescriptions through lyrics that take the form of judgments regarding someone who they think does not meet a standard. Often when rappers claim through their rhymes that someone does not meet this standard, the standard to which they appeal is one that they themselves have met. Take the following cases:

• (i) In 2013, on “Rich as F**k,” Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz rapped, “Look at you, and look at us, all of my n***as are rich as f***” (Lil 2013).

• (ii) In 2009, on “Lemonade,” Gucci Mane rapped, “My phantom sittin’ on sixes, no 20’s in my gun/Your cutlass motor knockin’, because it is a lemon” (Gucci Mane 2009).

These are cases of prescriptive rap because these rappers signal that they have met some standard that others are worse off for not having met. But, often, what are seemingly cases of descriptive rap are actually prescriptive cases.

In prescriptive rap cases that merely seem descriptive, a rapper asserts descriptive claims about herself or her situation, but these descriptive claims signal that these are descriptive features that should be true of someone. Or, put differently, these so-called descriptive claims communicate that the phenomena described bear positive value. Take the following cases:

• (i) In 2018, Travis Scott rapped, “Woo, made this here with all the ice on in the booth” (Travis 2018).

• (ii) In 2016, Lil Uzi Vert rapped, “go to the strip club, make it rain/ Count 100,000 in your face/yeah, put 300 in the safe” (Migos 2016).

I have distinguished between descriptive and prescriptive rap songs. But even if this distinction is analytically useful and many songs are either descriptive or prescriptive, many songs will be properly classified as both descriptive and prescriptive. Many can be classified as both descriptive and prescriptive because a rapper can both describe and prescribe on the same song. Now one might object that this undermines the utility of this prescriptive-descriptive distinction because the distinction is not helpful if evaluators cannot reliably pick out prescriptive songs from descriptive songs. However, evaluators can still assess the degree to which a song is descriptive or prescriptive. If an evaluator can assess the degree to which a song is descriptive or prescriptive, then she can assess the song’s epistemic or hermeneutical utility.

Someone could object that this descriptive-prescriptive distinction does not countenance the epistemic or hermeneutical importance of prescriptive rap because rap songs from rappers such as Immortal Technique and groups such as Dead Prez have such a great deal of epistemic or hermeneutical utility due to their prescriptive nature. This objection fails because even though these songs have epistemic value, these songs are excluded from airplay on the radio and other mass media. Recall, I distinguished between mainstream and underground hip hop. This objection actually serves as evidence that white supremacy and market capitalism have undermined rap as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons.

But this objector could rebut that this descriptive-prescriptive distinction still relies on the assumption that descriptive rap has more hermeneutic utility than prescriptive rap. The objector could insist that apart from what is on the Billboard charts, it is unclear why prescriptive rap cannot serve as an equally good hermeneutical resource as descriptive rap, at least partly because artists such as Immortal Technique and groups such as Dead Prez seem to create prescriptive rap songs that have hermeneutical utility that is due to the content of their prescriptions. A reply to this objection is that prescriptive rap songs can have hermeneutical utility but this utility operates less directly than descriptive rap. Take Dead Prez. They often prescribe that people of color should lead the charge to a socialist or anti-colonial revolution. This kind of prescription is hermeneutically useful because it will spur listeners to consider whether such a revolution would be good to enact and resultingly listeners would consider the state of affairs that would make such a revolution good to enact.

The idea is that even though a significant amount of prescriptive rap’s normative content is true, subjects will have to infer from the truth of this normative content to the descriptive truth that motivates the normative content. In the case of Dead Prez, the normative content is that people of color should lead the charge to a socialist revolution. The fact that people of color tend to be more socio-economically deprived than White people is the descriptive fact that motivates this prescriptive claim because people of color have the most to gain from creating a socialist society through revolution. This prescriptive claim could lead a subject to believe the fact that motivates it. But even if this is correct, subjects have to infer or take some extra cognitive step to discover the relevant descriptive truth. Descriptive rap’s content does not require such an inference or extra cognitive step. As a result, descriptive rap will tend to be a better hermeneutical resource than descriptive rap over time in comparison to prescriptive rap.

