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"Keepin' It Real": White Hip‐Hoppers' Discourses of Language, Race, and

Authenticity

Article in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology · June 2008

DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2003.13.2.211

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■ Cecilia Cutler
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

“Keepin’ It Real”: White Hip-Hoppers’

Discourses of Language, Race,
and Authenticity

This study investigates the discursive construction of authenticity among white

middle-class young people in the New York City area who affiliate with hip-hop.
It explores the ways in which hip-hop mediates the adoption of African
American English-influenced speech by these young people and how this
phenomenon complicates traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of identity.
There is a discourse within hip-hop that privileges the urban black street
experience. This forces white middle-class hip-hoppers whose race and class
origins distance them from this socially located space to construct themselves
linguistically as authentic via both form and content.

C urrent examinations of whiteness within linguistic anthropology have

shown how ideologically unmarked racial categories emerge from analyses
of linguistic practice and performance (Bucholtz and Trechter 2001). In
particular, it has been suggested that whiteness exists in a binary but unequal
relationship to categories such as blackness. It is ideologically, invisible and
unheard, but it is from this unseen position that whiteness derives its power. Recent
studies of language and identity within anthropology illustrate how identity is a
social and cultural process that emerges in various forms of social and sociolinguis-
tic practice and have served to highlight the ideological dimension of identity,
specifically the ways in which ideologies are produced, reproduced, and contested
through language. Studies of outgroup language use have challenged the idea that
the use of a particular linguistic form associated with a particular group automat-
ically signals membership in that group, yet it is this contextualization that estab-
lishes an indexical link between linguistic forms and particular groups of speakers

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13(2):1–23. Copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association.

1
2 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

(Irvine and Gal 2000). Crucially, such forms function as resources that can be used
to reinforce or contest social boundaries. The present study examines how white
hip-hoppers’ appropriation of African American English-influenced speech—both
in form and content—at times contests but in other cases reinforces ideologies of
difference. The analysis focuses specifically on the discursive construction and
performance of authenticity by white teenagers who affiliate with hip-hop.
The expression keepin’ it real is practically a mantra in hip-hop, exhorting indi-
viduals to be true to their roots and not to “front” or pretend to be something they
are not (Rickford and Rickford 2000:23). Although hip-hop is ostensibly a multiracial
and multicultural movement, its origins and creative force as well as most of its
well-known rap artists come chiefly from urban African American communities
(Blake 1993). There is a powerful discourse within hip-hop that privileges the black
body and the black urban street experience. According to Boyd, “hip-hop and bas-
ketball are spaces where Blackness has been normalized, and Whiteness treated as
the Other” (2002:23). This creates an interesting double bind for many white hip-
hoppers (WHHs) whose race and class origins are thrown into stark relief by the
normative blackness of hip-hop.
One is reminded of Du Boisian “double-consciousness” or the inability to see
oneself except through the eyes of others. Spears describes it as “the dual personality
caused by the cohabitation of two consciousnesses or cultural systems within one
mind, the White and the African-American” (1998:248). It implies the unavoidable
tendency to examine oneself through the eyes of others, or in Du Bois’s words, the
act of “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity” (Du Bois 1953:3). In this case it is WHHs who must see themselves
through the eyes of others (African Americans) and try to measure up to the standards
of authenticity, achievement, and knowledge established by the collective of indi-
viduals who lead the Hip Hop Nation.
Hip-hop began in the 1970s in New York City but only broke into the all-white
music video world of MTV in 1989 with the launch of the television program “Yo,
MTV Raps” (Rose 1994). The term hip-hop is employed here in its broadest sense
to describe an entire culture that includes rap music, breakdancing, writing (graffiti
art), dress, and speech (Dalzall 1996; Smitherman 1997). When asked to describe
their culture, hip-hop “headz” or followers almost uniformly say it is composed of
“four pillars”: writing (graffiti art or “graffing”), b-boying (breakdancing), DJing, and
MCing. DJing is the art of mixing records, especially the practice of “scratching” or
manually reversing the direction of the record on the turntable with the needle in
place to achieve a rhythmic backdrop for the MC (“master of ceremonies” or “mi-
crophone controller”). The MC, in turn, performs his or her rap on top of the rhythm
supplied by the DJ. The art of MCing is often called “rhyming,” which may involve
the performance of pre scripted lyrics or the spontaneous creation of rhymes, called
“freestyling.” Occasionally, people who write about hip-hop use the terms rap and
hip-hop interchangeably but these terms are not, strictly speaking, synonymous. Rap
music is the product of hip-hop culture, specifically the artistic form resulting from
DJing and MCing.
The collective of individuals who identify with hip-hop culture often refer to them-
selves as members of the “Hip Hop Nation” or simply the “nation.” Touré writes,
“the nation has no precise date of origin, no physical land, no single chief,” but it
exists “in any place where hip-hop music is being played or hip-hop attitude is being
“Keepin’ It Real” 3

exuded” (1999:10). In some sense, the Hip Hop Nation is like an imagined commu-
nity as described by Anderson (1983), in that it is constituted by imagined rather
than face-to-face relationships. This is particularly true of WHHs, whose ties to young
urban African Americans who create hip-hop culture are often tenuous or nonexistent.
Bauman’s (1991) formulation of neo-tribes or consumption-based collectives is
also useful here. Neo-tribes are the somewhat unstable, fleeting, collectives that make
up contemporary society, reflecting the need of individuals to find meaning by bond-
ing with others. Such self-defined communities often rely on the exclusion of the
other, which may be marked by overt signals such as dress and language. The con-
tinuity of the group is dependent upon maintaining these boundaries. Indeed, hip-
hoppers often define themselves oppositionally to mainstream society through lan-
guage, dress, values, and orientation. Alim writes that this sensibility reflects a
rejection of “ ‘standard’ notions of correctness and appropriateness” by members of
the Hip Hop Nation whose values and aesthetics, ways of thinking, and lifestyle
choices differ from the majority culture (in press:14). WHHs participate in this sym-
bolic display of group affiliation, although their authenticity and their license to par-
ticipate may be contested.
Hip-hop is not and never was exclusively black, yet the urban African American
experience is central to its message and reflective of the fundamental role African
Americans have had in its creation. Many young people around the world who are
marginalized due to their ethnicity or class have adapted the metaphor of the black
struggle in the United States to their own battles against racism and authoritarianism
(Alim 2002a). Latino youth in New York City have a long-standing tradition of
participation in hip-hop and are effectively viewed as insiders. The participation of
Puerto Ricans and to a lesser extent other Latinos in the New York hip-hop scene
is viewed as natural, given many of the political and social ties they have to the
African American community (cf. Morgan 1998). But this is not a generalization
that can be extended to most middle-class and upper-middle-class whites. Many
struggle to authenticate themselves within hip-hop precisely because they feel re-
moved from the urban black (and Latino) working-class experience.
Clearly, it is important to avoid the racialization of hip-hop culture and the language
associated with it. Rap music, hip-hop language and fashions, and the kinesics of
hip-hop style are highly commodified and widely accessible. As Sweetland (1998)
usefully reminds us, ethnic boundaries, though powerful, are not insurmountable. She
observes that racializing languages—or youth culture, for that matter—can obscure
the more subtle and intriguing process by which linguistic (and cultural) patterns
unexpectedly diffuse across cultural boundaries.
My initial interest in studying WHHs was to explore their motivation to adopt
linguistic patterns they had not grown up with—specifically those associated with
African American English (AAE)—and to come to terms with questions about who
speaks AAE and what it means to do so. This inevitably led to an exploration of
the ways in which hip-hop mediates the adoption of AAE-influenced speech by
non-African American youth and what (if anything) adopting outgroup speech pat-
terns signals about one’s identity—particularly one’s ethnic identity, given the asso-
ciations listeners have between certain ways of talking and certain ethnic groups.
One additional issue I wanted to explore was the question of authenticity, because
so many of the young people I spoke to reported incidents in which their right to
participate in hip-hop was challenged—either by black hip-hoppers or by other whites.
4 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

