You Never Thought that Hip Hop Would Take It This Far: The Effects of Infantilization on Black Artists & Individuals

“I know how to build a business. First you gotta get the black people to do it to get the white people to do it. Then you gotta get the black people to stop doing it. One step at a time” (The Office).

This is a quote from season 8, episode 9 of The Office, spoken by Dwight Schrute who, in this specific episode, was discussing his marketing strategy in the building of his newly started gym business. As the nature of The Office goes, this quotation was an ironic commentary on the societal notion of black culture and the black gaze as trendy, fleeting, and yet a key factor in the popularization and mainstreaming of commodities and cultural components. I came across this quote as I was using re-watching The Office in its entirety (for the fourth time now) as a frequent and convenient study break during the writing of this paper. In the context of this paper, this quotation so starkly stood out to me as an apt and satirical commentary on one of the very driving forces behind the infantilization of hip-hop and black individuals and culture on a larger societal and political scale. For, the infantilization of blackness is synonymous with society’s stripping of agency from the black individual. Society infantilizes black culture and its precipitates in order to attempt to remove a group consciousness and, thus, the ability of that group to form a coherent identity in the eyes of a majority white paternalist society. This paternalist approach results in a lack of recognition of the identity and agency of black individuals and artists. A key driving factor in the infantilization of blackness by society and institutional figures is the view of white paternalists that components of black culture (i.e. language, behavior, media) are frivolous and immature, and thus something that is ephemeral and not worth long-term investment. This sentiment eases the process of commodification of black bodies, intellectuality, and art, and in turn leads to disenfranchisement and exploitation.

The title of this paper, “You Never Thought that Hip-Hop Could Take it this Far”, is a quote from the legendary Biggie Smalls’s song “Juicy”. I chose this title because I thought it an apt summation of society’s expectation of hip-hop as ephemeral trend versus the true potential and achievements of hip-hop in establishing and promoting a sense of a complex black cultural identity. Society never thought — and to this day still does not think — that hip-hop could take it so far as to be a critical component of black art, intellectuality, and identity. That said, this paper will discuss the paternalistic strategies in the infantilization of blackness, the beneficiaries and victims of this agenda, and its role through the lens of hip-hop.

The infantilization of black culture, and hip-hop more specifically, is an active agenda by white paternalists. Paternalism, as defined by The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is “action limiting a person’s or group’s liberty or autonomy which is intended to promote their own good” (Dworkin). White paternalist philosophies date all the way back to American slavery during which white slave owners actively and overtly removed the liberty and autonomy of black people to the benefit of the Southern economy and to the physical and institutional detriment of black individuals. While slavery may be long gone, this white paternalist philosophy remains alive and well. This is evident in the use of black culture as a marketing strategy in institutions like sports, gentrification, big business, and popular culture. Major political and corporate players, to this day, very actively infantilize black culture with the intention of stripping away a general black consciousness and formation of identity, and thus the recognition of the agency of black people. That said, this is a double-fronted agenda. The perpetuation of infantilized black culture makes way for profit off of the backs of black individuals without the commitment of long-term investment — a hyper-commodification of black bodies and minds.

In her book, Black Looks: Race & Representation, bell hooks speaks on the role of consumer cannibalism in the contextualization of the identity of the ‘Other’: “The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated via exchange by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization” (hooks). She elaborates on the ways in which the differences of the ‘Other’ are eradicated through the process of continuous and vicious consumption which leads to the lack of recognition of the ‘Other’s’ history and decontextualization of their identity. In the context of hip-hop, the ‘Other’ is black hip-hop artists, whose ‘difference’ is embodied by black and hip-hop culture. This ‘difference’ eases the process of commodification of that very culture, and the increased commodification, in turn, leads to the decontextualization and lack of concern with the identity of the artists themselves. An infantilized culture is a culture which, in the eyes of society’s majority, lacks the maturity and agency to make decisions for itself, and thus a culture convenient for exploitation, commodification, and marketability.

Within the discourse of visual culture theory, this notion plays into the conversation of the gaze and its effect on high art versus low art. The gaze, as defined by Sturken & Cartwright’s Practices of Looking, is “the relationship of looking and being looked at in which the subject is caught up in dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people” (Sturken & Cartwright). The gaze has significant impact on what is considered by society to be high art, or art that “only an elite can appreciate”, versus low art, or “commercially produced mass culture presumed to be accessible to lower classes”. White paternalism views aspects of black culture such as behavior, language, and media as immature, frivolous, and fleeting, and thus ripe for mass production for the “entertainment” of society, and nothing deeper or more introspective than that. On an episode of Dr. Mark Anthony Neal’s “Left of Black” featuring UCLA Professor Uri McMillan, Ph.D., Neal and McMillan discuss the differing ways in which the gaze plays out in the careers of Grace Jones and Nicki Minaj, both of whom actively utilized physicality in their art. During this conversation, Dr. Neal quite aptly sums up the key difference between the two: “I think, because of the white gaze that Grace Jones had, that, even if folks were embracing her, they took her seriously as an art entity. Nicki didn’t get produced by that same white gaze, and I think sometimes we’re apt to toss her away as an artist when she clearly is doing something much more complicated than being a female rapper with a big butt”. Here, Dr. Neal laments the societally-driven and diluted view of Nicki Minaj as “a female rapper with a big butt”, stating that it strips away and infantilizes the complexities of her identity and agency for the sake of marketability and mass consumption.

