The Curious Case Of Azealia Banks.
Is appropriation of U.S. Black rage legitimate if she’s not authentically Black-American?
So now, a funny thing happened when I watched an interview of Azealia Banks, the young New York based rapper who has become an outspoken voice on the appropriation by outsiders of indigenous black-American culture, an argument dating back to days when Benny Goodman claimed to be “the inventor” of Jazz.
As I watched Ms. Banks speak passionately about white people “taking over” Hip-Hop to the point of tears, there was something about her voice, her speech, her features and her mannerisms that just seemed a bit out of place.
Her facial features said to me, Hispanic.
Very Hispanic.
Her accent said Latino. The crinkle of her nose when she got upset said Afro-Rican, Afro Cuban, Afro-Panamanian, something else…but not Black-American descended from migrants who escaped the Jim Crow, segregated south.
Like the old saying goes, “skinfolk ain’t always kinfolk,” and I am saying that Azealia Banks may not even be Black Folk.
Which begs the question. Is appropriation of historical U.S. black rage truly legitimate, if you are quite possibly a pretend Black-American?
As many may remember, the last incarnation of rage against cultural appropriation of indigenous black-American music was brought by Ray Benzino against the rapper Eminem.
Benzino felt that Eminem, because he was white, was an invader to Hip Hop culture, despite the legacy of Taki 183, the white graffiti artist who himself alone represents the definitive line between Hip-Hop culture and all that came before.
Some of the exact phrases Mr. Benzino used back then, are ones Ms. Banks does now. Almost like ignorant carbon copies of false stories created by people who were not in The Boogie Down Bronx to see and feel what real Hip-Hop actually was in the 1970's.
Because as anybody who was there at the beginning knows, Hip-Hop was never a black thing, it was a Bronx thing. The world is not copying black style, its copying Bronx style.
Now here’s where it gets curious about Ms. Banks and Mr. Benzino being such boisterous defenders of what they claim to be indigenous black-American music.
Mr. Benzino, whose real name is Raymond Scott, inherited his last name from his mother, who he claimed was a black-American woman.
The only problem? She was not Black-American at all.
Not even close.
Nowhere in her lineage was there even a trace of an ancestor who had touched down in the Jim Crow American South or had experienced any of the horrors of U.S. based slavery.
Mrs. Scott was born on the islands of Cape Verde and came to Boston as a child with her family who travelled to the United States by choice.
Benzino, whose father came to Boston from Puerto Rico, hid his lineage as much as he could, claiming a black-American birthright over the legacy of US black southern music like Jazz, blues and rock and roll.
But how could that be possible?
None of his family hailed from the Mississippi Delta region or from New Orleans, the birthplaces of Blues and Jazz respectively. Nor had they come up north from Georgia where funk music was born or from Alabama where major civil rights battles were fought.
So where does this personal claim, used by Mr. Benzino in the 2000's and by Ms. Banks now, over who should be allowed to sing what kind of music come from?
And how valid is Banks’ argument, when she, like Mr, Benzino quite possibly isn’t even of Black-American stock herself?
If Ms. Banks cannot prove that she is really Black-American — isn’t what she is doing then, cultural appropriation?
Banks’ who looks like my Panamanian prom date, has a weak explanation for her Latino accent. that she grew up around Dominicans.
Yet, Dominicans, even when raised in New York, always pronounce English words much differently than Puerto Ricans and Afro-Cubans. Their accents and patterns of speech even when speaking English are vastly different, particularly in Washington Heights.
Since Ms. Banks’ accent is not Dominican-York, there is no way she could have picked it up from the babysitter or in school. Banks also crinkled her nose when she questioned things, a silent Nuyorican way of saying “what?” or “wtf?”
Banks’ affinity to slaughter live animals for food, is trademark Caribbean Latino, not of black U.S. folk in northern cities.
Even if she gave a alternative religious explanation for animal slaughter, it would be off.
Dominicans practice what is called the 21 divisions, which is more Voodon than Yoruba, which Banks’ says she is an initiate.
For her to slaughter animals in any ritual, Banks’ would need to have received a knife ceremony, which you can only obtain after years in the religion. At 23, that would mean she was initiated very young, in typical Afro-Cuban style.
Not Dominican. Definitely not black-American.
Without a family tree, people can pretend to be anything they like. And there is no public record of who Ms. Banks’ grandparents actually were. and from whence in the U.S. they originally came from. To be quite accurate, there isn’t a lot of documentation as to who Ms. Banks really is at all.
So who is Azealia Banks and where does her family really come from? Panama? Costa Rica? Puerto Rico? Cuba?
Right now Banks’ roots are as mysterious as Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of The Nation of Islam.
He claimed to be black, but looked very, very white.