The data for this article are drawn from two years of sociolinguistic fieldwork in
New York City involving 35 white middle-class and upper-middle-class teenagers
and young adults who affiliate with hip-hop and who draw on a speech style that is
derived from African American English, referred to henceforth as Hip Hop Speech
Style (HHSS). I conducted roughly fifteen hours of interview data myself, but as a
white female academic, I found it was often difficult to get speakers to employ the
kind of speech they would use among their peers. I therefore hired several under-
graduate and high-school-age research assistants to conduct interviews among their
friends and classmates. These nine assistants collected approximately twenty-four
hours of interview data. Due to the similarity in age and the fact that most of the
interviewers were at least acquainted, if not friends, with the individuals they inter-
viewed, the data they collected is likely more natural than what I could have gathered
myself from the same speakers. I provided my research assistants with a list of
questions to elicit biographical data as well as questions centering on each individual’s
relationship to hip-hop culture and his or her feelings about the meaning of expres-
sions such as keepin’ it real.1
For my dissertation, I carried out a quantitative linguistic analysis on a subset of
12 speakers from the larger corpus of 35 speakers. All of the speakers in the present
study were part of this subset. The quantitative analysis focuses on five linguistic
variables widely associated with AAE: /r/-lessness, monophthongal /ay/, t/d deletion,
verbal –s absence, and copula absence. Additionally, I looked at the occasional use
of grammatical features such as multiple negation, habitual be, and ain’t.. Although
many of these features are not unique to AAE or HHSS, it is reasonable to assume
that speakers perceive them to be part of the linguistic resources they can draw on
to index HHSS. Their sporadic use of such features suffices to alert audience members
to the fact that they are referencing HHSS but often fails to match (quantitatively)
the use of such features in the speech of the target group. There is further justification
for looking at features such as monophthongal /ay/ and /r/-lessness because they do
not generally characterize the speech of young middle-class whites in New York.
Vocalization of /r/ is common in New York City but not generally among young
white middle-class speakers, and monophthongal /ay/ is found in some white ver-
naculars but not those in the Northeast. Deletion of final t/d is common among most,
if not all, speakers of English, but rates of deletion are typically higher for vernacular
AAE speakers, especially in bimorphemic verbs such as passed. Finally, grammatical
features like verbal –s absence, copula deletion, and habitual be are thought to be
almost exclusively unique to AAE and are rarely, if ever, found in other varieties of
American English. Multiple negation is similar in this regard, although it is commonly
found in other American English vernaculars. The appearance of these features in
the speech of WHHs therefore constitutes conclusive evidence that AAE, and more
narrowly, HHSS, the variety of AAE associated with hip-hop, is their linguistic target.
HHSS is not meant to designate a “true language” or “dialect.” I propose that the
variety associated with hip-hop is essentially a speech style rather than a register or
language unto itself for two reasons. First, the degree to which the linguistic features
of HHSS overlap with those of AAE makes it difficult to argue that it constitutes a
language unto itself. Second, HHSS indexes personal as well as contextual attributes
(Coupland 2001), whereas registers are often thought to index strictly contexts. As
such, I am putting forward a conception of style that is multidimensional, encom-
passing intraspeaker variation along a number of continua that do not necessarily
“Keepin’ It Real” 5

overlap, including standard–vernacular, formal–informal, the degree of attention paid

to speech, as well as the range of intra- and interpersonal strategic intentions (cf.
Bell 2001). In all cases, style relies on the manipulation of conventionalized social
meanings of dialect varieties (Coupland 2001). Accordingly, stylistic variation can
be seen as nested within and deriving from social (dialect) variation, which is in turn
nested within the larger system of a language. HHSS is a speech style employed by
young people who affiliate with hip-hop and overlaps to a large degree with urban
youth varieties of AAE in phonology, prosody, morphosyntax, and lexical usage
(Morgan 2001b).
Alim employs the term Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL), which he uses to
describe the language that defines the Hip Hop Nation. Alim writes that HHNL is
a “vehicle driven by the culture creators of hip-hop, themselves organic members of
the broader African American community” (in press:10). Viewing HHNL as a lan-
guage unto itself implies a distinction from AAE that may not be warranted, but it
does point to the need to further theorize this variety. The research thus far seems
to concur on several central points: that the speech style associated with hip-hop is
rooted in African American language and communicative practices (Smitherman
1997), that it is just one of many language varieties used by African Americans
(Alim in press), that it is widely spoken across the country and is used, borrowed,
and transformed by African Americans and non-African Americans in and outside
the United States (Alim in press; Bennett 1999; Bucholtz 1999; Condry 1999; Cutler
1999; inter alia).
The centrality of African American culture within hip-hop is undisputed, and thus
the connection between AAE and HHSS is to be expected. But to date, this rela-
tionship has not been the subject of any empirical research, aside from Alim (2002b),
who found that rates of copula absence in hip-hop artists’ musical performance far
outweigh the rates during taped interviews. Alim also argues that hip-hop artists pay
a great deal of attention to their speech and consciously manipulate it as a way to
maintain their street credibility.
The emphasis on street credibility relates directly to competing conceptions of
authenticity in hip-hop and points to the role of language ideologies in the ways that
WHHs conceptualize black hip-hop culture. In my data, direct questions from inter-
viewers about the meaning of keepin’ it real elicited two main themes: (1) the idea
that people should present themselves for what they are and not “front” with respect
to class, race, and language use; and (2) the idea that realness has to do with being
connected to “the street” or the urban ghetto in both a physical and a linguistic sense.
The analysis that follows explores how WHHs discursively construct themselves as
authentic within hip-hop.
When we look at specific examples in which young people discuss issues of
identity and authenticity, two patterns emerge. Core WHHs, who are typically in-
volved in hip-hop practices like MCing and Djing, feel secure about their right to
be in hip-hop and are quite candid about race and class. Furthermore, they do not
feel the need to signal their hip-hop identity in linguistically overt ways. The more
peripheral WHHs tend to orient more to the idea that authenticity is rooted in one’s
connection to the street or the urban ghetto. They feel obliged to establish their
credibility by placing themselves semiotically closer to the urban ghetto and by ob-
scuring the racial and class boundaries that separate them from the urban African
American community. They are also more inclined to make overt use of speech
6 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

