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What hip-hop culture has essentially done is make explicit the very crisis of identity that the black public at large faces. According to literary scholar Sharon Patricia Holland, “identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.” (See Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 137).There is also a perception that those of the hip-hop generation employ the word out of a sense of historical ignorance and in the simple pursuit of the financial opportunities encompassed in being the “realest” nigger within the music industry. Such perceptions hold the hip-hop generation and its artists accountable for making explicitly public, aspects of black life that largely remained within the confines of segregated black spaces, just a generation or two ago. As legal scholar Imani Perry observes, “there is no private space to distinguish between the nigga in the black linguistic world and the nigga in the white.” (See Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], 143).
"There is no private space to distinguish between the nigga in the black linguistic world and the nigga in the white."
Already accepting that they were products and inhabitants of a brave new black world – post-Civil Rights, post-Reagan era, post-crack, post LA Riots, post-MTV, etc. – the hip-hop generation has been less concerned with the validity of a term like “nigger,” but rather defining what a “real” nigga was, in other words, the black subject that was most organically representative of this brave new black world. Though the quest for the “real nigga” has, as Robin D.G. Kelly suggests in his book Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional, long been the concern of urban anthropologists, here the objects of study, become the primary interlocutors. (See Robin D.G. Kelly’s essay “Looking for the Real ‘Nigga’: Social Scientist Construct the Ghetto” in Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America [New York: Beacon Press, 1997], 15-42.)
The irony of this search for the authentic “nigga” was addressed by novelist Paul Beatty in his book Tuff. In the book, the character Rabbi Spencer Throckmorton comes across two young black boys wearing tee shirts that say “I Ain’t Got No Time for Fake Nigga” and “I love Black people but I hate niggas” respectively. The quotes are drawn from Lil Kim’s track “No Time” and Chris Rock’s comedic sketch “Blacks vs. Niggers.” Throckmorton says to the youths:
“Your shirts bespeak a bit of a familiar paradox. The quest for the real nigger within us and the simultaneous hatred for that selfsame nigger as other. As in I’m a real nigger, but I hate all other niggers who don’t fit into my idiosyncratic perception of essentialist niggerdom.” – Paul Beatty.Tuff: A Novel(New York: Knopf, 2000), 87.
Arguably the dominant existential crisis within contemporary hip-hop, the search for the “real nigga” was perhaps most coherently articulated in the chorus of Lil Kim’s track “No Time.” Throughout the song’s chorus, hip-hop artist and mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs repeats the line “no time for fake niggas.” The song was recorded in the midst of a virulent exchange of threats between Combs, head of Bad Boy Entertainment and Shug Knight, head of the Death Row Recording company. While the latter camp embodied what was perceived as a more authentic hardcore ghetto identity, Combs roots Bad Boys’ authenticity in economic productivity – the distinction between performative gesture (“talk ****”) and productive labor (“counting bank figures”).
Combs’ distinction finds resonance in the work of theorist and philosopher Ronald A. T. Judy. In his essay, “On Nigga Authenticity,” Judy argues that “the ‘nigga’ (as embodied within hip-hop discourse) is what emerges from the demise of human capital, what gets articulated when the field nigger loses value as labor…a nigga who understands that all possibility converts from capital, and does not derive from work.” According to Judy’s logic the “nigga” articulates a distinction between the labor of actual black bodies and the “labor” of that which ostensibly represents those black bodies in a global marketplace. Explicitly linking this new “nigga” to the world of hip-hop, Judy states that hip-hop is “thinking about being in a hypercommodified world”. In other words “niggas” – shorthand for the very idea of the hip-hop – fully understand that with the demise of black labor’s value (niggers), that real capital accumulation comes from the circulation of black “representations” (niggas) throughout the globe. Rather than a civil war between “blacks and niggers,” it’s the labor of black popular culture vs. the labor of black bodies. (See Ronald A.T. Judy, “On Nigga Authenticity” Boundary 2 [Fall 1994], 212.)
