Introduction

Eminem is a hip-hop musician of the finest caliber. Most befitting would be to label him a maestro – a beast on the mic. His lyrical dexterity commands attention and respect. Simply put, he is a veritable virtuoso in the genre of hip-hop. Though Eminem's music is generally known to offer enchanting displays, it has also, to a certain degree, displayed social awareness. As Glenn Fosbraey observes, "Eminem has used his platform to speak out on social, political, and racial issues" (143). Particularly important is how he has used his music to perform cross-racial solidarity, speaking about and against the sociopolitical mistreatment of Black people in America. This practice deserves careful examination, especially questioning whether Eminem's work constitutes an act of voice lending or whether it reinscribes the very systems of domination it seeks to critique. Such an undertaking promises to help articulate an ethical compass for those within the white majority group who seek, with solemnity, to join racialized communities' efforts at social transformation, at constructing a more equitable world.

Defining Voice Lending and Its Parameters

Voice lending is a concept that was introduced in an interview titled "Decoloniality: Interview with Dr. Walter Mignolo & Patrice Naiambana," wherein Rod Sachs interviewed the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo and the African performing artist Patrice Naiambana. From this interview, voice lending emerged as a decolonial concept that describes "an act one performs on behalf of another as a response to a perceived need." To clarify the parameters of the concept, four steps that one must take were introduced: "understanding the Other, accepting the Other, embracing the Other, and practicing inclusivity" ("Decoloniality"). Although these steps were not fully expounded in the interview, I will, thinking together with the interlocutors from the interview, ruminate on them here. Understanding entails a comprehension of the worldview perspective of the Other; accepting requires acknowledging the full humanity of the Other. One can only accept another human being by first recognizing them as such – as human. Therefore, anyone who rejects, alienates, another human being simply refuses to recognize them as a human being. Embracing demands a loving disposition towards the Other, that which eventuates in brotherhood, sisterhood, and comradeship. Practicing inclusivity is the empirical manifestation of the above steps as they form the aggregate treatment of the Other. These are the conditions that give voice lending life. How do they apply to Eminem? To attend to this question, we first need to treat the question – who is Eminem?

The Detroit Ghetto Origins of Eminem

Born Marshal Mathers, Eminem was raised "in a predominantly Black Detroit neighborhood" in the state of Michigan (Fraley 48). Raised by an economically struggling single mother, the hip-hop artist lived in conditions of social blight, which in America are disproportionately reserved for – or, in different parlance, re-served to – the Black community. Located in such spatiality, Eminem grew up immersed in Black culture, made Black friends, forged allyship with Blackness.  It is due to this backstory that I treat Eminem as befitting the grounds for performing voice lending.

His growing up as what mainstream America would call white trash, occupying "the underground of a decaying America where the socially excluded live," trapped in ghetto economic immiseration, granted Eminem an understanding of Black struggle and the views forged from within that position (Laurent 3). He shared with Black America not only economic want, but the conditions of "an absent father" in the household and "minimum wage jobs that ensured the cycle of poverty" (Hasted 34; Keller 165). I would not be mistaken to note that, being in the mire of such circumstances, a young Eminem had proximity to Black pain – being parallel to it but certainly not embodying it – the white skin insulated him from the flame of raw and unfiltered Black experience. His living in the ghettoized Detroit conscientized him to glean with clarity the position of Tupac Shakur when he said, "I'm tired of being poor and even worse I'm Black" ("Changes"); Ice Cube when he said, "I'm sick of being treated like a step child" ("The Nigga Ya Love to Hate"); and Kanye West when he said, "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" ("George Bush"). The point is, Eminem understands Black criticism of America, for he grew up witnessing its provenance.  

Loving Hip-Hop, Loving Blackness

The path one walks determines the kinds of people one meets. Both the poverty-stricken streets of urban Detroit and the symbolic path of a propensity for hip-hop that youthful Eminem walked ensured his meeting with Black youth. He met fellow hip-hop musician MC Proof, whom Marshal Mathers says was his "ghetto pass," "true brother from another mother," and "best friend," in Detroit, also meeting here his other "[B]lack friends" with whom Proof and he would later form the hip-hop group D12 (Hasted 10, 11, 16). These relationships culminated in interracial acceptance, a significant eventuality in a society still smoldering in Jim Crow laws. In other words, Eminem recognized the Black people in his environs as fellow human beings. This fact remains problematic, however, because it reminds us that Eminem, being on the privileged side of W.E.B. Du Bois's "color line," is the one privileged with accepting or rejecting the minoritized Others (125).