markers highly associated with AAE, such as ain’t, habitual be, multiple negation,
and copula absence, which leaves them open to charges of trying to “sound black.”
I present these data in the wake of a number of related studies of people who
make use of ethnically marked outgroup language varieties: these include Rampton’s
(1995) work on momentary, ritualized instances of outgroup language use (“cross-
ing”) among adolescents in Britain, Bucholtz’s (1997) work on the discursive con-
struction of a white identity through use of AAE among high school students in the
San Francisco Bay Area, and Sweetland’s (2002) study of the authentic use of AAE
by whites. These studies question the idea that certain language varieties are the
exclusive domain of particular groups. The young people in Rampton’s study have
created a new, “de-racinated” ethnicity constructed via commodified ethnic symbols
such as language and via the contestation of social and governmental practices of
racial categorization. Bucholtz’s ethnographic study of language and identity in a
San Francisco Bay Area high school shows that white teenagers—whether they af-
filiate with hip-hop or not—used AAE discursively to differentiate themselves from
blacks and thus assert their whiteness. Sweetland’s work suggests that whites can
acquire AAE and be accepted as authentic speakers within African American net-
works, despite claims to the contrary.2
I analyze the data utilizing the language-ideology framework (Irvine and Gal 2000),
which characterizes the semiotic processes of indexicality, fractal recursivity, and
erasure. Indexicality refers to the connection between form and meaning. Bucholtz
(2001:88) describes the indexical link between a linguistic form and its social meaning
as a relationship of (perceived) juxtaposition. As such, it is weaker than an iconic
link, whereby “the characteristics of a language are seen as a reflection of the essential
characteristics of its users” (Bucholtz 2001:89). Fractal recursivity involves the rep-
lication at other levels of some understood opposition or dichotomy between groups
of people or between linguistic varieties. Erasure is the process of simplifying the
field of linguistic practices, thus rendering some persons or activities or sociolinguistic
phenomena invisible (Irvine and Gal 2000). I make reference to this framework to
analyze how speakers attempt to authenticate themselves and to show how they
define themselves with respect to others within the hip-hop community.
This article first explores how some of the young people who participated in the
study define the expression keepin’ it real. Next, it examines differing interpretations
of “realness,” particularly how WHHs construct themselves as authentic and how
they deal with the question of identity and whiteness within hip-hop. Lastly, it takes
up the issue of language ideologies expressed in how these young people use language
and what they say about their linguistic practices. Their comments reveal an aware-
ness of the prevailing language attitudes surrounding AAE and the social conse-
quences of using a variety that bears quite negative overt stigma.

Background

All of the 35 speakers in my dissertation corpus can be classified as “white” or

“European American.” I focus more narrowly on a subset of six speakers for the
present study because they encompass the range of use that exists in the corpus as
a whole. The interviews with these particular young people also contain the most
elaborated discussions of realness. All six were adept at producing some feature(s)
of HHSS, but PJ and Ghetto Thug outrank all the others in range and frequency
“Keepin’ It Real” 7

with which they employ phonological and morphological features. They were fol-
lowed by Trix who, alongside PJ and Ghetto Thug, occupies one end of a continuum
of competence as judged by performance. Ivy and Benny represent the middle of
the road in their use of phonological and morphosyntactic features, while Bobo draws
on only a small range of AAE phonological patterns.
One of the central questions addressed by this research is how young people
construct their identities in a postmodern world where cultural markers are widely
commodified and can be adopted and reworked to create new ethnicities (cf. Hall
1988; Rampton 1995). In the dissertation, some general patterns emerged within the
subset of 12 original speakers whose speech was analyzed pointing to a connection
between an individual’s participation in “core” hip-hop activities such as MCing or
DJing and use of HHSS. The more peripheral hip-hoppers, who constituted the vast
majority of the young people in the study, participated largely through consumption
of rap music and hip-hop fashions. They tended to make much bolder use of HHSS—
at least in the interview data I collected—whereas the core members were generally
more conservative in their linguistic display of HHSS.
In Tables 1 and 2, these patterns are shown for the smaller subset of six speakers
who appear in this article. Table 1 divides the speakers into two groups: core par-
ticipants and peripheral participants.
Among the core group, Ivy would probably be classified as the “core” of the
“core” because she has a relatively high profile in the hip-hop scene as an MC.
Furthermore, both she and Benny have a higher degree of interaction with African
Americans relative to the other “core” hip-hoppers. Benny appears on stage with his
mostly African American crew during concerts. The remaining speaker, Trix, inhabits
a more marginal position within the core. He is a hip-hop DJ but works mainly at
local events in his Greek American neighborhood.
The second group is made up of more peripheral participants who expressed their
hip-hop affiliation mainly via clothing and music consumption. None were involved
in hip-hop as performers, nor did they show much interest in doing so. PJ and Ghetto
Thug were notable for the degree to which they professed some kind of connection
to the ghetto, although they lived in solidly middle-class and upper-middle-class
neighborhoods, respectively. Bobo mainly identified with hip-hop through fashion
and rap music. Peripheral hip-hoppers, particularly PJ, stood out linguistically due

Table 1
WHHs included in the present study.

Core hip-hoppers Peripheral hip-hoppers

Benny (age 18)—participates in Bobo (age 17)—listens to rap music
staged hip-hop performances as one and wears hip-hop clothing; plays on
of the “crew.” mostly African American football
Ivy (age18)—emerging female MC; team.
performs in progressive hip-hop Ghetto Thug (age 16)—listens to
venues in New York City and is a rap music and wears hip-hop
member of a women’s hip-hop clothing.
collective. PJ (age 17) consumes rap music
Trix (age 18)—hip hop DJ. and wears hip-hop clothing.
8 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Table 2
Speakers’ index scores for five linguistic variables.

Speaker Score
PJ 3.52
Ghetto Thang 3.27
Ivy 2.24
Trix 2.13
Benny 1.72
Bob 1.1

to their recurrent use of the ain’t construction, as well as habitual be and multiple
negation.3 The core speakers used these latter two features rarely if ever, and the
peripheral speakers used them too infrequently to merit quantitative analysis.
Table 2 provides index scores for each speaker’s linguistic performance. Index
scores were arrived at by adding up the percentages of a speaker’s use of five lin-
guistic variables found in AAE and HHSS: postvocalic /r/-lessness, /ay/ mono-
phthongization, t/d deletion, verbal –s absence, and copula absence. The higher a
speaker’s index score, the more he or she employs all of these features combined.
Although speakers varied in the extent to which they used any given linguistic vari-
able, there was a general correlation in the use of most of features.4
The data in Table 2 show that the more peripheral hip-hoppers, particularly PJ
and Ghetto Thug, tend to be bolder in their use of these particular features of AAE,
although Bobo is an exception. The linguistic data here correlate to some degree
with the ways in which these young people define and discuss realness within hip-hop.

