sold records and concert tickets: “People who said I never could make it, that I’d never amount to S-H-I—you know the rest—said a white boy can’t make it in rap music, kiss my white … you know the rest.”12 Once it came out that he’d exaggerated his link to the ghetto, fans were less willing to take his word on his skills as an artist. Perkins exposed Ice’s lies, but Ice’s fans were at fault for finding his fake story compelling. Why were listeners so eager to hear about a white man who’d ventured into a black neighborhood and outshined the black musicians?
Vanilla Ice was so thoroughly discredited that for the next ten years, any emerging white rapper was haunted by his inauthenticity. No rapper wanted to look like another Vanilla Ice. House of Pain wore shamrocks and Celtics jerseys in a sort of racial rebranding effort. We’re not white, these symbols suggested; we’re Irish. The group’s frontman, Everlast, had released a solo album just two years earlier and never said “Irish” once, yet his House of Pain album included “Top O’ the Mornin’ to Ya,” “Danny Boy, Danny Boy,” and “Shamrocks and Shenanigans.” The Irish, who endured indentured servitude but never the chattel slavery that brought Africans to the Americas,13 had endured social and economic exclusion in the US at the hands of other whites, but that exclusion was very much in the past by the time House of Pain’s hit single “Jump Around” reached number 3 on the US charts, and number 6 in Ireland.
Not until 1999, nearly a decade after Vanilla Ice, did another white rapper reach (then exceed) his level of sales and fame. Eminem convinced listeners that not only did he really, truly grow up poor in Detroit, but Vanilla Ice had made things even harder for him by making white rappers look like liars. 8 Mile’s most powerful scene shows Eminem’s character B. Rabbit win a freestyle battle by revealing his black opponent, Papa Doc, is not who he appears to be. Rabbit disarms Doc by owning up to living in a trailer with his mom—“I’m a piece of fucking white trash, I say it proudly”—as he accuses Doc of posing as something he’s not:
I know something about you
You went to Cranbrook, that’s a private school.
What’s the matter, Dawg, you embarrassed?
This guy’s a gangster? His real name’s Clarence.
And Clarence lives at home with both parents.
And Clarence’s parents have a real good marriage.
The revelations rendered Doc mute, but I imagine that late that night, tucked into bed, he might have thought, Yeah, but a cop would still shoot me first.
If Doc could have thought faster on his feet in the battle, he might have put into rhyme the notion that when strangers see him they see a black man, rather than a man with a private-school diploma. Why do you think the crowd was so willing to believe I was a gangster, he could have asked Eminem’s character, and so unwilling to believe you’ve faced a struggle?
White rappers try to shift the discussion from race to class, as if the wealthiest boardrooms and schools and neighborhoods had not been designed to keep black people out, while ghettoes and prisons were designed to keep black people in. When I tell stories about my childhood, I don’t mean to suggest that class trumps race, or that food stamps even the playing field. My parents, unlike Clarence’s, didn’t have a real good marriage, but that doesn’t make me less white. Eminem certainly admits being white made it easier for him to sell platinum; he attends to the advantages white skin gave him in selling records to white fans who might not have owned one song by a black rapper: “See the problem is/I speak to suburban kids/who otherwise would have never knew these words exist … they connected with me too because I looked like them.” Yet Jimmy Iovine, the record exec who signed Eminem, claimed hip-hop had so torn down racial binaries in this country that 8 Mile was “about class, not race.”14 “A white label head,” responded Public Enemy’s “media assassin” Harry Allen, “discusses a movie, ostensibly about a Black art form, in which the lead character is white, the screenwriter is white, the director is white, the producer is white, most of the productions talent, no doubt, white, and, of course, the film itself owned by a company run by, mostly owned by, and deriving the majority of its income from white people. Yet, something or other is ‘about class, not race.’”15
Eminem’s childhood poverty was so verifiable that he could put his childhood home, at 19946 Dresden Street in Detroit, on his album cover. Eminem’s old neighborhood was so impoverished that in 2013, the Michigan Land Bank put the house up for auction, with bids starting at only one dollar, despite the house’s fame. A reporter dropped by for a firsthand look at the place Eminem grew up: “A man who lives on Dresden,” he wrote, “told me that the neighborhood has been terrorized by drug and gang activity for several years. He also mentioned, while walking a 200-plus pound pit bull on a choke chain, that I should be careful because dope dealers often prey on Eminem fans who stop by and visit the home.”16 A white rapper found success in a genre invented by black men; his old neighbors menaced his fans. The fans came on a pilgrimage, determined to see for themselves the unsafe neighborhood and the crumbling childhood home that had made the white rapper who he was. You’d think one of them might have put down a dollar to purchase the house, but before it could sell, it burned down. Eminem’s employees recovered bricks from the rubble and sold them to fans via his website.
Just across town, Ben Carson—a black, Yale-educated surgeon—was running for president. In a 2015 campaign video, he posed in front of a dilapidated house much like the one Eminem put on his album cover. “Poverty and the mean streets of Detroit could have defined my life,” he said. “I’m Dr. Ben Carson, and this is my story.”17 That was his story, maybe, but that wasn’t his house. Reporters traveled to the house where Carson actually lived as a child and a teenager, and found that it “sits on a tree-lined block of well-kept, middle-class houses.”18 Carson’s childhood neighbor, who still lives on the same block, said, “This has always been, I would say, a pretty decent neighborhood—people working, kids playing. We used to keep the doors unlocked. Doors would be open at night. You could just walk in.”19 A black man rose from a pretty decent neighborhood to run for President but settle for a cabinet position as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He worried that if public housing were made too comfortable it wouldn’t inspire its residents to claw their way out of there, so he took $31,000 of the taxpayer money that could have gone to improve public housing and spent it instead on a dining-room set for his own office.20
Wasn’t this the American Dream? Ben Carson had beaten the odds to become a renowned pediatric surgeon, an inspiration to millions. He didn’t need to pretend he’d grown up in a worse house than he actually did. He didn’t need to claim to have overcome a “pathological temper”21 that caused him to attack and stab his classmates in incidents CNN was unable to verify. Ice-T suggested Vanilla Ice didn’t have to lie either: “One of his mistakes was he came into the rap business saying he was from the street. He didn’t have to say that. All he had to do was say hey, I’m a white kid, I’m trying to rap, and I want to be accepted. You don’t have to lie and say you’re from someplace you’re not, you know?”22 We had become obsessed with whether or not our public figures were telling the truth—and rightly so—but our fact-checking distracted us from the bigger problems with our impulse to buy into such stories. Being born poor made for a good story, once you got rich. Growing up poor was worth so much that our rappers and politicians were willing to lie about it, yet all it did for most people was keep them poor for the rest of their lives.
Four
HIP-HOP COMES TO CAMPUS
MF Grimm arrived at campus in the back seat of a taxi cab, having taken a 300-dollar ride from New York City to my campus more than halfway across New Jersey. “Professor Hess!” he said. “It made my mom’s day to hear that I’m speaking at a college. So, this is embarrassing, but I don’t have any cash. Can you cover the cab fare? I promise I’ll pay you back.” Grimm had waived his meager speaking fee. The creative-writing club paid for his flight from Los Angeles, and the American Studies program put him up in a hotel, but I paid the ornery cab driver with