Race & the Right Wing | James Braxton Peterson on MSNBC

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James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University.

Hip-Hop is Gay: Seeing Mr. Cee

Hip-Hop is Gay: Seeing Mr. Cee

by James Braxton Peterson | special to NewBlackMan

Hip Hop is gay. Not in the colloquial/vernacular sense of ‘gay’ as something negative or deplorable, but gay as in actually gay. I am gay too – about the possibility of actually having a real conversation about human sexuality, human resources and Hip Hop culture. It’s high time that Hip Hop had some real discourse about the homophobia that plagues us socially and I think at this point any other front(ing) is simply a thin veneer for the Hip Hop community’s inability to embrace the sexual reality of this culture that we know, love, and sometimes hate.

Recently, HOT97’s Mr. Cee (ne Calvin LeBrun) was arrested for public lewdness when police allegedly saw him receiving oral sex from another man in his car. According to the New York Daily News this is the third time that (in less than a year) Mr. Cee has been caught/detained for solicitation, loitering and now public lewdness. Even more recently, Mr. Cee pled guilty to lewd conduct in public. As J. Desmond Harris reported on The Root.com, the online response to Mr. Cee’s predicament was typically homophobic and at times downright ignorant. To my mind this is simply more evidence that Hip Hop is gay.

In his award-winning documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, filmmaker Byron Hurt unveils hypermasculinity and homosocialism as foundational pillars in the construction and performance of black masculinity in Hip Hop culture. The film also suggests that some of the rampant hypermasculinity, misogyny, and violent themes are ways in which men attempt to over compensate for their own homoerotic and homosocial desires. As more and more narratives like Mr. Cee’s emerge, the response to the alleged activities/crimes seem to be more indicative of Hip Hop culture than the actual alleged acts in question.

For his part, Mr. Cee originally denied these allegations, shielding himself in a playlist of oddly defensive rap tracks, and ramping up a twitter account so that he can defend himself against the perceived ‘plague’ of being gay in the homophobic world of Hip Hop. There are several situations in the not so distant past that have unraveled similarly in the public sphere. Eddie Murphy was arrested for a rendezvous with a transgendered person and rumors of him being gay have pretty much dogged him ever since. In a more honest discourse we might be able to consider that Eddie is more bi-sexual than gay, or better still, he, like many folk, have sexual preferences that can not simply be defined by hetero/homo terms.

You might also remember that New Jersey governor (McGreevey) who frequented Turnpike truck stops in order to satiate his socially repressed desires to be with other men. Or you might likewise recall Ted Haggert’s scandalous meth-drenched affair with a ‘personal trainer’, or former Senator Larry “wide stance” Craig’s arrest for lewd conduct. Maybe you haven’t seen the self-photograph of a svelte Bishop Eddie Long, in full pose – making a virtual/visual gift for his young targets of seduction. Bishop Long also, very recently settled his case. Mr. Cee is not the first and certainly won’t be the last public figure to be “guilty of” engaging in gay sexual activity.

Yet his recent plea, the responses, defenses and protests tell a powerful story of repression and utter fear of severe social rebuke. For the ministers and senators, their professional anti-gay rhetoric belied their personal gay desires. If we situate Mr. Cee’s alleged activity within the context of a long history of homophobia in Hip Hop – and here I am thinking specifically of the ways in which Wendy Williams stoked the flames of hatred and fear in the very first gay-rapper witch-hunt-like scandal. Nothing really came out of it except for the violent verbal attacks on Wendy Williams and the vehement denials of any rapper ever even having a gay thought.

Seriously, we cannot at this point in time as adult constituents of Hip Hop culture believe that no rapper (or DJ/producer) has or will ever be gay. It just doesn’t add up and this is not to weigh in on how/why you think people are gay – whether you think they are born that way or they somehow ‘choose’ their sexual preferences. Somebody in Hip Hop must be gay, but for me, our exceeding willful denials of this fact simply belies our culture’s repressed gay identity. We’re much like those ministers and senators who protest gay sexuality/marriage just a little too much – or just enough to signal the repression of deep-seeded gay sexual desires.