Accepting Others is humane, but what is more humanizing is to embrace them, bring them in, literally or figuratively. Being a white individual, Eminem has long demonstrated an embracing of the Black Other through his "association with African Americans over many years" (Keller 161). Even "his entire crew – D12, the Detroit Dozen or the Dirty Dozen" are "African-American, as are his producer Dr. Dre and several longtime friends and colleagues" (Keller 161). Moreover, he has substantively used his record label, Shady Records, to sign Black hip-hop musicians. Examples include Slaughterhouse, Griselda, Boogie, Cashis, Stat Quo, and 50 Cent. Essentially, Eminem tends to spotlight Black talent and help Black artists, as African-American English might say, "feed they family," which he has done perhaps out of a felt allyship with or debt to the Black community, since the hip-hop idiom that made him famous and wealthy is an "African diasporic phenomenon" (Harris 2).

Or he has done so because the talent for hip-hop lies in Blackness; or perhaps for absolution from the sins his forefathers committed against the Black community; or to assuage the "white guilt" of having appropriated a Black musical practice, as white musicians did with "the blues" and with "gospel," for white economic benefit (Keller 169; Bolton). Whatever the case may be, Eminem has done more than simply tolerate the Black Other. He has actively catered to Black interests as well as shown care, respect, and love to Black people.

An embracing of the Other must culminate in practicing inclusion. Eminem champions inclusivity by virtue of incorporating Black hip-hop musicians in his record label, as discussed earlier. Also notable is his use of his "music channel, Shade 45" on Sirius XM to promote the visibility of Black talent, by hiring Black personnel as radio hosts – for example, the famed host Sway Calloway of the "live weekday music show 'Sway in the Morning'" – and by providing an audience both to seasoned and emerging Black artists, since he airs their music and freestyles on such programs. Practical inclusion of Blackness, as shown by Eminem through his business ventures, is critical. This engagement suggests an understanding that if Black lives matter to white people, as some of them profess at protests and marches, and we have seen them, they must matter economically. White people cannot sincerely claim that Black lives matter if, when in a position to do so, they never engage in efforts to help Black people improve financially. Rhetoric from such a white person can only be termed white noise.

Eminem Showcases Concern for Black People

Now that we have observed how Eminem's persona aligns with the conditions for voice lending, we can take stock of his discursive attempts to speak to issues of "Black rights, politics, and activism" and their intricacies (Way 394). Critics have focused on three songs from the hip-hop practitioner's discography that directly speak to the Black struggle in America: "White America," from the 2002 album The Eminem Show, wherein he critiques whiteness and dissects its impact in propelling his musical career in hip-hop to stardom (Fraley 48-49, Keller 169, Dawkins 477); the 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards freestyle entitled "The Storm," an example of "anti-Trump protest" and "populist discourse" that constructs the people as victims of the powerful elite  (Eyerman; Dias; Riazanov; Way 393); and "Untouchable," from the 2017 album Revival, a record in which Eminem critiques the racially separatist policies of America (Isome 85; Fosbraey 148). In conversation with the established critiques, I cast my analysis of these songs in the light of voice lending, reading lyrics under the guide of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (see Huckin).

In his music, Eminem lends his voice to African America saying, to borrow Black writer Kerra Bolton's language in her article "Eminem: A Rare White Artist," "things that Black people have been saying to each other" and to mainstream America for years. Eminem does not disseminate novel epiphanies, not surface as a voice of the white knower discussing independent discoveries about the Black situation. Rather, he enters Black discourse, not with the aim of dispossessing the Black community of its voice, and this point is important to note, given the histories of Black dispossession in America and the world over, but to express solidarity with a community that he has long-standing ties with since his bleak Detroit upbringing.

