"Hip Hop Women Shredding the Veil: Race and Class in Popular Feminist Identity"

Justina Farfan

WGST 202

Professor Currans

Blog Topic: Women and Hip Hop

Article Review #2

Morgan, Marcyliena. "Hip Hop Women Shredding the Veil: Race and Class in Popular Feminist               Identity." South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3 (2005): 425-44.

          In Marcyliena Morgan’s "Hip Hop Women Shredding the Veil: Race and Class in Popular Feminist Identity", she explores how the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in hip hop are articulated through female rappers and artists. She explores these themes by analyzing the history of African American struggles in a white supremacist society, but more specifically the struggles of African American women. Women already were struggling for rights and equality, but it was more of a hardship for African American women. The way that women were able to speak out in a male dominated society was through hip hop. They communicated the hardships, struggles, and desire for equality through lyrical skill and rhyme, through hip hop.

         Morgan analyzed the history of African Americans starting in the 1950s when segregation was widely accepted throughout America. Back then, there was not just an issue with racial equality, “African American communities lived behind a veil that hid the complex and personal struggle to define manhood and womanhood” within a society that does not allow “social, cultural, and moral citizenship” (425). This was more difficult for African American women who heard different “messages about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be black in relation to man” (425). African American women were struggling for equality, but it was more difficult because they had to deal with racism and sexism at the same time.

          Morgan supports her claim that black women had a more difficult time in attaining equality by using historical references. In an 1855 case State of Missouri v. Celia, a black woman named Celia had attacked and killed her master after he had raped her. Unfortunately, the ruled in favor of the State of Missouri because Celia was a slave (429). This case set the precedent that since she was a slave she was not a woman (429). Later on after slavery was abolished, because “black women worked to support their families, unlike many white women, their claims to womanhood were treated as dubious” (429). Also since segregation was regularly practiced, the “control and surveillance were relentless and occurred within all aspects of black life, especially in terms of day-to-day interactions” (429). The way white people interacted with African Americans was “childlike” and degrading, more so to African American females. White women were seen as ‘‘people pleasers, concerned with harmony and with being accepted in life and in conversation” while black women were stereotypically seen as “dominant, subversive, emasculating, uncaring [and] loud-talking”. Hip hop women chose “a discourse style that is not only independent of patriarchal censorship and control, but also freely critiques the loss of power and responsibility of a good woman” (429”

          Hip hop women used their voices to challenge racial, gender, and class injustice, but it was very difficult for them to get the word out. For example, Morgan gives an account of when Sarah Jones’s recording “Your Revolution” was aired on the radio station KBOO-FM in 1999 in Portland, Oregon. This song was meant to retaliate against the misogyny presented in male’s lyrics and videos, however the song was met by retaliation. The FCC fined the station because it was viewed as “a feminist attack on male attempts to equate political revolution with

promiscuous sex and as such, is not indecent” (432). Morgan points out that their main issue with this song was that it was a female “hip-hop artist who defended herself in male terms” (432). Essentially the FCC was preventing women from speaking their minds, but still expected women to defend themselves against the misogyny in male hip hop artists music. The intersections of race, gender, and sexuality are “common for women in hip-hop culture” (433). Many would argue that women are dancing and listening to these songs that exemplify misogyny, yet “hip-hop artists both dance and protest as cultural participants and innovators” using their skills and “constantly [embodying] and [reframing] feminist identity” (433).

          Morgan states that “hip-hop women practice and perform desire” (440). They are really just exemplifying the desire to be treated with respect, the desire for change, and especially the desire “for a feminist ideology that includes all women and privileges none” (440). Desire is very powerful and is something that everyone can relate to; “desire shreds the veil” (440). This veil hides the injustices and stereotypes against women. Hip-hop women “consistently explore feminism, the intersections of race and class, and gender marginalization and oppression” (441). While at the same time, they support African American men, all men and those who have been “targeted by the state” (441). Morgan states that successful MC’s are making connections with everyone, addressing the struggles that have pervaded African Americans since they arrived in America and the struggles of being a woman in a male dominated society. They encourage and inspire and strive to make change.

          This article looks at how hip hop women “shred the veil of racism, sexism, and classism within African American communities and American’s in general” (426). In contrast, Margaret Hunter and Kathleen Soto’s article “Women of Color in Hip Hop: the Pornographic Gaze” depicts women as accepting of misogyny widely represented in hip-hop music. Hunter and Soto explain that the ways women are accepting is through female artists being overly sexual in their lyrics and by blatantly accepting misogynistic themes such as the “ride or die” type of woman, where she is “valorized” for putting her life in danger at the expense of her significant other. Morgan explores deeper into the history of women and hip-hop culture. She explains that women are supporting their relationship to men either in friendship or marriage which identifies “race and class hypocrisy” and that women hip-hop artists sometimes purposely make their lyrics extremely sexual because they are spoken in “male terms”. They use the overly explicit and sexual language to not degrade themselves, but to show an example of how men will speak about women. Women of hip-hop are interacting within hip-hop culture and challenging the common stereotypes posed against women and race. They constantly explore these intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, hoping to bring change to prevalent ways of thinking.