“BLACK MAN RUNNIN AND IT AIN’T FROM THE POLICE”: RAP MUSIC, POLITICAL ENDORSEMENT AND BLACK IDENTITY PAOLA ATTOLINO Introduction In a 1996 song called Changes, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, talking about America, said: “and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president”. This was the case until November 2008, when the election of Barack Obama as the 44 th President of the United States has made Martin Luther King’s dream come true. In the months leading up to the election, many African American rappers endorsed Obama’s candidacy, giving rise to a new Hip Hop genre called Obama Rap. Political endorsement is unusual for rap music, a genre strongly related to the experience of race and American Blackness in particular. Rap has always been against the Establishment, marked by disruptive lyrics expressing black America’s rage and discontent. Applying the Appraisal Framework 1 to a small corpus of rap songs, the present paper investigates to what extent lexical choices, linguistic uses and the employment of pragmatic strategies in the lyrics of so-called Obama Rap may reveal a sort of reconciliation between rap music and politics, in an attempt to discuss whether or not a new idea of (Black) American identity is emerging. When theorizing about identity, there is a common dualism between essentialism and social constructionism. Essentialist theories consider identity as something taken for granted, located ‘inside’ the person, whereas constructionist approaches view identity as a socially constructed and negotiated category, investigating “how people perform, ascribe and resist identity” (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 11-12). In view of the significant potential of rap lyrics for social insights, a constructionist approach will be adopted, and special attention will be paid to the negotiation of identity in this particular discourse context.