What's Self-Critique Got to Do with It?

The white lyricist began his attempt at voice lending in a manner important for a white performer to do, to invert the gaze, that is, to turn scrutiny within – to critique the (white) Self, as he does in the earliest of the records under critical consideration here, "White America":

Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself
If they were brown, Shady'd lose, Shady sits on the shelf
But Shady's cute, Shady knew Shady's dimples would help
… look at my sales
Let's do the math: If I was black, I would've sold half
I ain't have to graduate from Lincoln High School to know that
…
I'm like my skin is it startin' to work to my benefit now?

The hip-hop musician discursively constructs whiteness, creates the Self, as notable from the presupposition that whites have blue eyes as he does. His construction of the Self foregrounds a multiplicity of features that are often associated with whiteness. From the blue eyes to being cute, we know the colonial logic that whiteness represents beauty. The artist even deploys dimples as a metaphor speaking to the Eurocentric psychology that whiteness is more aesthetically attractive than other races. Todd Fraley explains that Eminem's "lyrics accent his race instead of denying it" (48). Of primacy is that whiteness is being created here not out of a sheer desire to glorify the Self, but to make it visible, exposable to criticism – self-criticism. "The power and privilege of whiteness" is submitted to criticism primarily through the concession that Black artists may be as skilled as Eminem, but they can only do half of his musical sales, thereby troubling the special treatment of whiteness over Blackness on the recording industry, social, and economic planes (Fraley 37).

By engaging in self-criticism, a white performer creates a transparent ethos, an admission of complicity, essential to constructing solidarity with the Black race. The scholar Frances Kendall has rightly noted that "all of us who are white have white privileges" (63). The shell of structural white supremacy shelters all white people, though, I admit, to varying degrees, because it is undeniable that the shell, again to varying degrees, has some weak, vulnerable spots, such as over the white poor, women, disabled, LGBTQ, and certainly the whites who actively resist the structure, the ones "doing antiracist work" (Sue 714). For Frances Kendall, the degree to which white people have white privilege "varies depending on our gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, physical ability, size and weight, and the like" (63).

If all white people wield a degree of privilege in race relations, they must interrogate that privilege prior to attempts at cross-racial solidarity. Derald Sue, a scholar who studies white allyship in social justice work, asserts that "becoming a White ally means developing an awareness of Whiteness and White privilege" (710). One is better off combating a problem by first realizing (and admitting) when one is a part of it. This gesture is akin to first combating ignorance, hypocrisy, naivety, but more importantly, avoiding confused or confusing antiracist activism, what Paulo Freire might call "ambiguous behavior" (60). Such behavior often textures white liberals, who easily see white power everywhere, only not in themselves. Drustrup et al. affirm that "it is usually very difficult for white people, especially white liberals, to see the parts of themselves that function as oppressors" (966).

From Self-Critique to Cross-Racial Solidarity

Along with or after performing self-critique, this good-willed "friend of the Negro" can lend a voice to Black causes without seeming insincere, even confused or confusing (Clark, qtd. in Warren 24). Perhaps due to an instinctive understanding of this reasoning, after having primarily started off interrogating white supremacy in "White America," Eminem in later records focalizes his protest on particular systems of Black oppression in America. In "The Storm," he turns attention to anti-Black governmental entities, particularly calling out what he regards as a racist American presidency, that of Donald Trump, who was the president then and is the president now. This fact explains why writers have termed the record "anti-Trump" (Eyerman; Dias; Armstrong).

But we better give Obama props
'Cause what we got in office now's a kamikaze
…
Racism's the only thing he's fantastic for

Note Eminem's deployment of an us vs them (him) structure, what Thomas Huckin calls "a Good Guys vs. Bad Guys frame with one group of participants being given favorable treatment over the other" (82). The songwriter does so by invoking a collectivity through the pronoun "we," which he is a constituent of, which while being urged to laud Obamas's (Black) presidency (excellence), also part of the good guys, must confront the misfortune of being subject to Trump's presidency, the bad guy, presupposed as being suicidal or dangerous. Trump's bad-guyness is also evoked in the presupposition that he is only excellent in racism. This framing explains the view of Lyndon Way, that in the freestyle "The Storm," Eminem positions himself as "a spokesperson for 'the people,'" a collective that is antithetical to elite, we could add racist, power (394). If Trump's presidency is racist, as Eminem claims, one could, then, reasonably surmise that it is anti-Black. In America, as in many other regions of the world, a mention of white racism immediately evokes Black oppression, which is not to undermine the oppressions of "other [O]thers," but to foreground that, because Blackness has historically been treated as an antithesis of whiteness, it bears the brunt of racism (Ahmed 2).

