Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black.

Posted in Articles, Arts, Canada, Communications/Media Studies, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion on 2019-03-15 17:58Z by Steven

Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black.

Canadaland
2015-04-30

Kyrell Grant

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black. And yet Drake’s own identity – his nationality, his mixed race background that includes Jewish heritage and upbringing, the neighbourhood he once lived in, the schools he went to – is often taken to mean that his black experience is somehow inauthentic.

It feels ridiculous to have to say this: Drake is black.

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black.

He is a black man as much as any other black man. And yet Drake’s own identity – his nationality, his mixed race background that includes Jewish heritage and upbringing, the neighbourhood he once lived in, the schools he went to – is often taken to mean that his black experience is somehow inauthentic. While certainly not the first artist to have this kind of analysis imposed on him, Drake’s profile means that his art in particular has been prominently used to deny his black experience when it doesn’t conform to someone else’s narrow vision of race…

Read the entire article here.

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Black and Jewish: Language and Multiple Strategies for Self-Presentation

Posted in Articles, Judaism, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2016-01-12 00:50Z by Steven

Black and Jewish: Language and Multiple Strategies for Self-Presentation

American Jewish History
Volume 100, Number 1, January 2016
pages 51-71
DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2016.0001

Sarah Bunin Benor, Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles, California

In January 2014, hip-hop star Drake hosted “Saturday Night Live” (SNL), opening with a skit about his black Jewish identity. In this skit, which takes place at his bar mitzvah reception, language is central to the comedy: Drake’s white Jewish mother has an exaggerated New York-sounding accent, and she uses Hebrew and Yiddish words — “tuchuses,” “oy vey,” “goy,” and “mazel tov.” His black dad uses features of African-American English, like /th/ sometimes pronounced as /d/, and he jokingly highlights his lack of knowledge of Drake’s mom’s Jewish language: “Torah, aliyah — man, I know dose girls, I met them on da road.” When Drake enters, he greets his relatives with words associated with each group: “To my mom’s side of the family I say, ‘Shabbat shalom,’ and to my dad’s side, I say ‘Wasssupppp.’” Drake proceeds to sing and rap about being black and Jewish, incorporating strains of “Hava Nagila” and hip hop, and highlighting stereotypical characteristics and linguistic features of both groups: “I play ball like LeBron [James], and I know what a W-2 is. Chillin’ in Boca Raton with my mensch Lenny Kravitz [another black Jew], the only purple drink we sip is purple Manischewitz. At my show you won’t simply put your hands in the air; we can also raise a chair or recite a Jewish prayer… I eat… knishes with my bitches … I celebrate Hanukkah, date a Rianika… You’re Jewish and black and you’re — challah!”

The juxtaposition of stereotypical linguistic, culinary, and celebratory practices associated with African Americans and Jews is funny to the audience because of the incongruence: The audience is not used to observing these practices in the same room, let alone the same individual. In addition, the presentation is intelligible as indexing black Jewishness because people outside the black and Jewish communities associate these practices with black people and Jewish people, respectively. Even if Drake does not use cultural combinations like these in his everyday life, he (along with the SNL production team) considers them appropriate for a parodic performance of his black Jewish identity.

Drake’s performance represents a growing phenomenon: individuals presenting themselves to the public as black Jews through comedy, performance art, interviews, and memoirs. In all of these “performances” (the term used broadly to refer to any speech act intended for consumption by a large audience), language plays an important role in how speakers align themselves with African Americans, with Jews, or with both. In this paper, I analyze nine such performances, focusing on the nine individuals’ use of linguistic features associated with Jews and with African Americans. This analysis points to the importance of language in self-presentation, as well as to the diversity of black Jews.

Black Jews

First, a bit of background on black Jews and on language associated with both groups. A common origin of black Jews is the union of a white Jew and a black non-Jew (sometimes involving the conversion of one spouse). This is the case for Drake and five of the nine individuals featured in the analysis below. The biracial children of these unions are sometimes raised with Judaism as their religion, sometimes with a Jewish cultural identity, and sometimes with no Jewish identity or practice. Another common origin occurs when white Jewish parents adopt children from Africa or from African-American birth parents and raise them as Jews, sometimes officially converting them. In addition to these individuals who grow up black and Jewish, many black people adopt Judaism later in life. Some of these converts are attracted to Judaism for spiritual or theological reasons, and others for social, cultural, or communal reasons, such as having Jewish friends or partners. Smaller numbers of black Jews immigrated to the United States from Jewish communities in Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, some black Jews are descendants of black people who converted to Judaism or who had children with white Jews several generations ago. In some families, Judaism goes back to the days of slavery, when black slaves sometimes adopted the religion of their white owners, a very small percentage of whom were Jewish.

Some discussions of…

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Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black.

Posted in Articles, Arts, Canada, Communications/Media Studies, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion on 2015-05-01 20:33Z by Steven

Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black.

Canadaland
2015-04-30

Kyrell Grant

Writers need to stop policing his blackness

It feels ridiculous to have to say this: Drake is black.

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black.

He is a black man as much as any other black man. And yet Drake’s own identity – his nationality, his mixed race background that includes Jewish heritage and upbringing, the neighbourhood he once lived in, the schools he went to – is often taken to mean that his black experience is somehow inauthentic. While certainly not the first artist to have this kind of analysis imposed on him, Drake’s profile means that his art in particular has been prominently used to deny his black experience when it doesn’t conform to someone else’s narrow vision of race…

Read the entire article here.

