Whiteness [In]Visible

Eminem and the Politics of White Male Privilege

Abstract

This essay examines Eminem's uneasy relationship with race. He has capitalized on a traditionally African-American art form while emphasizing and simultaneously effacing his own racial heritage. Indeed, one must see Eminem as both black and white in order for his public image to be fully coherent. His speech, gestures, friends, colleagues, economic fortunes, and artistic influences are all Hip Hop clichés while his hair and flesh are stark white. He complains about the difficulty of making it as a Rapper because he is white, and thus invokes the traditional complaint of white labor competing with African-Americans in the workforce, and at the same time admits that his whiteness made him an unprecedented success in the Rap music industry. The essay applies the theories of racial construction to Eminem's lyrics as well as to the film 8 Mile, in which the rapper is impeded in his struggle for success by bias within the African-American Hip Hop apparatus. Thus Eminem is cast in the traditional narrative of the underdog who overcomes doubt and discrimination in order to achieve dazzling success, yet ironically this scenario is played out against a power structure that is the tradition target rather than the perpetrator of discrimination.