“Keepin’ It Real”: Authenticity in Hip-Hop

The expression keepin’ it real is a central theme in hip-hop that means that people
should be true to their roots and give “props” or credit where credit is due (Morgan
1996). “Keepin’ it real” or realness is about being authentic, and hip-hoppers are
quick to criticize those who “front” or pretend to be something they are not (Rickford
and Rickford 2000:23). Being real or authentic in hip-hop is a complicated construct
that depends on many factors, but one component involves socioeconomic, ethnic,
and cultural proximity to the urban African American community where hip-hop is
created and disseminated—that is, “the street” (Blake n.d.). Alim describes the street
as “the center of hip-hop cultural activity,” which is not just a physical space but a
“site of creativity, culture, cognition, and consciousness” (in press:5–6). Establishing
one’s connection to the street is obviously de rigueur for rappers themselves, but it
is such a defining element of hip-hop that many middle-class WHHs try to play up
their connections to the actual ghetto or to some imaginary ghetto by forming crews
and engaging in certain “gang”-style activities (cf. the “preppie gangsters” docu-
mented in Sales 1996).5 As noted above, questions about the meaning of keepin’ it
real in my corpus elicited two main themes: 1) the idea that realness has to do with
being connected to and achieving respect on the streets, and 2) the idea that people
should present themselves as what they are.
“Keepin’ It Real” 9

WHHs often cite the two white rappers Vanilla Ice and Eminem as embodying
opposing poles of an imaginary spectrum of authenticity. Vanilla Ice is often cited
as the personification of “frontin’ ” because he made false claims about growing up
in the ghetto when he really grew up in a white middle-class suburb (Rose 1994).
He is now widely perceived to be a creation of music-industry moguls who were
trying to tap into the white suburban rap audience (although, in all fairness, he was
widely popular in his own time). Eminem, on the other hand, comes from a poor
neighborhood in Detroit and was discovered and promoted by the African American
hip-hop icon Dr. Dre. He is seen as the embodiment of white authenticity within
hip-hop and is the standard against which many WHHs measure themselves.
Thus Eminem has become an icon of realness for WHHs, essentially giving them
the right to participate and claim authenticity in hip-hop. Although Eminem’s up-
bringing was very different from that of most of my consultants, they see Eminem’s
very existence as proof that “white people can rap too.” Bobo, a 17-year-old boy of
Russian American heritage, expresses similar feelings about Eminem in Example 1
when he says that the white rapper’s respectability rubs off on other whites like
himself. Bobo was interviewed by his female African American friend and classmate
Kitoko, who asked him whether Eminem could be considered “not white” because
he raps. Bobo’s speech is notable for its lack of HHSS markers, which may reflect
his hesitancy to use such forms in the presence of an African American interviewer.
(1) Bobo interviewed by Kitoko (age 17, 2000)6
1 Bobo: He’s – I mean, I have really liked him. I like his new song. I like
2 his – I like – he’s a cool guy, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not
3 going to like debunk him for being white – I mean, you know,
4 that – that gives me a little bit of an advantage, you know, in my
5 lifestyle in some ways, you know, people say, “You know,
6 Eminem’s white, you know. Maybe other white people that are
7 cool like that” – and, you know, he – he’s obviously white, but,
8 I mean, if you talk to the guy, you wouldn’t know he’s really
9 white.
More than most of my consultants, Bobo affiliates with mainstream commercial rap
as opposed to gangster rap. Similarly, he projects a clean-cut, studious image in con-
trast with the ghetto image to which some young male WHHs aspire. In Lines 8–9,
Bobo implies that perhaps some of Eminem’s respectability stems from the possi-
bility that he could pass for black based on his language.
When middle-class WHHs define keepin’ it real in their own words, they make
reference to the two definitions alluded to earlier. In Example (2), Ghetto Thug (a
self-selected moniker), a 16-year-old boy of Armenian American heritage, makes a
connection between a particular kind of lifestyle and “realness.” The fact that this
speaker chose the name “Ghetto Thug” as his pseudonym provides a view into his
own ideological stance as well as how he views himself within hip-hop and correlates
neatly with his relatively high index score in Table 2.
(2) Ghetto Thug interviewed by Andrew (age 16, 2000)7
1 G Thug: Nah, you know what it is? It’s like – where – with hip-hop
2 music, the rappers or whatever, keep it real. Like – like – like
3 you don’t really have that – with like – with other types of
4 music. It ain’t like real.
10 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

5 Andrew: I understand what you’re sayin’

6 G: [You know what it is?
7 A: I understand what you’re sayin’
8 G: [You know what it is? It’s like – it’s like – like – like I could
9 associate with like – I could associate it with my life. So, you know
what I’m sayin’?
10 A: [Really? Living in Forest Hills which isn’t exactly the –
11 G: [Well no, I’m sayin’ –
12 A: [ghetto neighborhood of –
13 G: ((early rising contour)) No, I’m sayin’ but –
14 A: [ghetto capital of the world.
15 G: Of course, of course now, but I’m sayin’ like – like just
16 because my parents live here don’t mean that I chill here . . .
17 A: Yeah, so right, your friends live in mostly ghe – ghetto
18 neighborhoods, high crime areas?
19 G: Whatever.
When Ghetto Thug says that rappers “keep it real” as opposed to artists from other
musical genres, he is alluding to the fact that many rappers are active participants in
a vibrant street culture. Andrew, a friend and classmate, challenges Ghetto Thug’s
personal knowledge of this culture. As the product of private schooling and a resi-
dent of Forest Hills a well-to-do part of Queens, Ghetto Thug justifies his realness
by claiming that he does not hang out near his home. Later, when Andrew asks if he
means to say that he hangs out in “high crime” ghetto areas, Ghetto Thug replies
with a very noncommittal “whatever,” which suggests that he is hesitant to identify
exactly where he does hang out, perhaps because it is not really very “ghetto”-like.
The ideology of ghetto proximity as necessary for realness emerges in response
to questions about who Ghetto Thug thinks should not participate in hip-hop, as seen
in Example 3.
Example (3) Ghetto Thug interviewed by Andrew (age 16, 2000)
1 A: Do you think hip-hop’s for everybody?
2 G: No.
3 A: Who isn’t it for?
4 G: Like what type of people?
5 A: Yeah.
6 G: . . . for – for – for people that like – for like rich people.
7 A: All right.
8 G: It ain’t for rich people. Not for like – not for like, you know,
9 like high class white boys and shit. It ain’t for that.
10 A: We have several friends like that (( )) and they listen to it.
11 G: [They ain’t – they ain’t high class WHITE
12 boys! I’m talkin’ ’bout the fuckin’ Beverly HILLS niggas.
13 Like fuckin’ rich niggas with like fuckin’ – ((falsetto pitch)) I
14 ’onno, nigga! Like fuckin’ niggas that own like – condos and
15 shit. I ’onno. Niggas with loot.
Here, Ghetto Thug constructs wealthy white people from places like Beverly Hills
as archetypal outsiders to hip-hop.8 He suggests that as an affluent but not “rich”
person, he is a more legitimate participant than they are. By contrasting himself to
other whites in this way he attempts to establish his own legitimacy and to counter
race-based discourse about who can or cannot participate in hip-hop. These attempts
“Keepin’ It Real” 11

