Race Consciousness and Support for Affirmative Action in Brazilian Hip Hop?

We’re in Rio! We arrived today and are starting our academic meetings with professors tomorrow. I am going to be researching the role of race and race consciousness in Brazilian hip hop. Specifically, I will examine the ways in which it exemplifies or challenges the supposed national ideology of racial democracy, and how it promotes or discourages affirmative action policies. My perspective is that hip hop culture is an important producer of critical approaches to daily norms and a way to understand the racial inequalities that are increasingly difficult to hide with the racial democracy ideology (the idea that the country is all about nationalism and democratic equality between classes and races in Brazil).

For my first question, my premise is that hip hop does challenge the purported national ideology of Racial Democracy. From what I have learned so far, it seems that Brazilian hip hop has a large political component that discusses race and inequality. One DJ stated that rap has been the most dominant aspect of hip hop culture in Brazil because of rap’s “incisive way of relating the reality of poor black people.” Such a statement is a direct challenge to the existence of racial democracy. I will also examine whether different types of hip hop deal with race in different ways. For example, a dissertation on hip hop and funk in Brazil observes that the white, more prosperous artists do not address race as explicitly as the music from the favelas. These differences might tell us something about how views on race diverge along racial and class lines.

I do net yet have a strong presumption for whether hip hop raises discussions and consciousness about affirmative action programs and creates more support for them. I’ve learned from initial conversations and research that the music in the favelas is different from the music coming out of more prosperous areas. There are also government programs with grants aimed at developing hip hop skills and culture in the favelas. If the hip hop in the favelas is race conscious and proposes remedies for the oppression of Black Brazilians, this might be an outlet for a perspective “from the bottom.” I want to examine the audience of this music and see if the favela musicians’ perspective can affect other peoples’ consciousness about racial inequality and the need for affirmative action programs. Music can be a powerful tool for creating cultural and political identities and beliefs – if hip hop addresses race and the need for state action to remedy inequality, and if people are responding to its message -- it can be a vital component of the movement for affirmative action.

I will compare my research in Brazil to Black music in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s that helped to advance ideas of Civil Rights and to shape Black identity as powerful and beautiful. This music was part of a cultural phenomenon of Black identity, expression, and influence in which artists stood up against white hegemony, specifically whiteness as the standard against which Black people had to judge themselves. Black American artists were proclaiming pride in their own identity while tying it their call for racial justice. I will see if this phenomenon is also reflected in Black Brazilian hip hop. For example, I will examine whether the overt discussions of race in Brazilian hip hop constitute a challenge to the whitening of Brazil and the related notion of racial democracy, and whether these expressions are linked to calls for racial justice that demand policies such as affirmative action.