A further reason why prescriptive rap does not have the hermeneutical utility that descriptive rap does vis-à-vis mainstream rap music is that a significant amount of the content that populates mainstream prescriptive rap is false. I assume that normative content that involves claims that subjects should act misogynistically, materialistically and glorify drug use and dealing is false. And according to analyses and studies of mainstream rap’s content (Herd 2005; Lena 2006; Hunter and Soto 2009; Spence 2011; Knutzen, Moran, and Soneji 2018), mainstream prescriptive rap’s content has enough of this false normative content such that prescriptive rap significantly contributes to mainstream prescriptive rap music failing to serve as a good hermeneutical resource in comparison to mainstream descriptive rap.

Now, someone could object that most, if not all, descriptive claims pick out features of the world that can be evaluated negatively or positively according to a standard and thus the distinction between (i) actual descriptive rap cases, (ii) seemingly descriptive rap cases, and (iii) prescriptive rap cases is hollow. According to this objector, this distinction is hollow because when someone describes something, she likely describes a phenomenon due to a value she antecedently holds aside from a value concerning description itself. For example, in Melle Mel’s case, he describes features of living in the South Bronx presumably because he disvalues some state of affairs in the South Bronx. Similarly, when Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz make prescriptive claims that being as wealthy as they are is good and not being as wealthy as they are is bad, they do so because they value this state of affairs. So, if non-epistemic values motivate both descriptive claims and prescriptive claims in rap, then this distinction between seemingly descriptive rap and actually descriptive rap is hollow because both prescriptive and descriptive claims in rap value some state of affairs or other.

This objection fails because even if non-epistemic values motivate descriptive claims in rap, these claims can still be evaluated for whether they are true. That is, one can engage in an epistemic practice because of a non-epistemic motive, but this non-epistemic motive does not make the practice itself non-epistemic. For example, I may engage in neuroscience because I disvalue Alzheimer’s disease and because I suspect that practicing neuroscience could contribute to ameliorating this state of affairs that I disvalue. That is, even if neuroscientists make descriptive claims about the brain because they disvalue Alzheimer’s disease, their descriptive claims can still be evaluated for whether they are accurate or true. Similarly, rappers can be evaluated for whether their descriptive rhymes are true even though a non-epistemic value motivates their descriptive rhymes or claims.

A further objection to this distinction is that rappers’ intentions cannot be known and thus whether they are performing an assertive, expressive or prescriptive speech act through their songs cannot be known (Thompson 2005). Rap as an artistic medium involves personae that rappers embody and develop such that their intentions are too difficult for hearers to determine because one cannot know whether rappers are just playing a role, embodying their personae, or trying to accurately describe their world (Thompson 2005; Hunter and Soto 2009).

This objection fails because it assumes that a particular speech act is only properly individuated by a speaker’s intentions (Grice 1957, 66; Langton 1993, 315; Hornsby and Rae 1998, 25). But speech acts can also be individuated by a speech act’s uptake or consequences. For example, if a woman factory manager commands her men employees, but these employees take her commands as requests rather than commands because of her gender, then hearer uptake or the consequences of a speech act can be used to individuate it (Kukla 2014). Even if a rapper is playing a role or embodying a personae, her rhymes qua speech act can be evaluated as assertives if her audience receives them as such.

I now argue that if (i) descriptive rap accurately represents reality more often than prescriptive rap, then (ii) hip hop as a hermeneutical resource plays a better hermeneutical role for Black and Latinx persons when descriptive rather than prescriptive rap predominates the content of hip hop.

If a subject prescribes a way the world should be, then she either endorses a way the world could be apart from how it currently is or she endorses the way the world currently is so that it can continue to be that way. For example, political progressives typically prescribe that the world progress beyond its current state because they think some other state would be better. And, similarly, conservatives typically prescribe that the world be conserved in its current state because they think it is better that the world not change due to its current value. Often conservatives not only prescribe conserving how the world is, but they also prescribe that the world should be as it was at some prior state.

If a subject describes, then she attempts to get it right about how the world was, is, or will be. This contrast between prescribing and describing, at the very least, licenses the assumption that descriptive rap will tend to produce better epistemic consequences than prescriptive rap.

I take it that a descriptive rap song will serve a better hermeneutical resource than prescriptive rap for Black and Latinx persons because resources that are in the business of describing will tend to help people communicate and understand their reality better than resources that are in the business of prescribing how the world should be.