to differentiate oneself from other whites on the basis of class, income, or geo-
graphical residence in order to place oneself in a semiotic sense closer to the urban
black “street” culture resemble the dichotomizing processes found in fractal recur-
sion. The logic is that the closer one is to the “street,” the more authentic one is. The
dichotomy between the black urban underclass and the white middle class gets re-
projected onto relations between the white middle class and the white upper class as
a way of legitimizing white middle-class participation in hip-hop.
In the next example, Benny, who identifies as Jewish American and attends a
private school in Brooklyn, alludes to the two contrasting discourses within hip-hop
of what constitutes realness or authenticity.
(4) Interview with Benny (age 18, 1999)
1 Cece: What does – what does “keeping it real” mean to you?
2 Benny: I think it’s just being – being true to yourself, like don’t act –
3 don’t act like, you know, someone that’s not you; and some
4 people – some people like they keep it real with a gun or
5 something, like they get a lot more heart when they’re
6 holding a gun, and they change; and when they put the gun
7 down, you know, it – they – they don’t act the same. I’ve –
8 I’ve seen that a lot, and it’s like a lot of people try to keep it
9 real by being mad hard and – these are like questions that are
10 just like – I mean, I like the questions ’cause they’re not easy.
11 It would kind of be boring if you kept asking like really
12 simple stuff to answer like –
13 C: It’s hard, right?
14 B: Yeah.
15 C: Nail it down. What does it mean to you, though?
16 B: Well, me? I think – to me, I – I could just say I keep it real
17 because I don’t – I don’t want to – I don’t try to deny anything
18 that I am– I don’t try to be black, but I’m not trying to be
19 white, ’cause you don’t try to be anything. I’m just trying to –
20 I’m just trying to be, you know?
The first discourse of realness appears in Lines 2–3, where Benny talks about
being “true to yourself.” The second discourse appears in Lines 4–9, when he says
that some people “keep it real” or gain respect on the streets by wielding a gun or
by being “mad hard” (‘very tough’; See Smitherman 1994:131)—similar to Ghetto
Thug’s interpretation, in which realness has a connotation of streetwise toughness
and a knowledge of how to hold one’s own. The first discourse emerges again in
Lines 16–20 when Benny defines realness in relation to his own experience. He says
that he keeps it real by not trying to deny who he is and by not trying to be black.
But he also emphasizes that he is not trying to be white—or indeed anything at all.
He is just trying to exist. The emphasis on the word be in these four iterations
highlights the act of being as one of the sites where authenticity is constructed. Trying
too hard to “be” something is a violation of authenticity.
These examples show how authenticity is defined in terms of both space—that is,
the literal or symbolic proximity to the urban African American core hip-hop com-
munity—and honesty or truthfulness about where one comes from. WHHs seem torn
between the requirement of some kind of connection to the street and the need to
acknowledge the race and class identity that separates them from that space.
12 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Eminem’s status as a highly respected and successful white rapper mitigates some
of the anxiety they feel in this regard, but speakers also discursively construct them-
selves as “real” by distancing themselves from people who “try to be black” or who
are “too rich” to be legitimate participants.

The Construction of Self and Other: Discussions about Identity and

Hip-Hop

Turning to specific examples of young people discussing issues of identity, it is

evident from the interviews that many WHHs are quite conscious of their race as
participants in hip-hop. There is also an underlying sense that part of “keepin’ it
real” is acknowledging who one is, which includes race. One example of this racial
self-awareness is found in my interview with Ivy, a talented hip-hop MC of Jewish
American heritage who performs regularly at venues like SOBs and the Nuyorican
Poet’s Café in New York City.9 Ivy grew up in Ann Arbor, the child of academic
parents. She became interested in hip-hop when she was about ten years old and
established connections with the Detroit hip-hop scene as a teenager. Shortly after
graduating from high school, she moved to New York City (specifically to Harlem)
to further her career as a rap artist. Ivy constructs herself linguistically as part of the
AAE speech community, but she is constantly reminded of her whiteness and must
constantly acknowledge it within the industry and culture of hip-hop. Here, she dis-
cusses how she was called out, or publicly identified for being white when performing
in a battle sponsored by Blaze, a hip-hop magazine. MC battles involve two opponents
who take turns testing their verbal skill by “dissing” or berating each other for one
minute. The winner is determined by the response of the audience or onlookers. It
is important to note that battles sponsored by magazines and cable television channels
are highly commercialized and differ significantly from the informal battles that takes
place on street corners, parks, parties, or other places where black hip-hop youth
gather.
(5) Interview with Ivy (age 18, 1999)
1 Cece: Have you ever had a hard time or has anyone ever given you
2 a hard time for being white?
3 Ivy: ((raspy voice)) That’s why I lost the battle! ((suck teeth)) –
4 the Blaze Battle, ’cause they brought up the fact I was white
5 ((rising contour on white)). And you know, ((falsetto pitch))
6 makin’ ra – racist references, “Oh, you’re a racist. Oh, you’re
7 a racist. I’mo lynch YOU. Oh, you racist.” You know, just
8 sayin’ shit, callin’ me a white bitch and whatnot and um . . .
9 C: It would be hard not to take that personally.
10 I: Right, but you can’t. ((falsetto pitch)) That’s my race card,
11 that’s MY CARD! How’m I gonna let someone pull my
12 card?! That’s – they don’t know shit about my card! You
13 know what I mean? That’s how you can’t take it personal,
14 because they actually don’t know what they’re talkin’ about
15 and so . . . ((suck teeth)) I ’onno. In that – in that instance, I
16 played the role. I was like, “Oh, I re – you want me to be
17 racist, so I’ll be racist. Look, I’m a racist, look, here’s my
18 KKK – sheet – here’s my – you know – here’s
19 my – here’s my rope – and um fuck you too,” you know . . .
“Keepin’ It Real” 13

