© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 2/6 (2008): 1783–1800, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00171.x Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop Anthony Kwame Harrison* Virginia Polytechnic and State University Abstract This article reviews the history of scholarship on racial authenticity within studies of rap music and hip hop. The concept of authenticity currently enjoys a central place in sociological work on popular music, subcultures, and racial identity. As a music and cultural form that straddles all three of these fields, the debates surrounding authenticity within rap and hip hop are as contentious as any. Using the year 2000 as an arbitrary dividing line, this article presents the late 20th century foundations of research on authenticity and race within hip hop, then moves on to discuss more recent developments in the academic literature. Despite hip hop scholars’ increased emphases on discourses of space and place, and processes of culture and identity formation, the field continues to be framed through notions of essential blackness, and critical interrogations of white hip hop legitimacy. After providing an overview of the state of the field, it is argued that greater attention to language use among hip hop enthusiasts, and a particular emphasis on hip hoppers who fall outside the black–white racial binary will prove fruitful in reinvigorating these longstanding debates. Ethnographic studies of local underground hip hop scenes within the Unites States are recommended as a logical place to begin. Questions of racial authenticity have dominated sociological research on hip hop (and rap music particularly) since the early 1990s inception of the field. To paraphrase a statement more often made about critics than critical thinkers, people didn’t seemed to pay much attention to hip hop until the extent of its white audience was revealed. The base assumptions surrounding hip hop and racial authenticity have always been that black identity is, by default, legitimate, while white identity is either suspect or invalid. Writing at the start of the 21st century, Bakari Kitwana (2002) took little pause in defining the ‘hip hop generation’ as African Americans born between 1965 and 1984. Meanwhile, many of the most volatile and well-rehearsed debates on the subject have focused on the contested acceptability of white hip hoppers. Few question that white people have played an important role as hip hop artists who have helped to expand rap music’s market, as a dominant demographic within that market, and as key players behind the scenes of the cultural industry machines that have fueled the popular- ization of hip hop’s music and lifestyle (George 1998; Samuels 1991;