Now, that descriptive rap serves a better hermeneutical function for Black and Latinx subjects does not preclude that prescriptive rap can serve a good hermeneutical function too. For example, when artists such as Jay-Z or Lil Wayne positively value drug dealing as a route to wealth and status through their prescriptive rap songs, these rap songs do convey information about the communities and environments that produced these prescriptions. But subjects who listen to these songs must do cognitive work such as reflecting on the causal origins of these songs’ prescriptions if these songs are to serve a hermeneutical function. In comparison, descriptive rap songs do not require this kind of cognitive work because descriptive rap wears its hermeneutical payoff on its sleeves. So, a reason why descriptive rap serves a better hermeneutical function than prescriptive rap is that subjects can receive descriptive rap’s hermeneutical payoff of understanding and communicative capacity with less cognitive work than in the case of prescriptive rap.

The claim that prescriptive rap requires more cognitive work than descriptive rap to serve its hermeneutical function is motivated by an uncontroversial picture of cognitive architecture in the cognitive science and social psychology literature. The phenomena of working memory and cognitive load are the relevant parts of this picture vis-à-vis motivating this claim. Working memory refers to the information-processing capacity that a subject has when a subject encounters new information and thus attempts not only to commit it to long-term memory, but also to coherently integrate it with the information that resides in their long-term memory (Plass and Kalyuga 2019). Jan L. Plass and Slava Kalyuga present the following definition of cognitive load:

By definition, cognitive load is working memory load required from a learner for performing a cognitive task. The part of cognitive load that is directly relevant to learning is called intrinsic or productive load. According to cognitive load theory, this load needs to be managed to be within the available capacity of working memory. (2019, 340)

The notion of cognitive load matters with respect to the claim that prescriptive rap requires more cognitive work than descriptive rap to serve its hermeneutical function because if (i) a subject’s use of descriptive rap as a hermeneutical resource tends to require less cognitive work than prescriptive rap, and (ii) a greater degree of intensity of cognitive work covaries with a depressed likelihood that a subject integrates some information, then (iii) descriptive rap will tend to better serve a subject as a hermeneutical resource than prescriptive rap because descriptive rap involves less cognitive work than prescriptive rap.

Cognitive processes can use the available capacity of working memory in various ways. Some of these working memory processes are “inferring, abstracting information, and integrating different sources of information” (Plass and Kalyuga 2019, 342).

IV. THE PRESCRIPTIVE-RAP SUB-THESIS

I now turn to the prescriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, white supremacy has caused prescriptive rap to predominate the content of hip hop in comparison to descriptive rap.

By ‘rap music’ or ‘rap,’ I am referring to rap music that is on the Billboard Top 200 and Hot 100 charts in terms of sales and radio plays or spins, online streams and music video YouTube views. I restrict ‘rap music’ this way because music that is, say, played on the radio most often and music that has received, say, tens or hundreds of millions of views on YouTube has uptake with more non-dominant group members than music that is rarely played on the radio or music that has only tens of thousands of YouTube views.⁹ The notion that motivates restricting ‘rap music’ or ‘rap’ in this way is that if something serves a hermeneutical role for a non-dominant group, then a large enough number of non-dominant group members must be aware of or familiar with the thing that could serve this role. And music by artists such as Jay-Z and Drake, rather than artists such as Dead Prez (unfortunately) satisfy this condition of awareness or familiarity.

By Karl Marx’s (1978) lights, a basic feature of a capitalist society is that workers sell their labor to members of the capitalist class who own the means of production. On this understanding of capitalism, rap artists sell their labor to record company owners when they either license (temporarily allow) or permanently sell control of musical compositions they have labored to create in exchange for compensation. The amount of compensation that a rap artist receives depends on the current state of the market and the rap artist’s particular demand in this market. For example, the amount of money that Drake was given in exchange for his first album was a function of at least (i) his popularity both preceding and when he approached record companies, (ii) record companies’ staff’s opinion of his album in terms of its sales potential, (iii) record companies’ opinion of the potential of the music to be licensed to television programs, films and advertising or commercials, and (iv) the number of other similar artists in the market.

A basic feature of markets is that if something is in high demand but in low supply, then its value in the market will rise or be higher than if the inverse were true. Or, if a commodity’s demand surpasses its supply, then this commodity’s value in the market will be higher than it would be if demand did not outstrip supply. In the case of Drake, in the late 2000s, there were few, if any, rap artists who were not already in a long-term recording agreement with a record label who had such a high demand for their music from the public.