In Hip Hop this repressive denial often takes the shape of hypermasculine narratives with a no-homo brand of homophobia functioning as the frosting on the cake. Check out Funkmaster Flex’s seething defense of his homie Mr. Cee delivered in response to a rival station’s bit about Mr. Cee’s alleged public fellatio scenario. Flex goes on for at least five minutes straight, berating the entire station, defending Mr. Cee, and intimating that (gasp) there may be some folk at that other station who are actually gay, not (as Flex suggests re: Cee) framed by the NYC Hip Hop police.

But let’s pretend for minute that Mr. Cee is gay. Does that mean that his show, “Throwback at Noon” isn’t hot like fire? Does it diminish his pivotal role as Big Daddy Kane’s DJ? Is Ready to Die any less dope to you now than it was before you thought about the possibility that Mr. Cee was gay? I hope that you answered NO to all of these rhetorical questions and I hope that starting now the Hip Hop community can at last be persuaded to confront its irrational fear of the full range of our community’s human sexuality.

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James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC. Follow him on Twitter @JBP2.

A New Spin on Duke Debunking the ‘Uncle Tom’ myth

from Slam Magazine

We’re pleased to present Prof. James Braxton Peterson’s essay on ‘Uncle Tom – gate,’ which stemmed from ESPN’s Fab Five documentary. He is an Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University and a Duke alumnus. Prof. Peterson contacted us out of the blue and we thought his views were well worth running.

A New Spin on Duke: Debunking the ‘Uncle Tom’ myth.
by James Braxton Peterson / @JBP2

Now that the men’s college basketball season has come to an end I can address some issues/concerns regarding ‘Uncle Tom – gate,’ that have been festering with me a bit – my own consternation being stoked by numerous queries and solicitations of my opinion on these matters from various friends/classmates within the Black Duke alum community. I am a Black Duke alumnus, class of 1993.

In case you missed it, ‘Uncle Tom – gate’ commenced after the debut of the ESPN documentary, Fab Five. In the film, Jalen Rose states the following: “For me, Duke was personal. I hated Duke and I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited players who were Uncle Toms.” Note well here that Mr. Rose is narrating his mindset at the age of 17 or 18 years. He’s describing his mental approach and preparation for the Fab Five’s first encounter with the Duke basketball team and its much valorized programmatic presence in the NCAA’s and college athletics more broadly. For an 18-year-old Rose, the thought of battling Duke on the court was a daunting but welcome challenge.

But the off-court contests, of racial stereotypes, institutional history, recruitment preferences and of class and experiential diversity within the Black community proved to be weighty for his young mind. He was honest if not eloquent in his narrative and I have to say – much like Duke’s drubbing this year at the hands of Arizona, I was not upset by it. Instead I absorbed it with the kind of quiet, confident knowledge that being a part of the legacy of Black folk at Duke requires. When winning is the norm (in any competitive arena) the hate that winning breeds becomes a natural part of the public discourse. It is the grassroots response to the top down media love affair with Coach K, Duke’s elite institutional status, and those consistently copied Cameron Crazies.

Don’t get me wrong. I immediately grasped the anachronistic sense with which Rose deployed the ‘Uncle Tom’ epithet. For points of clarification please note that the conventional meaning of ‘Uncle Tom’ — a Black person (usually male) who is a sellout; someone who exhibits self-hate via subservience to white folk and white supremacy. Malcolm X coined the term in his excoriation of those Black folk, even Civil Rights leaders, who he felt chose conciliation over confrontation. This was not exactly the meaning that Rose was going for or achieved. Rose used the term as a means to express his frustration with the racialized and stratified nature of college basketball (then and now), our society (then and now). If we really wanted to ‘go there,’ we should acknowledge the literary figure of ‘Uncle Tom,’ that famous, cheek-turning, Christian man in bondage, who was actually quite popular before Malcolm and others transformed him into the signifier of Black anti-black identity.