In "The Storm," Eminem reasons that Blackness is the object of the racism of Trump's America.

Tiki torches in hand for the soldier that's Black
And comes home from Iraq
And is still told to go back to Africa
Fork and a dagger in this racist 94-year-old grandpa
Who keeps ignorin' our past historical, deplorable factors

The quoted lyrics topicalize the victimization of Blackness in Trump's America. The first sentence carries an intertextual evocation of a specific reference in American culture, the "Unite the Right rally" (Winter; Blout and Burkart; McAuliffe; Ophir et al.), which displayed "scenes of (tiki) torch wielding, swastika bearing and sieg heiling 'alt right' 'activists,' white nationalists and fascists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia on 12 August 2017" (Winter 1). Donald Trump said of this group they "included 'some very fine people,'" according to Rosie Gray in her article "Trump Defends Nationalist Protesters." Eminem links this white nationalist cultural subtext to racism directed toward patriotic Blackness, the soldier who has just fought America's soi-disant wars against terror in Iraq. Evidently, the lyricist finds this an absurdity, as he goes on to presuppose that Black war heroes are being told to go back to Africa, and that this directive is not new; the key word is "still." In fact, the racist discourse "go back to Africa" is an enduring "nativist and xenophobic" term in America, used to trouble, even to delegitimize, African-American belongingness (Bazian 8). Eminem attributes these racist elements against Blacks to President Trump, "exaggerates the president's age, calling him a 94-year-old grandpa" for ridicule (Riazanov 170). Trump must be ridiculed because, as Eminem argues, he continually ignores America's troubled histories of racism against Blacks. All in all, Eminem protests against an America wherein racism overrides patriotism, seeing that Black patriotism does not protect against racism in America's dominant discourse.

Eminem even lambastes that in America Black protest has been targeted with censure, an evident attempt at censoring critical Black voices:

Now if you're a Black athlete, you're a spoiled little brat for
Tryna use your platform, or your stature
To try to give those a voice who don't have one
He says, "You're spittin' in the face of vets who fought for us, you bastards!"
…
F--- that, this is for Colin, ball up a fist!

The lyrics frame Black protest as being subject to condemnation. They allude to Donald Trump's 2017 vitriol against the Black NFL players who, led by Colin Kapernick, began a protest movement that became known as "taking a knee," where they would kneel during the national anthem, doing so in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement (Bolton, "Eminem, A Rare White Artist"). Eminem asserts that such NFL players were offering their voices to Blacks without political voices, an allusion to the bulk of the African-American masses, the ones who are without cushion from racist oppression, that is, as hip-hop might say, "those in the hood or on the corner." Noteworthy is the lyricist's intertextual allusion to the Black Power Movement, through the imagery of the "raised-fist salute, a symbol of [B]lack power" (Blakemore 1). Thus, as he lends his voice to the Black struggle, Eminem does so in solidarity with or in the consciousness of Black power. Perhaps he does this because he feels that Black treatment in America has not seen significant changes since the Black Power Movement, which seems to be an argument he makes in "Untouchable":

As this beat backspins, it's like we're drifting back in
To the sixties, having black skin is risky
'Cause this keeps happening
Throughout history, African Americans have been treated like shit

It is evident that the rapper is of the view that Black treatment in American environs has seen no change since the sixties, the era of the emergence of Black Power. He presupposes that the present mistreatment of Blacks is a replica or continuation of past struggles. The implication is that race relations in America have seen stagnation, are at an impasse, or that the present is simply the past – so much for a civilization that prides itself in the notion of social progression. Is there progress in America if humanity is still stuck in old ways? Eminem might say no – because white/Black relations are still textured by archaic racist systems.