Now, the demand from the public was high for rap content that either describes or prescribes materialism. Drake was in high demand because he satisfied this content demand and because he was musically an excellent rapper. Here I assume that a rap song’s musical excellence can depend on features other than its content. On the 2009 mixtape release, So Far Gone, that partly created this high demand for Drake, he rapped:

“I ain’t drive here, I got chauffeured/Bring me champagne flutes, rosé and some shots over/I think I’m better when I’m not sober/I smoke goodie, no glaucoma, I’m a stockholder/Private flights back home, no stopover/Still spittin’ that shit that they shot Pac over…” (Drake feat. Lil Wayne 2009).

Here, the content of Drake’s rapping meets the demand of either describing or prescribing materialism. So, the combination of his rapping skill along with meeting this content demand propelled Drake into becoming one of the most commercially successful rappers in the history of rap music.

Drake is not alone in meeting this content demand of materialism in the content of his rapping. The Billboard Top 200 and Hot 100 charts are dominated by content of this and closely related kinds (Lena 2006).

Rap artists often make music that attempts to meet this content demand because if they do they are more likely to have their songs played on the radio, editorial websites or blogs are more likely to share links to their music and music videos, and thus they are more likely to receive more compensation from record labels for their albums and music. But this particular content has not always been in demand (Bailey 2014, 61).

This market demands one kind of content rather than another kind of content because of (i) the convergence in tastes of the majority of rap consumers and (ii) the influence of taste making or gatekeeping blogs, magazines and radio stations such as Pitchfork.com, The Source, Vibe and XXL and leading rap radio stations such as New York’s Hot 97 (WQHT). Since the release of music from NWA in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the majority of rap consumers have purchased rap content that invokes ideas of materialism, gang affiliated violence and generally descriptions of life either in impoverished Black and Latinx communities or the lives of Black and Latinx persons who have emerged from these neighborhoods by means of activities such as drug dealing. The market has largely demanded this kind of content from rappers since the late 1980s and early 1990s (Bailey 2014, 61).

When NWA released their sophomore album, efil4zaggin, in 1991, it sat atop the Billboard Top 200 chart which tracks album sales (NWA 1991). This was the first time that hip hop or rap music had reached higher than the 27th best-selling album in the US according to Billboard (Samuels 1991). As a result, a demand was created among record labels in North America for music that had a content similar to NWA’s successful album. Demand was created among record labels because demand existed among the dominant group for content of this kind. In NWA’s case, the album was number one on the Billboard Top 200 because young White men purchased the album in great numbers. The lesson that record labels learned is that rap music that took up life from the vantage point of young Black men in the inner-city sold very well among young White suburban men and teenagers.

Once record labels learned this lesson, they began to sign and develop rap artists who described life in impoverished communities of color in urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. But not only did record labels contract with and develop such artists, but they also encouraged already established and contracted rap artists who did not focus on describing materialism, drug dealing and gang related violence to turn to making music that did focus on these things. A striking and well-known example of this is 2Pac or Tupac Shakur, one of the best-selling rap artists of all-time. Early in Tupac’s rap career, he released music that did not involve this kind of content, but by the end of his career and untimely death at 25 years of age, he was releasing music that primarily trafficked in content of this kind. His career spanned from the late 1980s to 1996.

A basic phenomenon is that dominant group members, young White men, who are a consumer block with some of the greatest purchasing power in the history of humankind, created market demand for music that involved features of Black and Latinx experience in impoverished communities of color that their own wealthy suburban communities lacked. Here a dominant group, through a market mechanism, transformed or changed the content of rap.

But as record labels and artists responded to this demand there was a shift from rappers describing things such as drug dealing, materialism and gang affiliated violence, to rappers prescribing these things. Todd Boyd describes this shift:

‘Gangsta’ rap offers original commentary on the horrific nuances of ghetto life. In many cases, what was once thought of as a radical critique of repressive state apparatuses, as in NWA’s Fuck Tha Police, has been transformed into a series of unapologetic narratives that celebrate violence, humiliate women, and indulge in marijuana use to excess. (Boyd 2004)

One reason for this shift from descriptive to prescriptive rap is that prescriptive rap better responded to the dominant group’s demand. Evidence of this is that prescriptive rap albums such as 2Pac’s All Eyez One Me, Jay-Z’s albums of the mid-to-late 1990s or The Lox’s chart-topping albums of the same time period sold better among White men than did descriptive albums of the same period from groups such as Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, The Jungle Brothers, and artists like Mos Def, Common, and Pharaohe Monch (Samuels 1991).

