Within hip-hop, MC (Master of Cermonies) battles are one of the most visible and potentially humiliating venues for demonstrating one’s verbal skill. Competitors face each other in front of an audience. Each has a minute to “diss” his or her opponent against a backdrop of rhythms produced by a DJ. Each participant’s performance generally consists of “freestyle” or spontaneously generated rhymes designed to belittle some aspect of the opponent’s appearance, rhyming style or place of origin, and ritual insults directed at his or her mother, sister, or crew. Opponents show good will by embracing afterwards. Ultimately the audience decides who wins by applauding louder for one opponent than the other at the end of the battle. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1974, 1981), I will analyze clips from a televised MC battle in which the winning contestant was a White teenager from the Midwest called “Eyedea.” I will show how Eyedea and his successive African American opponents, “R.K.” and “Shells”, participate in the co-construction of his Whiteness. Eyedea marks himself linguistically as White by overemphasizing his pronunciation of /r/ and by carefully avoiding Black ingroup forms of address like “nigga” (c.f. Smitherman 1994). R.K. and Shells construct Eyedea’s Whiteness largely in discursive ways – by pointing out his resemblance to White actors, and alluding to television shows with White cultural references. Socially constructed racial boundaries must be acknowledged in these types of performances because Whiteness (despite the visibility of White rappers like Eminem) is still marked against the backdrop of normative Blackness in hip-hop (Boyd 2002). In a counter-hegemonic reversal of Du Boisian double-consciousness hip-hop obliges White participants to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. Hip-hop effectively subverts dominant discourses of race and language requiring MC battle participants to acknowledge and ratify this covert hierarchy.
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Cited by (16)
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Evans Pim, Joám
2018. Preventing violence through hip hop: an evolutionary perspective. Journal of Peace Education 15:3 ► pp. 325 ff.
Croom, Adam M.
2014. The semantics of slurs: a refutation of pure expressivism. Language Sciences 41 ► pp. 227 ff.
Croom, Adam M.
2015. Slurs, stereotypes, and in-equality: a critical review of “How Epithets and Stereotypes are Racially Unequal”. Language Sciences 52 ► pp. 139 ff.
Deditius, Sabina
2014. Obelga jako rytuał w rap bitwie. In Hip-hop w Polsce. Od blokowisk do kultury popularnej,
Vickers, Caroline H., Sharon K. Deckert & Ryan Goble
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Vickers, Caroline H. & Sharon K. Deckert
2013. Sewing Empowerment: Examining Multiple Identity Shifts as a Mexican Immigrant Woman Develops Expertise in a Sewing Cooperative Community of Practice. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 12:2 ► pp. 116 ff.
Vickers, Caroline & Ryan Goble
2011. Well, Now, Okey Dokey: English Discourse Markers in Spanish-Language Medical Consultations. The Canadian Modern Language Review 67:4 ► pp. 536 ff.
Hua, Zhu
2010. Language socialization and interculturality: address terms in intergenerational talk in Chinese diasporic families. Language and Intercultural Communication 10:3 ► pp. 189 ff.
Whitehead, Kevin A. & Gene H. Lerner
2009. When are persons ‘white’?: on some practical asymmetries of racial reference in talk-in-interaction. Discourse & Society 20:5 ► pp. 613 ff.
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