What are those systems? They include the racial profiling of Blacks that Eminem criticizes in the song:

Black boy, black boy, we don't like the sight of you
Pull up on the side of you
Window rolled down, 'profile'
Then we wonder why we see this side of you
Probably comin' from the dope house

Eminem speaks from the point of view of a white police officer, topicalizing the enduring issue of American policing systems' tendency to profile Blacks. The racial profiling of Black people by the police explains why, while there are "high levels of police stops among Americans generally, African Americans are disproportionately subject to police stops" (Benton and Landgrave 72). Due to problematic racial profiling, Mark Benton and Michelangelo Landgrave find that "encounters with the police are sufficient to increase distrust in [even aversion to] the police among African Americans" (18). Perhaps this is the "side" of the Black subject that Eminem alludes to in the lyric "we see this side of you." The profiling of African Americans as criminals is one likely reason of the "disproportionate representation of Blacks in prison" (Blumstein 192). Criticizing this reality, Eminem says in the song, "on you another drug charge, homie, it's back inside for you," thereby presuming that the profiled Black individual, who is about to be arrested, was charged for drugs and imprisoned in the past.

Another problem associated with the racist American policing systems that Eminem also protests in "Untouchable" is the very one that led to the advent of the Black Lives Matter Movement: police brutality against Black people:

And just in case a chase might ensue, we got that tried and true
Pistol drew right at you, we’d be delighted to unload it
In your back, then walk up and lay that taser on the side of you
F----- up, but what the f--- am I to do?
I keep tellin' myself, keep doin' like you're doin'
No matter how many lives you ruin
It's for the red, white, and blue
Time to go find a new one and split his head right in two

These lyrics topicalize the systematic issue of unarmed Black subjects being killed by the police. Bor et al. find that "police killings of unarmed [B]lack Americans have been interpreted by many as an expression of ‘structural racism'" (1). As Eminem presupposes, this issue has devastated a multiplicity of lives. From the family of Tamey Rice to the family of Daunte Right, to the family of Breonna Taylor, to the family of Atatiana Jefferson, to the family of Sean Bell, to (and too) many more.

The police killings of the enumerated figures not only connote police brutality against Black people, but Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the very power of the racist (white) American state "to subjugate [Black] life to the power of death" (39). Why? America does not comprehend that Black lives matter – too. Not only does necropolitics apply to the subjection of Blackness to physical violence, it manifests through symbolic violence, which encompasses Black impoverishment. Assuming a position of a Black person, a practice I subject to criticism later in this essay, Eminem contends in "Untouchable" that "we're strapped financially." The Black condition in America is a condition of poverty. Now, to pose a question that I am convinced many others have asked before, how does a country with the largest economy in the world manage to have a significant portion of its society mauled by the unforgiving fangs of poverty? Blacks are, for the most part, a people forsaken, left in the conditions of socio-economic death in the "internal colony" – the ghetto (Andrews; Clark).

In the lyrics for the song, still assuming a Black point of view, Eminem problematizes the very creation of the ghetto:

Wait, why are there black neighborhoods?
'Cause America segregated us, designated us to an area
Separated us, Section-Eight'd us

The hip-hop artist begins with the assumption that there are Black neighborhoods. In aggregate, the quoted lyrics evoke an awareness of the deliberate "racialization of space in US Cities," a practice primarily meant to proscribe Blackness from intruding into white America, a resultant of apartheid histories such as "White flight" and "racial housing policies" (Zimmer 273; Rothstein 166). It is such histories that made African America subjectable to ghettoization, to internal colonization, to necropolitics.