So as to not stray too far into the realm of the theoretical and abstract, one must provide concrete examples of the agenda of infantilization by white paternalist institutions, of which there are many. One of the largest institutions that may serve as a microcosm of society in the discussion of infantilization for the sake of commodification is the sports industry, especially the NCAA, NBA, and NFL. Shaun Harper, Ph.D.’s Black Male Student Athletes and Racial Inequalities in NCAA Division I College Sports states that, “Perhaps nowhere in higher education is the disenfranchisement of black males students more insidious than college athletics” (Harper). He backs up his argument with statistics on high black representation on revenue sports teams at schools with underrepresented black populations, declining male student-athlete graduation rates, the exorbitant salaries of Division I coaches, and more. It is in the NCAA arena that black athletes are infantilized into physically capable pawns lacking intellectual agency in a much larger corporate game, and are kept from being able to reap the full benefits and rewards of their labor (because it is going into the pockets of their coaches). The NFL revels in this systematic disenfranchisement as well, as evident in the fact that the impetus for the reintegration of the NFL, post ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ of the 30s and 40s, was largely due to the fact that black bodies are physically capable and supremely marketable in the eyes of money-hungry GMs. In terms of the NBA, I’ll reference Dr. Neal’s lecture on the notion of “cerebral mastery” bestowed upon Larry Bird and the pigeon-holing of Magic Johnson into a purely physical talent. The infantilization of the black athlete caused society to view Magic as a brute talent lacking intellectual agency when the truth of the matter was that Magic, while supremely physically capable, could barely jump and had a higher basketball IQ than Larry Bird (Lecture Notes).

Sociopolitical institutions and racist policies also stand to gain from the infantilization of blackness. The agenda of the school-to-prison pipeline benefits from the infantilization of black individuals as justification for prison-like school atmospheres and rules that turn black kids into self-fulfilling prophecies. Such infantilization instills in the minds of some educators that black kids are incapable of higher learning and thus not worth the time to teach. That said, education itself, on a larger scale, stands to lose from said infantilization as it increasingly and statistically fails young black kids. Mass incarceration, similarly, stands to gain from the infantilization of blackness in that it pushes the narrative that black men (as young as teenagers) should be held accountable enough to be tried and sentenced (often unjustly) as grown men, and yet, once sentenced, these men are stripped of their agency and deemed incapable of reform. All of a sudden, these men are infants in the eyes of the law, incapable of positive improvement and reform — an overt cover by the American government to hide the true covert reason for our lack of a reformative prison system, which is that those black prisoners fuel the lucrative prison industrial complex.

Similarly to the way in which sports can act as a microcosm for society, hip-hop can act as a microcosm for black culture in America. Thus, just as blackness is infantilized on a national sociopolitical scale, hip-hop and the blackness that made it is highly infantilized in the arena of mass media and entertainment. Hip-hop is a genre that epitomizes and pushes to the extremes the very factors of black culture that white paternalists consider frivolous and, thus, unworthy of a complex identity, agency, or serious investment other than as marketable and trendy entertainment. Hip-hop as a genre is also very much characterized by the black gaze which, as addressed earlier in this paper, marks the genre in the eyes of society as low art, prime for mass production and entertainment, NOT for serious introspective and intellectual discourse and analysis. Based on these premises, infantilization and the decontextualization of artist identities becomes an agenda of white sociopolitics due to their frivolous, disposable, entertainment-only sentiment toward black culture.

I also believe, however, that this infantilization is a reactive agenda by white paternalists bred out of fear of the formation of a cohesive black identity and consciousness that white supremacy that has worked so hard for so long to suppress. I believe this very fear is brilliantly described in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which Douglass recounts his slave master’s response to his wife’s teaching Douglass how to read: “‘Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.’” (Douglass). Just as learning provides the slave with an opportunity to free him or herself through the formation of intellectual identity and agency, hip-hop culture provides a space for the proliferation of black culture and circulation of black knowledge and a cohesive black consciousness. Knowledge is power and the the infantilization of hip-hop culture is an effort to actively suppress a platform for the common knowledge and culture of black people.

Similar notions can be said about rock ’n’ roll music which, like hip-hop, is among some of the most mainstream of genres. As goes the popular discourse on rock, figures like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley are often considered the kings and or masters of the genre. However, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and more are often left out of the discussion of rock “mastery” even though these individuals are considered among the originators of the genre.

In conclusion, hip-hop and, on a larger scale, black culture is infantilized by American society in order to facilitate the commodification of such culture because it is seen as a frivolous and disposable, yet entertaining, faction of society which can be exploited through its marketability and appeal to the masses. White supremacy and the institutions that uphold it perpetuate the infantilization of black culture, and hip-hop more specifically, out fear of a common black consciousness, agency, and sense of self. To intertwine this point with the context of Douglass’s writing, hip-hop culture is (metaphorically) the ‘education that will ruin the slave’; in other words, it is the relatable black experience and common knowledge that will allow for the psychological liberation of black people and toppling of the racist institutions which enslaved them in the first place. And, with that, I will close with a quote:

“Is hip-hop just a euphemism for a new religion? — The soul music of the slaves that the youth was missing?” -Kanye West (Georgeous)