Ivy lost the battle because she was unable to recover from her opponent’s charge
of racism in her rebuttal. Her language use suggests a strong personal identification
with the African American hip-hop community as well as her knowledge of its
communicative norms. She quotes her opponent in Lines 6–7 but does not quote
him in ways that differ considerably from her own speech. Although the contracted
form I’mo for I’m going to may be indexing an AAE speaker, it is also a form that
she uses quite often herself and one that many white New Yorkers use as well. She
likewise generally preserves intervocalic /r/ in her own speech and does so in quoting
her opponent in Line 6 (you’re a). Similarly, she reduces the /st/ clusters in racist
in all three instances of the word—something she tends to do at quite a high rate in
her normal speech (63 percent; N = 127). Overall, however, it is her subtle mastery
of intonation patterns such as raspy voice and falsetto pitch that are most indicative
of her linguistic competence. Despite her midrange index score in Table 2, 61percent
(N = 134) of the listeners in a blind test judged Ivy to be African American (Cutler
2002b).
In Lines 3 and 15 there are two examples of sucking teeth, which further index
her knowledge of extralinguistic and communicative norms within hip-hop. Sucking
teeth or “suck teeth,” is an Africanism that has survived in the New World among
West Indians, Guayanese, and African Americans. It refers to the gesture of “drawing
air through the teeth and into the mouth to produce a loud sucking sound” and is
generally an expression of anger, impatience, exasperation, or annoyance (Rickford
and Rickford 1999:165–166). It appears that teeth sucking has expanded to new
domains of use among young African Americans beyond those first described by
Rickford and Rickford in 1973. It represents a kind of contextualization cue (Gumperz
1982) that signals a speaker’s definition of the situation. It can have different mean-
ings ranging from neutral to negative and is used with a high degree of frequency
in casual conversation to signal a speaker’s affective stance (see Cutler [2002a] for
an expanded discussion of suck teeth among WHHs). Ivy’s linguistic and extralin-
guistic usage here suggests that she sees herself as part of the same speech community
as the speakers she voices. This contrasts with most of Bucholtz’s (1997) consultants,
who differentiate themselves in subtle linguistic ways from black speakers.
Ivy also draws on the ideology of oppression that pervades some rap music. As
a young white woman participating in an African American male-dominated art form,
she too experiences a certain degree of discrimination. And although Ivy has been
made to feel aware of her race within hip-hop, she expresses a heartfelt solidarity
for others within the community, as in Example 6. Here she further indexes her
status as an insider by employing collectivizing pronouns to link herself to African
American hip-hoppers.
(6) Interview with Ivy (age 18, 1999)
1 Cece: Did you follow that controversy about Tommy Hilfiger?
2 Ivy: What controversy?
3 C: That I mean supposedly he said he didn’t even like black
4 people or something like that . . .
5 I: It doesn’t surprise me. I mean, I remember there was a thing
6 with Timberland back in the day – um – where they sayin,’
7 you know, “We’re not tryin’ to market to – to that audience,”
8 you know. We’re like, “Yo, we buy like fifty percent of your
9 gear!” like – like maybe even more, you know. “We’re the
14 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

10 reason why you’re – why you’re makin’ your money. It’s not
11 hikers buyin’ Timberland,” you know and you know, they
12 didn’t give a fuck but – but you – I’m not surprised. That’s
13 why I don’t sweat it. I don’t – I really don’t go and buy the
14 labels ’cause they’re labels, ’cause I know it’s, you know,
15 just exploiting this culture, and it’s not giving back to it. You
16 know. So if I’mo buy a label it’s gonna be someone who I
17 know who’s doin’ good.
Clothing designers like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Timber-
land have traditionally targeted the yuppie/country-club class. Over the past decade,
however, they have become hugely successful among urban black and Latino teen-
agers (and of course among the white teens who adopt urban hip-hop style). In the
mid-1990s, a rumor spread that designer Tommy Hilfiger had said he did not really
like black people, spurring a debate within the hip-hop community about whether
people should wear his clothing or that of any other typical white-owned brands that
were popular at the time. In expressing her indignation about the behavior of com-
panies like Timberland vis-à-vis African Americans, Ivy uses the pronoun we in
Lines 8–9 to link herself anaphorically to the black hip-hop community referred to
in Lines 3–4. The pronominal indexicality here can be seen as attempt to downplay
racial difference within hip-hop in line with the progressive political and social ide-
ology of unity within the Hip Hop Nation.
Ivy is perhaps more conscious about her whiteness than many of the other young
people interviewed in this study because she has quite a high profile as an aspiring
rapper. Ivy has also been reminded of her whiteness by the music industry. She has
been offered (and has turned down) several record contracts by companies that saw
her race as a way to market her music. Some company representatives saw her as
the “female Eminem” while others saw her as a kind of rap/folk singer. As a white
woman, she has had to fight an uphill battle to earn her place within an art form
dominated by African American men. She thus has a large personal stake in pro-
moting the multicultural, progressive ideology of the Hip Hop Nation. She clearly
sees herself as part of the hip-hop community and has earned herself a place based
on her talent as an MC. Many of the other consultants expressed similar assertions
about an identity rooted primarily in hip-hop and secondarily in race.
For example, Benny, an 18-year-old senior at a private high school, says he did
not make the decision to be white and had no choice in the matter. In Example 7,
he reports that his friends tease him about being “black on the inside” (Line 14).
The fact that many of these friends are themselves black (in contrast to most of the
other consultants, whose friendship groups are primarily white) lends him a greater
degree of credibility.
(7) Interview with Benny (age 18, 1999)
1 Benny: I don’t think I made a decision to be white. I’m just – I was
2 born and this is my – you know, it’s not even a situation. It’s
3 just who I am. I don’t know if – I don’t even know if my
4 friends look past it or not, but it doesn’t matter to me.
5 Cece: Do the – do your friends ever say anything to you?
6 B: Oh –
7 C: Do they ever give you a hard time?
8 B: – Of course. All the time.
“Keepin’ It Real” 15

9 C: What do they say?

10 B: Like, “Yeah, I think he’s black.” They’re like – they are
11 always – they’re always saying something like that, like –
12 C: As a joke, though, or seriously?
13 B: I don’t know. Sometimes, they seem so serious and they’re
14 like, “This kid is black on the inside,” and I know how to (( ))
15 and shit; and it’s like, “All right.” Oh my God, ask me if they
16 fuck around with me?! ((slow, rhythmic speech, AAE
17 intonation)) All the time – of course; but, you know, we’re all
18 friends.
In Line 17 Benny answers his own question in a markedly slower, AAE-influenced
style that indexes his integration in the group despite the fact that he gets teased
about being white. This is evident in his vocalization of /l/ in all, the affrication of
the voiced fricative in the, and the monophthongal realization of the /ay/ diphthong
in time. The intonation patterns are also reminiscent of patterns found among some
AAE speakers, such as elongated syllables, low pitch, and creaky voice. For Benny,
part of “keepin’ it real” is not trying to deny his whiteness, and this earns him a
badge of honor among his friends – that of being called “black on the inside.”
Benny’s self-portrayal contrasts with that of PJ, a high-school freshman whose
claims of identity go beyond the typical third-party ascriptions of blackness. Inter-
estingly, PJ is much less involved in hip-hop than young people like Ivy and Benny,
yet comes closest to constructing himself discursively as black.
(8) PJ interviewed by Lien (age 16, 2000)
1 Lien: What words and expressions are out?
2 PJ: “Phat.” You don’t say “phat” no more. That shit been out a long time
3 ago.
4 L: What about “dope?”
5 PJ: “Dope?” Only white people use that word.
6 L: Do you use that?
7 PJ: No, but I consider myself blackinese.
8 L: Blackinese?
9 PJ: Blackinese.
10 L: What does that mean?
11 PJ: That I’m a white person that’s got a little bit of black in me. That’s
12 basically what it means –
At different times, PJ offers competing self-conceptions of his identity. He identi-
fies himself as white and Jewish at the beginning of the interview, but at later points
like this one, he distances himself from this identity when he says that whites are the
only ones to use “dead” expressions like “dope.” He feels that his connection to the
street gives him a unique insight into what it means to be black and that this makes
him fundamentally different in some way from other white people. It also confers on
him, in his view, some sort of borderline blackness that he terms “blackinese,” or be-
ing “a white person with a little bit of black.”
WHHs occupy a liminal space with respect to identity, and they appear to be
constantly negotiating their position with respect to African American core members
as well as other whites. These examples suggest that young white hip-hop devotees
grapple with issues of race in different ways. Some, like Ivy and Benny, invoke the
ideology of inclusiveness within hip-hop to downplay racial difference. Yet they are
16 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

careful to acknowledge their own race in line with their interpretation of “keepin’ it
real.” Others try to obscure or downplay their own whiteness, or in PJ’s case, to
create a novel racial category. For many young people, to participate in hip-hop is
to step outside one’s identity to some degree and become something else, perhaps
similar to what Hall (1988) has referred to as the emergence of “new ethnicities”
(cf. Rampton 1995). But the normativity of blackness in hip-hop still forces WHHs
to confront their race and class in ways they are usually not obliged to do. They
must acknowledge their whiteness in order to be accepted as “real,” and any indi-
vidual who tries to claim he or she is black risks being labeled a wannabe.