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Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-04-03 17:19Z by Steven

Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls

The Feminist Wire
2013-04-03

Safy-Hallan Farah, Guest Contributor

I am an East African Girl. A couple years ago, one of my friends told me that being an East African meant I’m not really black. A visibly mixed-race girl with a “high yellow” complexion and sandy brown hair telling me I’m not black didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to tell the girl, in the words of CB4, I’m black y’all. I’m black like the back of Forrest Whitaker’s neck. I’m black like Snoop Dogg’s lungs. I’m black like some Helvetica font against a white backdrop trying to sell you stuff.

I’m a black woman. But my nose, my loosely coiled curls and my fivehead make me black in a way that extends the colorism debate, creating this hierarchy of aesthetic value where I’m not just black, I’m also acceptably black.

Back in the day, white people went to East Africa to find Iman, their acceptable black girl. When white people did this, former Essence Editor-in-Chief Marcia Gillespie called East African model Iman Abdulmajid “a white woman dipped in chocolate,”  highlighting Iman’s acceptable blackness while also lamenting the fact that black women’s beauty is often measured in their proximity to whiteness…

…In “Poetic Justice” by Kendrick Lamar ft. Drake, Drake does it again: “I was trying to put you on game, put you on a plane/Take you and your mama to the motherland/I could do it, maybe one day/When you figure out you’re gonna need someone/When you figure out it’s all right here in the city/And you don’t run from where we come from.” But couched between another lazy description of a faceless, nameless East African Girl, and Drake’s assertion that that East African Girl is busy ignoring him for another man, is a story of afrodiasporic identity, which is what sets Drake apart, narratively, from other rappers.

While Drake’s definition of black beauty may seem limited, his definition of black identity is what Touré would call “post-black,” and Michelle Wright would call “postwar diasporic black.” Drake’s flow in “Poetic Justice” facilitates a broader discussion of black identity and black authenticity, a discussion that implicitly critiques Marcia Gillespie’s “white woman dipped in chocolate” statement, positing that East African Girls “come from” the same city Drake does, Toronto. The underlying message is that Drake considers us black like him. Drake, as a black Jewish man whose Degrassi character Jimmy Brooks dated a fake East African Girl, occupies a similarly hybrid space like East African Girls. For many East African Girls, that feels like poetic justice because the definition of ‘authentically black’— descendants of Africans brought here as slaves— is a limited definition that doesn’t even include Barack Obama, much less East African Girls…

…East African girls are generally not mixed race, yet this idea that we are is deeply embedded in the minds of white racialists, leading some to believe we’re an entirely different, special, exotic breed of people. This goes back to the pseudoscience of Carleton S. Coon’s “The Races of Europe.” Anthropologists and white racialists, which are often one in the same, have been claiming we are of majority Arab or white or “Afro-Asiatic” descent for years. And while that isn’t the sentiment of Drake or Nas’s lyrics, our alleged mixedness underpins their lyrics by virtue of the sheer selectiveness of the East African Girls shouted out in hip-hop lyrics. When Drake or Nas reference East African Girls, it can be easily inferred that they mean Cushites representing the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia). “Cushite,” a term derived from “Cush” of the Hebrew Bible and Quran, is in reference to our shared “Afro-Asiatic” language classification, which is often mistakenly typified as a shared racial identity. This little mistake triggers a big mistake: the conflation of biology and genetics with race and ethnicity as a social fact, which reifies the racial categories…

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Can Drake Save the Bar Mitzvah?

Posted in Articles, Arts, Identity Development/Psychology, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion on 2013-04-02 02:48Z by Steven

Can Drake Save the Bar Mitzvah?

The Jewish Week
Blog: Well Versed
2012-04-12

Eric Herschthal

When Drake’s new video, “HYFR,” dropped [was released] over the weekend—in which the Jewish, biracial hip-hop superstar raps at a bar mitzvah—I was thrilled. Initially.

For years, pop culture references to the Jewish rite of passage have been stuck in the same mode of self-mockery.  Self-criticism is great, and in retrospect I partly appreciate the brutal truth that films like the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” show to us Jews—that this once incredibly powerful, meaningful rite had become totally cauterized, stripped of any real substance.  The bar mitzvah has become just another excuse to get the family together—half of which you may not even like—and torture a poor 13-year-old with a foreign tongue he’s probably less comfortable with than trigonometry.

But the Coen brothers didn’t invent that trope; it’s been around for years.  What felt so refreshing about Drake’s video, and still sort of does, is how it isn’t self-mocking at all.  Here’s a rapper so at ease in the self-conscious, status-driven world of pop star culture, that he can brandish his Jewish identity with little self-pity.  He brings his Jewishness to a world—the hip-hop world, and the millions who love it, myself included—that’s mainly known Jews as a stereotype.   The Jew, in hip-hop, is either the boss behind the scenes or, on the rare occasion (as with the Beastie Boys), the nerdy white kids who are lovingly embraced—but still, let’s be clear, as nerdy white kids.

Drake’s changed all that.  In large part that’s because his Jewishness is not the first fact about him.  Many see him mainly as a black rapper, if a light-skinned one.  And even when he broke onto the scene a few years ago and, when asked, would talk about his upbringing by a white Jewish mother in Canada—who sent him to a Jewish day school, and had him bar-mitzvahed—you didn’t get the sense he was trying to hide it.  But I’m actually less interested in what Drake’s openness about Judaism says about the changing world of hip-hop—and my sense is that, in many ways, it’s far more evolved in terms of black-Jewish relations than much of the country—than what it might say about Jews’ perceptions of themselves…

…As much as I want to stick up for Drake, I think Kuehne is right.  The song and the video still have many of the hallmarks of what’s problematic with hip-hop—mostly, the objectification of women.  Plus, there’s a ton of profanity.  “But she was no angel, and we never waited,” Drake raps at one point. “I took her for sushi, she wanted to f*** / So we took it to go, told them don’t even plate it.”

The song’s title, “HYFR,” stands for “Hell Yeah F***ing Right.”…

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