Now, a hypothesis of why prescriptive rap sold better among White men than descriptive rap is that White men consumers of rap music were valuing drug dealing, materialism and gang-related violence. Resultingly, prescriptive rappers more clearly responded to the fact that young White men as a consumer block valued these things. Prescriptive rap more clearly responded to this valuing because prescriptive rap conveys a positive value of the very thing that White men are valuing, namely Black experience in impoverished neighborhoods that involves drug dealing, materialism, and gang-related violence. For example, suppose that José values documentaries about baseball because he values playing and engaging with baseball and its culture. And suppose that I make documentary films that not only describe baseball, but I make documentary films that claim that baseball is a good thing with which one ought to engage. My documentaries about baseball seem to more clearly respond to what José values than other mediums that also describe baseball but do not positively value it in the same way. Similarly, prescriptive rappers provide young White men with content that not only describes Black and Latinx experience that involves these activities, but it also positively values these things.

So far I have explained how a dominant group, White men, have created a market for rap that has a particular content. Now, I motivate the claim that white supremacy explains why there is demand among White men for rap that has this content.

Human subjects are disposed to believe what feels good and to not believe what feels bad (Nisbett and Ross 1980; Thibodeau and Aronson 1992; Mandelbaum 2016, 2019; Porot and Mandelbaum 2020). Dominant group subjects benefit from their group membership partly in virtue of the fact that non-dominant groups do not benefit from their non-dominant group membership. And suppose that dominant group members like to believe that their wealth, status and position in society are due to their own hard work such that they deserve what they have. Their belief that they deserve what they have is in tension with, if not inconsistent with, the fact that their wealth, status and position in society are due to their dominant group membership rather than their own hard work. Consequently, these subjects are disposed to believe things that are not in tension with or even consistent with their dominant group status (Giner-Sorolila and Chaiken 1997; Kahan et al. 2007). This belief disposition is a member of the more general disposition that subjects have to form beliefs in ways that both affirm and do not threaten identities they take to be true of themselves (Cohen, Aronson, and Steele 2000; Cohen 2003; Cohen et al. 2007; Prasad et al. 2009; Lewandowsky et al. 2012; Sinatra and Seyranian 2015; Trevors et al. 2016; Vidigal and Jerit 2022).

The psychological mechanism at work here results in a form of identity protective cognition (Sherman and Kim 2005; Kahan et al. 2007; Kahan 2013, 2017). Identity protective cognition obtains if a subject forms attitudes or beliefs that protect a group, to which they take him or herself to belong, from the ascription of a negative feature. In describing this phenomenon, Kahan et al. (2007, 470) say, “as a means of identity self-defense, individuals appraise information in a manner that buttresses beliefs associated with belonging to particular groups (Cohen, Aronson, and Steele 2000; Cohen 2003; Cohen et al. 2007).”

White men in North American society are a subset of the dominant racial group in North America and because of this they are disposed to like rap music that involves Black and Latinx folk’s experience in urban communities where this involves things such as drug dealing, valuing of extreme wealth, and misogyny. That is, rap music with this content makes them feel good because it is evidence that supports and is not in tension with, or inconsistent with, their dominant group status.

Rap with this content is not in tension with or inconsistent with their dominant group status because if (i) Black and Latinx persons tend to drug deal, value extreme wealth for its own sake and are misogynists, (ii) these features of Black and Latinx persons are taken as evidence that Black and Latinx persons deserve their lack of wealth, lower status and positions in society and (iii) rap music tends to have this content, then (iv) rap music is evidence Black and Latinx persons do not deserve what White persons have, namely relatively more wealth and higher status and positions in society. To put the point differently, rap music’s content here partly explains why Black and Latinx persons deserve their position in society relative to Whites and this explanation is something that feels good for Whites to believe.

In significant measure, the explanation I present here of how psychological mechanisms relate to the content of hip hop music at least partly answers the question of how the content of hip hop music is at least partly a consequence of power relations between dominant and non-dominant racial groups in US society. In describing this question, Juliana Mansvelt (2005, 133) says, “A key question in thinking about consumption of music is the extent to which consumers can construct their own meanings in the context of music produced for them by the music industry and how constant negotiation and flows between commerce and creativity in music create a complex geometry of power.”