Language Practices and Ideologies surrounding AAE

In general, WHHs seem quite sensitive to questions of authenticity given the im-
portance placed on realness within hip-hop culture. Yet their adoption of African
American cultural signifiers, particularly language, seems contrary to the idea that
one should not “front” or pretend to be something one is not. I have suggested in
previous work that linguistically most WHHs do not match the speech of African
American rappers in a quantitative sense and furthermore that there are many features
of HHSS and AAE that they do not draw on (Cutler 2002a).
We can view this unsystematic use of HHSS features as a form of indexicality.
Irvine and Gal write that “linguistic forms, including whole languages, can index
social groups [and] can become a pointer to (index of) the social identities and the
typical activities of speakers” (2000:37). Thus HHSS, or some assortment of HHSS
features, indexes urban African American street culture, particularly young males and
their activities. With respect to authenticity, there is perhaps also a sense that trying
to sound too black might actually make one less “real” because one is trying to be
something one is not; that is, respecting ethnolinguistic boundaries is an essential part
of “keepin’ it real” because it is an acknowledgment that one is not trying to be black.
Turning now to metalinguistic comments about the meaning of AAE, we can
observe how WHHs discuss others’ reactions to their language use. White hip-hop
artists, particularly MCs like Ivy, must display their ability to perform a number of
verbal genres from freestyling to rapping and battling—genres that have a long tra-
dition in the black community—while being ever mindful of their audience and their
whiteness. But many of the more marginal WHHs who participate in the culture
primarily as consumers may not be as sensitive to linguistic boundaries. PJ is one
such case. In Example 9, he is accused by his friend Jing (a mutual friend of Lien
and PJ who is of Chinese American heritage) of trying to “sound black.”
(9) PJ interviewed by Lien (age 16, 2000)
1 Lien: Okay. Has anyone ever told you that you sound black?
2 PJ: Nah ah. ((i.e., no))
3 Jing: Has anyone ever told you that you try to sound black?
4 PJ: People – people be callin’ me a wannabe, but I don’t know
5 what they Ø talkin’ about, you know. I’m just doing my
6 thing. I’m just handlin’ my business. What I do ain’t nobody’s
7 business, you know what I’m sayin’, except for mine. I
8 handle my own. That’s what I’m about. You know, what I’m
9 about ain’t no – but, hey, I’m – I’m handlin’ my own. You
10 know, I’m livin’ my life the way I want to live. Ain’t nobody
“Keepin’ It Real” 17

11 got to tell me nothin’, you know what I’m sayin’?

12 L: What do you think that means when someone tells you that
13 you sound black?
14 PJ: I mean, I – ain’t nobody ever told me I sound black. This is
15 the first time I hear such – such bullshit. Anybody here want
16 to say anything?
17 J: Yeah. You sound like you want to be black.
18 PJ: Whatever, man. You sound like a wannabe Chinese person.
19 J: What’s your point, kid?
20 L: But he is Chinese.
21 PJ: All right. Well, you might have a point this time
22 L: ((laughs))
23 PJ: All right
24 L: ((laughs))
25 PJ: but, anyway, I’m just – I’m just handlin’ my own. I’m just
26 doing what I got to do, you know. If I have (( )) – it’s a (( )) a
27 free country. It’s like I’m in – I’m in – I’m in Russia or shit.
28 J: I don’t know, but we just got to listen to you all day, you
29 know.
30 PJ: For real, and, yeah, you – and you got to put up with my shit.
31 You got to love it or leave it, ((for)) real.
This example illustrates PJ’s linguistic competence in his use of habitual be (Line
4), the zero copula (Line 5), and negative inversion (Lines 10, 14)—all well-docu-
mented morphosyntactic features of vernacular AAE.
Elsewhere, PJ identifies his own speech as “Ebonics,” which he glosses as the
language of “hip-hop,” but his highly stylized speech prompts his Lien and Jing to
challenge his authenticity. In a blind study, PJ was judged to be African American
by 44 percent of the respondents (N = 64) (Cutler 2002b). An almost equal number
(45 percent) judged him to be Latino; only 11 percent thought he was European
American. These results suggest that PJ is at the very least trying not to sound white.
He shows an awareness that HHSS (or Ebonics, as he calls it) exists and he perceives
this to be what he speaks, but he denies that anyone would think he is trying to “talk
black.” These comments show a certain willingness to erase blackness from Ebonics.
When PJ’s challenge to Jing’s authenticity as a Chinese person falls flat, he resorts
to the argument that America is a free country and that he essentially has the right
to talk any way he chooses. The implied message is that even if his speech is per-
ceived to sound black, it is his right to talk this way.
Speakers who were linguistically more conservative than PJ in their performance
of HHSS were also challenged by their peers about the way they speak. In the next
example, Trix, a young man of Greek American heritage, describes in a discussion
with his friend Eugene (of Russian American heritage), how his present girlfriend
(also of Greek American heritage) did not want to go out with him because he
“sounded black.”
(10) Trix interviewed by Eugene (age 18, 2000)
1 Trix: Well, I’ve been going out with my girlfriend now for like
2 eight months; and like it was hard to get her because the
3 reason she didn’t want to go out with me is because she said I
4 sounded black, like she –
5 Eugene: And that was actually a big – a really big thing for you?
18 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

