If you haven't figured it out, I love Das Racist. Since I came across their music several months ago I have been listening to them almost exclusively. I do take issue with some of their content which I find, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise tasteless, but for the most part I think they are genius AND I really appreciate that they are creating rap that gives me something to chew on and that they refuse to take themselves seriously. My friend Josh once asked, "but isn't that just the worst kind of hipsterism?" Usually, I would agree with Jay Smooth who once, speaking specifically about hipster brand-irony, defined cowardice as a refusal to take anything seriously. However, in this case, I disagree. Refusing to define oneself or take oneself seriously can be really liberating. Surely, sometimes, often when done by people in power, it has been a way of evading responsibility for one's actions (or RACISM, sexism, etc.) i.e." Don't take the fact that I wore blackface to a Halloween party so SERIOUSLY, bro. I didn't mean anything by it." However, when you are brown or otherwise marginalized, people always want to define you or get you to define your self, so they can "know" you, in the colonial sense.
For example, as a mixed race woman, people always ask me "what I am"? I could tell them, but I prefer to let them WRITHE in their discomfort of NOT KNOWING. Because the way they act towards me or WHAT THEY THINK THEY KNOW ABOUT ME will change based on how I answer the question. If I say, I'm Black, they will usually become more comfortable because they think they know something about Black people and have some idea of how they think they should proceed now that they know they are interacting with a BLACK PERSON. Or if I conflict too much with what they "know" about BLACK PEOPLE, they will tell me I'm not Black. Because colonists get to tell you what you are and aren't. That is their power as colonizing subject (as opposed to the colonized object, i.e. the brown person.)
If I tell them, I'm Lebanese they may respond in a different way, like by telling me about they had had a Lebanese best friend in middle school. (Great! I care! I really do!) The point is, if you don't tell them, they can't know. It's a way of depriving this tiny bit of power from people that enjoy every other power and privilege in every other possible way. Well, sometimes. You don't have to be privileged in every way to "other" somebody or make them feel less than. But in the situation I am describing, the situation of someone asking me "what" I am, I feel they have taken power away from me by putting me under the microscope, and the only opportunity I have to seize agency is to refuse to answer. To make them SQUIRM.
And that's what I love about Das Racist. They make us squirm. While they are not dodgy about naming their ethnically, they refuse to use their music as a soapbox, to make a political stand and stick by it, their music is inherently political to those that choose to acknowledge its racial implications. One could argue that for anyone to speak from a marginalized subjectivity (i.e. being brown) is inherently political. (I was going to exclude Dinesh D'Souza and Ward Connolly from that statement, but their positions are political too, just not in the way I would like them to be.) Anyway, by talking about being brown, DR resists assimilation, which is inherently political. By naming racism, i.e. in "Shorty Says," DR draws attention to its continued existence in an allegedly "post-racial" America, which is also political. Their message is not always consistent, it's not even always anti-racist, ("smoke till my eyes turn Chinese"?) but it's it DR's unique way of speaking from their marginalized subjectivities, those of three brown men of varying ethnicities, one that is marked by experiences of racism, which are reflected in their music, BUT NOT MAKING AN OVERT STATEMENT about what sort of racial future we should be moving towards, they make us think without giving us the answers. Kind of like what a good professor does. Some good professors. Anyway, my point is, people freak out because they can't figure these guys out. But that's what makes them so interesting, and what makes their music so unique. So stop analyzing and just listen.
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