I certainly understood Rose’s remarks as offensive from my perspective as a Black Duke alum, but I did not/do not distinguish the depiction of Duke from the perspective of the Fab Five from the depiction of Duke from the perspective of the early ’90s UNLV squad in HBO’s Runnin’ Rebels documentary from the steady vitriol directed at Duke during this time of year from some of my dearest friends. All paint Duke as a white institutional(ly) Evil Empire – kinda like the way all non-Yankee baseball fans see the Yankees. Say what you want about recruitment preferences, character vs stereotype, etc. – perennial excellence breeds perennial hate. So yes, the loss to Arizona this year still smarts a bit – maybe not as much as Fab Five’s losses in their appearances in the final rounds of NCAA tournament play – but there’s much consolation in the fact that we’ll be back next year and the next year, and the next year… In fact, we’ve been there so much since I graduated in 1993 (after winning back-to-back championships and being in the Final Four ALL FOUR years of my undergraduate experience) that I don’t even fill out brackets anymore – sorry Mr. POTUS. I just put Duke in the winner’s slot.

Read the Full Essay @ Slam

James Braxton Peterson on the Michael Eric Dyson Show

The Michael Eric Dyson Show
Wednesday August 25, 2010
WEAA-FM Baltimore
CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting)

We continue our “Open Mike” series with a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. James Peterson, a professor of English at Bucknell University, author of two upcoming books on hip-hop culture, and self-professed hip-hop scholar. Peterson writes broadly and brilliantly about the underground, the nature of narrative, and the intersection of black expression, social struggle, and popular culture. As we look toward the commemoration of the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, Peterson surveys the culture and political landscape over the years hence, and offers an assessment of the status of black America and its progress toward the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King articulated. From education, politics, and policy, to the arts, religion, and religious institutions, Peterson offers reasoned critical analysis on the most important themes and prominent figures in black American culture, and follows the through line from the civil rights era to the hip-hop generation.
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'Sampling Illmatic' Draws 10,000 Viewers

Webcast of 'Sampling Soul' session attracts 10,000 online viewers

The World Listens In to Class

By Camille Jackson

Thursday, March 18, 2010

On Tuesday evening heads were nodding in a lecture hall on East Campus. But this time, people around the world could tune in and share the class's energy.

A special webcast of the popular spring course, “Sampling Soul,” set a record Tuesday for live streaming video at Duke with an audience of more than 10,000 viewers.

The class is co-taught by Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African American Studies, and Grammy-winning music producer, 9th Wonder. Bucknell English professor James Braxton Peterson, Duke ’93, joined them Tuesday for a discussion of rapper Nas’ 1994 album, Illmatic.

While Neal’s students filtered into Richard White Lecture Hall, students of hip hop gathered online to take in the lecture and offer real-time commentary on Twitter. Minutes before the event started, hundreds of online viewers had announced their anticipation on Twitter.

By the end of the night, the number of Twitter postings for the session almost reached 500. Others emailed dozens of questions ranging from the academic to the absurd.

Neal said the webcast showed the reach university intellectual discussions can have.

“I have always envisioned the study of popular culture and music as the study of public cultures, so it just seemed a natural fit to make a course like ‘Sampling Soul’ available to a broader public,” said Neal, who moderated the discussion.

“Additionally, I take the concept of being a public intellectual seriously, and the work that Professor Peterson, 9th Wonder and myself did during the webcast is the kind of work that public intellectuals should be doing,” he said.

Many viewers wanted to know if Nas himself was watching. Others were drawn by the celebrity of 9th Wonder. The most passionate online audience members debated the merits of “Illmatic” and Nas’ lyricism on Twitter among themselves.

