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Hip-Hop, It’s Time to Slam The Door Closed on White Girls Like Miley Cyrus

Lock it, then throw away the key.

Here we go again.

The blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, guitar-stringing, quintessential American sweetheart crept out of the window of her little house on the prairie to sneak on over to the hood. Sorry Daddy, little Miley Cyrus is all grown up, and this blonde bombshell proved it with an edgy new haircut, a crisp Michael Jordan jersey, a 101 course in twerking and an invite to the cool Black kids’ cookout.

But, in the words of Drake, the moment she stops having fun with it, she’ll be done with it. And just as quickly as hip-hop embraced the former prepubescent Hannah Montana with open arms, that she was.

Squeezing every penny, molly, blunt and Black cosign that she could from hip-hop’s hug, little prodigal child Miley tore off a ghetto chapter for her puberty scrapbook, trekked back to her “rootsy” country sound, and left the rap scene high and dry. In an ironic synchronism of sorts, we caught wind of it just a day before the obligatory public dragging of her fellow culture vulture, Yes Julz. Just like Miley, the social media “kween” was awarded an undeserving platform, for nothing more than a fat a** on a white female body.

Nevermind the fact that she’s only doing what 2.8 billion other 25-year-olds are with a Snapchat: collecting filtered selfies and recording clips with their modish cliques mouthing the latest hit rap single word-for-word. So you’ll have to excuse me for finding no surprise in the entitlement leading her to poke around with the N-word like she didn’t know any better. You’ll then need to accept my apologies for not batting a single eyelash at her tearful Snapchat apology and her loss of two hosting gigs that slipped between the cracks of her… “joke.”

Yet some of us still RSVP white girls like them, who forge a signature onto Black culture and sport “n**ga” around like the latest pair of J’s, right into the culture. Meanwhile, these same white girls will bring their silence as a plus-one when Black America is gunned down by their less-tolerant kinfolk.

Yes, it’s a sad, sad story and even harsher disappointment for those choosing to defend the Mileys and Yes Julz of urban society. Unfortunately though, it’s an all too familiar season finale in the latest episode of White Girl Meets Black World.

No, Miley, nobody’s upset that you’re “getting back to what you know.” It’s actually a far better look on you than whatever you called yourself doing in hip-hop. I certainly would have no complaints about you strapping up your boots and trading in your blonde faux locs for pigtails to quietly walk out of the door that was selflessly opened for you. But what has pissed off those of us who can’t flip the Black culture switch on and off whenever we enter the room is the face-spit that followed:

But I also love that new Kendrick [Lamar] song [“Humble”]: “Show me somethin’ natural like ass with some stretch marks.” I love that because it’s not “Come sit on my dick, suck on my cock.” I can’t listen to that anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much “Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock” -- I am so not that.

How dare you mask your hip-hop degradation in “girl power.” Just because you chose to swim in the shallow end of hip-hop––using inflatable “c**ks” to keep you afloat while making an attempt at relevancy––doesn’t mean that it owes you or your mainstream white feminism a damn thing. The salute to Kendrick Lamar’s “stretch mark” line from “HUMBLE.” was a cute touch, too. But ultimately, it did nothing more than further demonstrate your lazy, hollow understanding of hip-hop that much of your Whiteness blinds you from.

Perhaps, it would have been much more fitting to dissect the DAMN. project as a whole. Maybe touch on its connections to the socio-political climate. Maybe discourse on its testament to Black manhood, and more narrowly, the dichotomy of underprivileged ghettos and projects among America. I might have even took surprise at a mention to your former collaborator who produced the track, Mike-WiLL-Made-It, and dialogue about how well his sound further purported the single.

But just as you’ve done with all of our culture, your limited comprehension of our Blackness to the one thing that served you best, and you ran with it. My best guess from the looks of your new denim shorts, cowboy boots and wooden horse-y is that you never cared to. Or, maybe it was your Whiteness that obstructed a truer sense of the culture before deciding to trespass into it. Whatever it was, let your 30-day free trial with Black culture be a lesson for you and and all other “Black at heart, authentic hip-hop admirers:” hip-hop is for us, by us, and we never wanted nor needed you to validate it.  

So now as in the words of Nicki Minaj, more relevant now than ever before, “Miley, what’s good?”

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