Pitfalls of Voice Lending in Eminem's Music

Though Eminem attempts to lend his voice to Black America to trouble issues such as those treated above, his attempts have not been without pitfalls. Let us critique the video of "The Storm." As described by Lyndon Way, the video positions Eminem rapping "to the camera, gesticulating and leaping in the foreground," in front of "a group of [Black] men" (394). The implication is, the video textually foregrounds a white person, who is protesting Black issues, while backgrounding Black subjects, the very people with a direct connection to the experience to which the white person speaks, which remains problematic. Thomas Huckin says of foregrounding that the practice is about "emphasizing certain concepts (by giving them textual prominence) and de-emphasizing others," the backgrounded (82). Eminem's foregrounding connotes, then, not only that he "represents himself as a straight-talking, fearless spokesperson for 'the people,'" as Lyndon Way suggests, but for specifically Black people (395). This process creates a plethora of problems for this well-meaning ally of the Blacks in Eminem. The first, a performance of the white savior complex; another, an appropriation of the Black voice; and lastly, a focalization of white visibility and a simultaneous perpetuation of Black invisibility.

White saviorism is the colonial notion that white people are called by nature to save non-white Others from disagreeable human conditions. It is itself a "form of White supremacy" (Sondel et al. 1627). That Eminem would stand in front of a group of Black men while criticizing Black oppression surely reeks of white saviorism. The rapper is positioned as the hope of the Black community. He has come to not only support but to fight for African Americans, especially to fight for the Black men who stand, or, it can be said, hide, behind him. Eminem might have thought that situating a throng of Black men behind his performance in the video would communicate Black support for his attempt at cross-racial solidarity, but this dismally turned into Blackness cowering behind a macho whiteness that positions itself as willing to confront, head-on, systems of Black oppression. This move places the Black men in double jeopardy, being emasculated by America following "the experience of slavery, segregation, and the multitude of forms, including sexual, white racism has taken," as well as being emasculated by an ally (Pinar 860). Where does this leave the Black men? Effectively castrated. In this condition, they are being spoken for, even protected, by the white subject.

Because the Black men in "The Storm" video stand in silence, we can note that the Black voice has been appropriated by the white performer, Eminem. In different language, the white person has literally taken words out of the mouths of Black people, which culminates in a dispossession of voice. Now, as Gayatri Spivak would argue, the subaltern can no longer speak. Worse still, the subaltern, stripped of voice and self-expression, becomes an object, or – to be specific to the Black positionality in the video performance – becomes a mere backdrop for a white performance. Nothing could make a white performance standout more than a black background could.

This point, then, takes us to the notion of how Eminem's video centers white visibility while at the same time creating Black invisibility. In America, as in every region of the globe, the colonial psychology places the spotlight on whiteness – on white people, civilization, culture, thoughts, even dreams (and I mean the American dream), etc. The same logic is perpetuated in Eminem's video performance of "The Storm." It screams: "Here is a prime white hip-hop musician engaging his inimitable rhymes in a noble cause for Black people, who in turn give a nod by standing behind him!" As a result, it can be inferred, Eminem's fans revel in seeing their star rapper shining as he puts his lyrical dexterity to helping a helpless, even hapless, community. Where is that community? Based on what we see in the video – it is in the shadows.

The song "Untouchable" also illustrates the pitfalls of Eminem's effort to lend his voice to the Black community, specifically in the segment wherein he raps from the imagined perspective of a Black man. For a white artist to assume the voice of a Black person inevitably invites trouble. It is a case of what bell hooks terms "a process of 'eating the other,'" a mode of cultural consumption in which dominant whiteness symbolically devours Blackness in order to feel what it is like to be the Other (59). In Eminem's case, this amounts to a form of discursive cannibalism – the act of rapping as a Black subject becomes a way of dominant whiteness engulfing the Black Other and its pain, to feel, and then to speak, as the Black Other itself.

Sarah Ahmed's work on affect and emotion offers further insight here. She suggests that feelings derive from the body's contact with an object, how this fact is read, and how the object "impresses (upon) us," that is, what we take it to mean upon cognition (8). What, then, shall we say happens when white contact with the minoritized Other involves not just empathy, but a total imaginative speaking as the Other? Perhaps the colonial construct of the purity of the white body, an element with pristine pores, we may suppose, makes it conceivable that the white subject absorbs not only the feelings of the Other, but the Other itself (which is perceived as absorbable). Enacting such a case, Eminem's contact with Blackness becomes an act of absorbing Blackness, feeling as a Black person, a form of what scholar Dirk Moses calls "affective colonization" (7). Do white allies who support Black Lives Matter speak in solidarity with Black people, or as though they were themselves Black? I leave this unresolved question to scholars of affect and race.