Using Ustream as an online host, Duke’s Office of News & Communications (ONC) has produced webcasts for the past year in the form of online “Office Hours.” The program is usually held on Friday afternoons and encourages viewers to informally submit questions on a particular topic to a featured faculty member. History professor Laurent Dubois’ Office Hours on politics and the World Cup held the previous record for viewership, with 7,900 unique visits.

Tuesday’s class was perhaps the first time a classroom discussion at Duke has been publicly webcast with interaction from viewers through social media. The event demonstrates Duke’s commitment to sharing faculty expertise with a broad audience, an idea that Duke alum Neil Williams, Duke ‘06 appreciates.

“I think these live lectures are awesome and a great way to spread knowledge and the Duke brand to the global community,” said Williams who watched the webcast and tweeted comments. “I think alums would love to see more lectures broadcast on the net, as long as the subject matter is interesting.”

Williams found out about the webcast through 9th Wonder’s Twitter page, which has 30,000 followers.

“He's a trusted name in hip-hop so it would make sense for people to tune in based on his recommendation alone,” Williams said. Both ‘Sampling Soul’ instructors have large followings on the Internet. Neal has a blog, New Black Man, and is also an active Facebook user. He uses these platforms to “help break down some of the boundaries between the so-called Ivory Tower and the rest of the world.”

Adds Neal, “I'm thankful that there are folk at Duke who see the immense possibilities of these kind of experiences.”

© 2010 Office of News & Communications

Sampling Soul and Reading Illmatic

North Carolina Public Radio--WUNC
The State of Things Hosted by Frank Stasio

Hip Hop Generations
Wednesday, January 06 2010

This semester at Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal of Duke's African and African-American Studies Department is joining forces with Grammy Award-winning music producer 9th Wonder to teach a class called "Sampling Soul." It's a look at how the songs that made up the social soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement remain relevant in contemporary culture. Neal also contributed to the new book, Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic (Basic Civitas Books/2010). It's a collection of essays that brings hip-hop scholars together to analyze the early artistry of Nas track-by-track. Bucknell University’s James Braxton Peterson (Duke '93) joins Neal and host Frank Stasio to talk about the importance of "Illmatic" and how it resonates with a new generation of hip-hop artists.

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Philly Po-Po Beatdown--About Race?

from NewsOne.com

Philly-Beatdown Was All About Race
by James Braxton Peterson

It is somewhat disingenuous for Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, a black man, to suggest that Monday night's beat-down of three black men by about half-dozen uniformed officers was not about race. Of course it was about race (and class). Could this 'traffic stop' beating have possibly happened to three white men? I can't even imagine it.

Read Full Essay

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James Braxton Peterson, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC.

James Peterson on the Sean Bell Verdict

You Know How We Do
By James Braxton Peterson | TheRoot.com

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part II)

"Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him" - John Donne

Part one of this essay appeared as a blog on Blackprof during the fall of 2007. At that time, the 'Bell' in the title referred specifically to Mychal Bell of the Jena Six. I serialize the title here not because of my love for Hemingway (or Donne for that matter), but to revisit the theme of death and valueless black life in the criminal justice system. Sean Bell, like Michael Bell before him, did not receive fair treatment under the law. The Bells' lives are seen as less than that of their white counterparts, whether those counterparts be racist high hchool bullies or racially indoctrinated officers of the law. It is interesting that of the officers involved in the shooting, the black cop shot the least, (4 bullets); the mixed-race cop shot 11 times, and the cop of Lebanese decent shot 31 times. I read this sliding scale as corollary to the effects of the racial and social indoctrination or our nation's police forces.

But the deadly confrontation between Sean Bell and his friends with those undercover detectives was not just about race. This confrontation had as much to do with the manifestation of black masculinity in the public sphere as it did racism - institutional or personal. It had as much to do with gender and gender roles as it did with race.

Read the Full Essay @


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James Braxton Peterson is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University and the Founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC .