Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Riverside

UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations bannerUC Riverside

Don’t Believe the Hype: Gender and Interracial Relations Between Asian Americans and Blacks in Hip-Hop

Creative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
Abstract

Historically, race scholars have characterized the American racial order through a black/white duality. Due to growing numbers of Latinos, Asians, other immigrant groups and multiracial people in the United States, the American racial hierarchy is in transformation. When their place in the racial hierarchy is considered, Asian Americans are frequently placed closer to whites than blacks, due to their elevated status through educational and economic attainments compared to other minority groups. In an increasingly global culture and marketplace, examining Asian American participation in hip-hop—a genre represented as predominantly black in mainstream society—allows me to explore relationships that are not often foregrounded in the public eye, nor in the academic literature. I use an intersectional lens to examine how Asian American women and men who participate in hip hop culture negotiate gendered and racial stereotypes and hip-hop’s hypermasculinity. This research explores the racial dynamics in hip-hop through interactions between Asian-Americans and blacks, in an arena on the margins of society where blacks seemingly hold the highest position of the hierarchy as hip hop artists. The research contributes to understanding the racial location of Asian Americans vis a vis the black/white duality.

The study draws off 23 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hip-hop participants. The findings reveal that respondents construct hip-hop as a liberating space where they can circumvent limiting racial and ethnic stereotypes. However, an intersectional lens reveals the constraints that hip-hop’s hypermasculinity places on AAPI men as well as the ethnosexualized expectations that AAPI women must negotiate. The experience of AAPI men and women in hip-hop due to their unique position in racial and gender hierarchies interacts with stereotypical notions of AAPI people in wider society to relegate these participants to the margin rather than center of hip-hop culture. Thus, I find respondents’ constructions of hip-hop less an indicator of hip-hop culture’s openness than a statement of how constricting the mainstream U.S. culture is for AAPI Americans, rendering hip-hop’s conditional acceptance preferable by comparison.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View