He is speculated to be Turkish, which would qualify as Caucasian, yet he, like Norman Leer’s white script writers on Good Times provided distinct images, no matter how inaccurate, of what black thoughts and values were supposed to be. Even though he himself was not a product of the sub-Saharan African slave trade himself in any way.
Ms. Banks is pulling a similar hoax.
Now, it is understandable why Ms. Banks would pretend to be an indigenous Black-American, instead of what she actually is.
And that reason is: political positioning.
It would explain why Ms. Banks, like Ray Benzino before her and Wallace D. Fard Muhammad before him, feel this need to portray and defend a skewed idea of a culture that is not actually theirs at all.
Positioning is how a white man like Wallace Fard Muhammad would choose to pretend to be a black man and live among the black poor, a group searching for hope and a leader.
If he defended gripes of the disgruntled and pointed out an enemy, it would give him power while keeping the light off of his own dubious background.
If you point the finger at others, promote plans of action and position yourself as a thought leader, people may actually fail to notice your own outsider status, especially if you look like them.
This kind of cultural appropriation, practiced by Banks can also be found to be perpetrated by the children of immigrants in their desire to fit in.
When I was a kid, these children from places as wide as Brazil, Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana would often hide the origin of their backgrounds from the neighborhood, claiming to be from various towns in North Carolina, yet could not tell you what any of the towns looked like or what Geechee really meant.
Children of Haitian parents who spoke mostly Creole at home, donned twinges of southern accents in the streets and speak of Jim Crow laws as if they were there. Or at least like their grandmother was there.
The only problem is that they weren’t. The same way the children of West African immigrants were not here for any part of the civil rights movement. No mater how many “hey yalls” or “what our people went through” phrases they use in their everyday speech.
It’s just not true.
The truth is, however, the battle between black and white America, if there even still is one, is really not an outsiders beef to come in an dictate best paths and strategies like Ms. Banks seems to have a propensity to do.
She really needs to mind her own business. It is not her beef.
Just like segregation in the South, wasn’t Stokely Carmichael’s beef either. It may have Dr. Martin Luther King’s beef, who was actually from Georgia and lived the experience of segregation, but Carmichael was an outsider.
King’s family legacy had come from US slavery and lived through slave uprisings, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. But that experience did not belong to Carmichael, or his family, who came from Trinidad and Tobago, by way of The Bronx.
Yet Carmichael was going to come down south and school Dr. King on what needed to be done and where the movement needed to go.
Just he wasn’t from the USA.
Carmichael’s viewpoint on integration with whites differed radically from Dr. King, who was actually an American black person. As did Malcolm X, another child of a West Indian parent. As does Louis Farrakhan, a child of, you guessed it, Caribbean immigrants. Farrakhan even sung Calypso records.
Yet, Dr. King was actually from the South and was forced to endure mocking insults by Northern black immigrants and their children who called him an “Uncle Tom.”
Yet many of those who pelted King with insults, had families living in other countries when ‘Uncle Toms Cabin’ was written.
For years this immigrant version of US Blackness, led by Marcus Garvey, which pushes for cultural separation has been promoted over the aims of authentic Black American leadership who after living here for centuries wanted integration, just like the rest of the western hemisphere.
Dr. Kings legacy, one of at least the hope of integration, lives on in Hip Hop culture, which at its Bronx roots, was very integrated.
In actuality it is the first truly integrated cultural movement that the United States has given to the world.
But for people like Ms. Banks, an outsider pretending to be black-American, is it better that people still eat at separate lunch counters and stay at separate hotels in order to protect culture.
That is not what the civil rights movement was about at all. It is not what the Americas are all about. In this hemisphere we mix. She should know that.
If we do what Ms. Banks suggests we do, there would have been no Hall and Oats, no Rod Temperton, no Tina Marie.
So was Rick James a “shoe shining coon” too?
Which brings me back to Ms. Banks’ obvious Afro-Latino accent, Latino shows of emotion and Latino mannerisms, calling T.I. a “shoe-shining coon” and Charlemagne an “Uncle Tom;” terminologies frequently used inaccurately by black immigrants and their children, who have absolutely no understanding of what those terms actually mean and how they are supposed to be used.
If anything, white singers or rappers on top of R&B productions, should be T.I.’s beef. He is actually black-American, from the South, not a just another brown person with similar features pretending to be one.
Maybe Ms. Banks should provide some actual paperwork of who she really is, to prove to us that she is indeed an indigenous Black American from the South, going back to before the civil war and not some child of recent arrivals who is a great pretender, appropriating a culture that is not hers.
Or better yet, maybe she should take a DNA test, since different regions of Africa supplied distinctly different labor supplies to the Caribbean, South America to the USA. Making an Afro-Cuban make up radically different than someone from Mississippi or Georgia.
People can pretend to be anything they like, but the proof is in the transparency of paperwork and public records. Otherwise, it may be Ms. Banks who is guilty of a version of cultural appropriation herself, pointing the finger at everyone else.