6 T: Yeah. You know, like I would always like say, “Son this, son
7 that,” you know – “Get the fuck out of here,” this and that,
8 you know, but it’s not that she like – she’s like, “It doesn’t go
9 on you, you know. It’s just not – like it doesn’t fit your
10 character,” ’cause like I’m a really nice person, you know;
11 and I’m – I’m not like the type of person to be like hardcore
12 and stuff like that. So, whatever, she just like – yeah, I’ve
13 been told I act – I act black; but that – at that time was like
14 that’s how all my friends were acting, you know, so it was
15 like my friends were acting like that, I was acting like that,
16 you know?
Trix’s girlfriend apparently thought he was too nice a person to talk the way he did
and her criticism made him aware of the need to shift his speech according to the
context. In terms of language ideologies, these attitudes reveal an iconic link for
some whites between AAE and roguish behavior. Spears (1998) notes that the link-
age of blackness to profanity stems in part from the media’s obsession with a par-
ticular segment of black street culture (e.g., gangster rappers like 2 Live Crew); this
ideological link is little affected by the fact that profanity itself has become increas-
ingly normalized across racial and cultural boundaries.
The reactions they get from adults and peers make WHHs sensitive to the
social meanings attached to HHSS and AAE. Although their knowledge of com-
municative competence within the African American speech community is often
limited, WHHs are quite sensitive to mainstream societal norms about when it
is inappropriate to use such varieties. Speakers almost uniformly acknowledge
the need to switch in the presence of adults or in the workplace.The statements
WHHs make about language use are particularly revealing with regard to language
ideologies. In these excerpts, the language of hip-hop or “Ebonics” becomes an
icon for a particular class of people. It is constructed as a language or style of
the street that will prevent one from getting a job and having a secure future in
the “real world.” This attitude stems in part from the widely held belief among
whites that language is a legitimate reason to deny employment, particularly to
African Americans (cf. Morgan 2001a) and that if only they would change the
way they speak, they would have better job opportunities.10
Although WHHs flirt with a covertly prestigious language, they become more and
more aware of the potential personal consequences of continuing to use it as they
grow older. Bourdieu (1991) predicts that young people with linguistic capital (i.e.,
access to the prestige language) will eventually embrace this identity and the “material
and symbolic profits” it can secure them. Most of the WHHs in this study possess
a high degree of sociolinguistic awareness, and we might well expect many of them
to begin to alter their speech in the coming years. The subject of my first case study,
Mike (discussed in Cutler 1999), is one example. As the transitional to college drew
nearer, Mike’s speech became less stylized and he strove for a more clean-cut look
in the way he dressed. These shifts were part of a long process that began in ado-
lescence when he openly flirted with black cultural markers via hip-hop and extended
to his eventual recognition of the limitations placed on him by his own cultural roots.
“Keepin’ It Real” 19

Conclusion

This study has explored the ways in which WHHs discursively construct them-
selves as authentic within hip-hop in their discussions of realness, race, and language.
The examples presented above illustrate semiotic processes in several ways. The
perception that true hip-hop comes only from the ghetto reflects an essentialist per-
ception held by many non-African Americans that most black people also come from
the ghetto. A dichotomy is thus instantiated between the black ghetto, which is reified
as the authentic locus of hip-hop, and the white suburbs or nonghetto areas, which
are fake or inauthentic. Fractal recursivity is played out at the level of practice when
WHHs try to act like urban gangsters or when they play up their connections to
certain neighborhoods (e.g., Ghetto Thug’s claim that he doesn’t “chill” in Forest
Hills where he lives with his parents). There is further recursive dichotomization
when WHHs separate themselves from other WHHs whom they construct as less
“real” than themselves.
The emergence of white rap artists like Eminem has made it easier for WHHs to
establish their authenticity, but this process is complicated by the fact that hip-hop
was and continues to be perceived as an African American cultural form. Unlike in
some other countries where hip-hop is effectively a celebration of blackness often
in the absence of black people (cf. Bennett 1999), WHHs in New York City coexist
and often interact with African American hip-hoppers in the streets and subways.
Hip-hop’s rootedness in underprivileged urban African American communities as
well as its inherent antiestablishment ideology casts the participation of privileged
white youth who represent part of that establishment into stark relief. Within hip-hop,
the unequal black–white binary is subverted; blackness emerges as normative and
authentic and whiteness—usually the unmarked invisible category—becomes visible
and marked. The street and the imagery it conveys loom large in the collective
hip-hop consciousness and many within the hip-hop movement struggle with what
role the street should play in the movement’s ideological message. The contrasting
interpretations of realness found in WHHs’ discourse reflect this ongoing debate.
With regard to language, the complex relationship that WHHs have to hip-hop and
HHSS challenges the idea that particular language varieties are the sole domain of
particular groups. And although the linguistic practices and ideological stance of
some WHHs contest and downplay racial difference, those of others seem to demand
the erasure of blackness and reinforce white privilege.

Notes
Acknowledgments. I am deeply indebted to Mary Bucholtz, John Singler, Bambi Schief-
felin, Renée Blake, Greg Guy, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions in shap-
ing this article as well as to the many young people who contributed to this research as con-
sultants and research assistants.
1. Of the interviews presented here, I conducted two, those with Ivy and Benny. Bobo was
interviewed by his classmate Kitoko, Ghetto Thug was interviewed by his friend Andrew, PJ
was interviewed by Lien, who knew him through their mutual friend Jing, and Trix was inter-
viewed by his classmate Eugene. All of the research assistants are of European American
heritage except Kitoko, who is African American. Pseudonyms are used throughout to pro-
tect the identities of the speakers. Ghetto Thug was the only speaker in the present study who
chose his own pseudonym.
20 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

2. In particular, Sweetland’s study contradicts Labov’s (1980) assessment of “Carla,” a

13-year-old white girl who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in New Jersey
and was thought by many listeners to speak AAE. Labov’s (1980) view of Carla’s language
as inauthentic was based on the observation that she had not acquired the tense and aspect sys-
tem of AAE. Sweetland’s evidence shows that white speakers can acquire such features and
can be accepted as members of the AAE speech community.
3. Habitual be is the use of the uninflected form of the copula as a marker of habitual or
repetitive action. Multiple negation is defined as the negation of the auxiliary verb and all in-
definite pronouns and quantifiers in the sentence, as in He don’ do nothin’ for Standard Eng-
lish He doesn’t do anything (Rickford 1999:8).
4. The percentages for each speaker’s use of each variable are as follows:

Verbal
r-Ø monoph. t/d -s Ø
Speaker (VrC) N /ay/ N deletion N absence N Copula N
Benny 16% 204 64% 198 56% 77 10% 20 0% 38
Bobo 0% 33 39% 142 49% 39 0% 21 0% 30
Ghetto Thug 72% 161 94% 162 81% 36 3% 34 10% 25
Ivy 26% 272 70% 220 63% 127 11% 19 15% 37
PJ 82% 302 86% 170 77% 65 10% 50 42% 36
Trix 59% 315 58% 164 66% 115 0% 22 0% 43

5. One of my consultants in New York City recounted that there were at least five all-
white crews on Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side: NUTS (Never Underestimate the
Style), 10-7, CWB (Crazy White Boys), HFL (Hoods for Life), and Breeds.
6. Transcription conventions are as follows: [ : overlapping with previous turn; – : false
start; CAPITALS: loud or emphatic enunciation; (( )) : speech inaudible; stage directions;
nonverbal utterances; bold: form or content relevant to discussion; italics: ironic or emphatic
tone.
7. Andrew is a native New Yorker from Queens of Jewish American descent.
8. In this transcript, nigga(s) does not refer to a racialized category.
9. Further information about Ivy (a.k.a. Invincible) and her crew the Anomolies can be
found at the following websites: http://members.aol.com/Intelexx/Anomolie.html;
http://www.vinylexchange.com/backishez/anomback.html.
10. Morgan (2001a:58–86) refers to racist language tests used to weed out potential em-
ployees based on the belief that AAE usage reflects ignorance, criminality, and immorality.

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