Suppose that William, a White subject, considered rejecting the views involved in rap content of this kind. If he considered rejecting that Black and Latinx men are prone to be drug dealers, materialistic and misogynistic, then he would have to accept that he should be less confident in his belief that he deserves what he has. Suppose that William does not ultimately reject the views involved in rap of this kind because if he were to reject these views, then it would be more difficult for him to believe something that makes him feel good, namely that he deserves what he has. So, here, that William is a dominant group member plays a role in his attraction to rap music. That is, de facto white supremacy plays a role in William’s attraction to rap music.

This explanation of why White men are attracted to rap with this content also partly explains why prescriptive rap predominates over descriptive rap because prescriptive rap is better evidence that Whites, say, deserve what they have. For example, KRS-One’s description of drug dealing in Boogie Down Productions’ “Love Is Gonna Get’Cha” is not as good evidence that Whites deserve what they have in comparison to Fat Joe’s prescription of drug dealing in his 2006 hit “Make It Rain” which featured Lil Wayne. On this song Fat Joe raps:

I’m a hustla’s hustla, a pusha’s pusha / You a busta, a customer / I’ll get you some cook up / yeah, crack [Fat Joe] is a chemist (Fat Joe feat. Lil Wayne 2006).

In contrast to Fat Joe’s prescription, KRS-One, as the rapper of the group Boogie Down Productions, describes how his drug dealing in the South Bronx led him from being an average, but very poor, teenager to a financially better state. But KRS-One concludes this story with the bad consequences that ensued from drug dealing. KRS-One ends the song by saying:

So, for future reference, remember / it’s alright to like or want a material item / but when you fall in love with it / and you start scheming and carryin’ on for it / just remember, its gonna get’cha (Boogie Down Productions 1990).

On the one hand, Fat Joe endorses selling drugs and does not invoke its bad consequences. On the other hand, KRS-One describes the real consequences of selling drugs. Here KRS-One’s song does better epistemically than Fat Joe’s song because KRS-One more accurately portrays the attenuating consequences of dealing drugs. And if songs such as Fat Joe’s predominate rap over songs such as KRS-One’s because of market capitalism and white supremacy, then rap music is undermined as a hermeneutical resource for, say, Black and Latinx persons because songs like Fat Joe’s neither help them more deeply understand their current reality nor help them communicate about their reality in a more epistemically effective way.

One might object that even if prescriptive rap that prescribes materialism, drug dealing and misogyny, is more prominent in rap music than it had hitherto been because of white supremacy and market capitalism, rappers such as Lil’ Wayne, Gucci Mane, Migos, Kodak Black and 2 Chainz often are just describing their worlds which involve materialism, drug dealing and misogyny. And if these rappers frequently enough merely describe their worlds, then prescriptive rap may not predominate as I have claimed. But any assessment of how often a rapper describes rather prescribes must consider the distinction between seemingly descriptive rap and actually descriptive rap because if one does not countenance this distinction in an accounting of the prevalence of descriptive over prescriptive rap, then one could count actually prescriptive instances of rap as descriptive because at least some, if not many, instances will be cases of seemingly descriptive rap. So, this objection fails because if one does not employ this distinction when assessing rap music, one will inaccurately count descriptive and prescriptive rap instances.

The argument that I have presented involves an emphasis on the hermeneutical role that hip hop played for Black and Latinx people in impoverished places such as the South Bronx in its earlier days. This emphasis raises the question of whether the account that I present involves commitment to the idea that hip hop could not play this role for impoverished White people or impoverished people of any race in the US. The idea that motivates this question is that if hip hop’s hermeneutical utility was due to its capacity to put into view important features of the experience of living in an impoverished community, then hip hop should have also been able to serve a similar role for, say, White people who lived in similarly impoverished communities.

The account that I present does not involve commitment to the notion that hip hop in its early days could not have served a good hermeneutical role for White impoverished communities’ denizens because according to this account hip hop in its early days would have in significant measure played a good hermeneutical role even if it played a more effective hermeneutical role for Black and Latinx people in places such as the South Bronx. Hip hop in its early days would have played a good hermeneutical role in some degree for impoverished White people because there are features of living in an impoverished community that are similar irrespective of whether an impoverished community is largely populated by White, Black or Latinx people.