Transcending Pitfalls

Walter Mignolo has propounded that to engage ethically in decolonial politics, a white person can no longer speak ahead of Others, can no longer speak for Others. He says, "the white person must follow the lead" of Others ("Decoloniality"). The suggestion in our case, then, is that Eminem can no longer make a freestyle rapping in front of Black men, can no longer even make a solo song speaking to the Black experience, and certainly must not make songs assuming a Black position. Why? He does not possess what Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, calls "the fact of Blackness" and might now be called the lived Black experience (82). Black people speak for themselves against issues of Black oppression, which explains why Jose Dias observes that, upon hearing Eminem's freestyle "The Storm," some African Americans argued that they did not "need a white savior" (2). Am I, then, implying that this well-meaning ally of the Blacks, the very one whom I regard as meeting the conditions for voice lending, must now purge the Self of all concern for Blackness?

No. In order to transcend the trap of white saviorism and other pitfalls treated earlier in this writing, he must speak to Black issues only behind Black voices. This performance may take shape in the form of serving as a feature in a Black led record, a Kendrick Lamar, Doechii, Rapsody song, etc. The same goes both for a cypher and freestyle. Serving as a feature, he should not only rap after the lead Black artist, but also in agreement with the issues that the Black artist raises in protest. This approach constitutes a speaking with, rather than a speaking for, the Black Other. Even in this case, Eminem's whiteness will still be visible, but his privilege will likely garner significant attention for the musical piece, thus helping amplify Black activism through the song. As for taking the point of view of a Black person, as is the case in "Untouchable," this practice must be a fructification of naivety. Black people feel for themselves, being themselves; neither they nor their emotions are available for absorption by whiteness.

Conclusion

I have illustrated that Eminem's case is a complicated performance of the politics of voice lending in an era where cross-racial solidarity continues to be both urgent and fraught. His musical work and public gestures demonstrate an earnest desire to fight on the side of the oppressed, of Black Americans, a sincerity grounded not necessarily in guilt, but in lived proximity to Black socio-economic death. That is, Eminem understands the need for white solidarity with Blackness, not as a mere outsider who stumbled upon Black oppression, but as someone shaped by the experience of the ghetto, a locus that sometimes forces a convergence between the struggle of the white poor and Black disenfranchisement. It is out of this experience that he meets the ethical conditions for voice lending, understanding, accepting, embracing, and practicing inclusivity, but not without complications that create a paradox central to this study.

Even as he combats white supremacy, Eminem risks reinscribing it. His whiteness sometimes takes center stage and sometimes possesses Blackness. In "The Storm," Black men become silhouettes to his performance; in "Untouchable," Blackness is absorbed, rather than supported. These are not acts of conscious domination, but rather expressions of unconscious white supremacy – a reminder that whiteness, even when allying, is hard to uncenter. This is the curse of white visibility.

Voice lending, then, must be conceived with humility and care, not as speaking for, nor even merely speaking with, but as an echo from behind, that is, Walter Mignolo's "follow the lead" ("Decoloniality"). A white person who wishes to engage in voice lending must first learn to follow the lead of Black people, who, through lived experience, know their struggle best, and thus, can map their liberatory path best. Voice lending is not about leading, but amplifying. If it were thought of in terms of writing, it would not be a composing of new text, but a making of the Other's text bold. The true test of voice lending lies not in how loudly one speaks, but in how intentionally one chooses to stand – not ahead of, but behind, in support of.

For Eminem, it can be said that he is neither savior nor saboteur, but a well-meaning artist attempting to build bridges across the complex terrain of interracial relations. The task he attempts is behemothic. Although his voice may not heal Black pain, if presented with discernment, it can, at the very least, assist Black voices to be heard louder, clearer, and without obstruction. Perhaps that is the highest calling of the white ally in hip-hop: not to transcend, not to replace, but to amplify from behind the critical truths that Black America has been shouting in perpetuation.

Works Cited 

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, 2014.

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