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A people expresses its personhood collectively through its culture. Sometimes that culture is made tangible in the form of a thing-as with the music (Rap or Hip-Hop), dance (breakdancing), poetry ("spoken word"), and styles of dress (urban) that are part and parcel of the collective way of life and meaning making of contemporary black and brown urban youth. When an aspect of black culture is turned into a commodity or a thing that can be bought and sold in markets accessible to and more importantly controlled by whites, it generally provokes fierce debate among blacks. White rapper Eminem is the latest target of accusations that whites are ripping off black people's cultural stuff.1 Before him, there was, of course, rock 'n roll legend Elvis Presley; before Elvis, there was jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman; and so on and so forth.
In the view of the critics, commodifying black culture is the equivalent of picking a luscious fruit or vegetable and plopping it in a jar or plucking a flower in full bloom and pressing it in a scrapbook. Commodification, in other words, is like embalming or mummifying a living thing. Black culture commodified similarly loses its organic edge-its authenticity, its purity, its originality, its spontaneity, its vibrancy, and most importantly its rootedness.2
Furthermore, commodification portends the dilution of black culture because it is often accompanied by an effort to increase the thing's appeal to consumers in the white-dominated mainstream. Dilution carries with it the implication that black culture is inferior and does not operate according to its own uncompromising standards of excellence. Commodification, especially if it is in accord with white tastes, may destroy the very qualities that gave blacks gratification and enjoyment in the thing and its accompanying rites and performances. When it comes to judging the merits of cultural productions, blacks tend to prefer the spontaneous, the impromptu, and the improvised over the premeditated, the guarded, the scored, and the scripted (all of the latter being characteristics that facilitate commodification.) Black cultural production is often a reaction to the relative social isolation and material deprivation to which blacks have been, and to some extent still are, subjected. Blacks accordingly resent commodification because it allows nonblacks to experience the pleasure of black's "outsider" or rebellious...