However, even though hip hop in its early days could have or did serve a good hermeneutical role for, say, impoverished White people, it often played a better hermeneutical role for Black and Latinx people because there are features of the experience of living in poverty in Black and Latinx communities that White communities do not share. One such feature is that the nature of police maltreatment will often differ because the view that police have of, say, Black or Puerto Rican people will often differ. According to this false view, Black and Afro-Latinx people are either innately morally inferior to White people or culturally morally inferior to White people (Blum 2020; Alcoff 2023). Another such feature is that the poverty that, say, a Black person experiences is of a piece with the racial injustice that Black people have suffered over time from the regime of chattel slavery, to the Reconstruction era (Du Bois 1998), to Jim Crow, to real estate steering policies (Taylor 2019). So, a song such as “The Message” likely did play a good hermeneutical role for impoverished White people, but it played an even better role for impoverished Black and Latinx people because the song invokes content that not only corresponds to the experience of living in poverty, but also importantly to the experience of living in poverty as, and because, one is Black or Latinx.

V. EXECUTIVES, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND HERMENEUTICAL MARGINALIZATION

So far, I have argued that white supremacy and market capitalism have diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource through its effect on consumer tastes and thus market demand. I will now argue that white supremacy has partly diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource because the class of music business executives is so thoroughly composed of White people.

Hermeneutical marginalization obtains if members of a non-dominant group are prevented from contributing to their society’s set of shared social meanings, collective hermeneutical resource or social imaginary (Fricker 2007, 151; Pohlhaus, Jr 2012; Medina 2013, 90). Black and Latinx persons have been hermeneutically marginalized because they have been systematically prevented from obtaining positions that do much of the contributing to the collective hermeneutical resource, such as journalists, professors, lawyers and political positions. White men compose the majority of the record executives in the music business (Kitwana 2005; Mitchell 2018). With respect to the number of Black executives in the music business, Keith Negus notes,

Although numerous African-American executives have contributed to the formation of the modern music industry and the history of recorded music, all have continued to occupy a ‘precarious position’ (Sanjek 1997). This instability intersects with a broader issue of historical continuity; the black music divisions have not been allowed the space to establish their own agenda. One conspicuous point here is that there are very few senior African-American executives within the corporate hierarchy who are above the black division and hence involved in the decisions about closing down business units or re-staffing departments. This is recognized within the music business and has been emphasized by Garofalo, who has noted that “black personnel have been systematically excluded from positions of power within the industry” (1994, 275). The black music divisions have not been allowed to develop a continuity and sense of history that is consonant with the African-American contribution to US musical culture (Negus 1999, 495).

If White men compose the majority of record executives in the music business because of white supremacy and this composition partly results in the diminishment of hip hop as hermeneutical resource, then white supremacy has partly diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource because the class of music business executives is so thoroughly composed of White people. I assume that White executives will be more prone to release music that involves prescriptive rap than, say, Black or Latinx executives. I safely assume this because feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science have persuasively argued that a group’s shared identity can significantly affect the decisions that a group makes.

Groups that share an identity will tend to share unnoted assumptions that bear on what they take as valuable and thus the decisions they make. Helen Longino (1990) has argued these shared assumptions will not only affect which theories scientists choose to explain observational data, but also affect the research projects they pursue. Sandra Harding (1992, 2015) has similarly argued that groups of researchers who share assumptions, because they are homogeneously composed in terms of identity, will comparatively tend to fail to ask questions and consider hypotheses about injustice that arrive at the truth. And Elizabeth Lloyd (2005) has persuasively argued that androcentric bias caused false evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm to predominate the relevant scientific literature. So, what is true of researchers’ decisions, mutatis mutandis, is true vis-à-vis white executives’ decisions.

VI. CONCLUSION

I have argued that white supremacy and market capitalism have diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people. To this end, I introduced a distinction between prescriptive and descriptive rap to show that white supremacy and market mechanisms have resulted in prescriptive rap predominating hip hop music once the music industry noticed its commercial viability. This argument involved appeal to (i) the way that the positive self-conception of White people qua dominant group relates to the market demands placed on record companies and (ii) the fact that White people overwhelmingly compose the set of record executives in the music business.¹⁰

REFERENCES

Footnotes