Representing race in Mac Miller

Mac Miller is an upcoming rapper with a little talent and a respectable knowledge of hip-hop history. In the video for his song Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza, however, he does little to allay concerns about white appropriation of hip-hop, which one academic recently called "an unambiguously African-American form." The Awl points out that:

He shows that he has black friends in his videos (let's dap each other up on camera!), sports a bunch of awful tattoos, constantly refers to getting high, and displays a nice collection of sneakers.

Most troubling, the video features Mac Miller wandering around an urban environment while a shirtless black teen with a boom-box follows him around. The implication may be that Miller channels authenticity as he pays homage to hip-hop's genesis in the Bronx, but it comes off as yet another instance of a white creator "speaking for" black artists. Michele Wallace writes persuasively in Invisibility Blues of how Stephen Spielberg's big-screen translation of The Color Purple neutered its relevance to the black community. There was the white writer William Dufty ghostwriting Billie Holiday's autobiography, which extended a long lineage of white writers telling the stories of black women.

While these examples don't quite parallel Mac Miller's music video, they do help illustrate his lack of self-awareness about the kinds of discourses (visual and otherwise) that his video engages with.