bell hooks - critique on the commodification of rap music

so what does it mean when white feminists criticize black male rappers for their misogynist and violent lyrics instead of going after their / (our) own white brethren who are the ones purchasing the music, the demographic the music targets? What does it mean that young white males are the primary consumers of the genre that has the most harmful and derogatory lyrics? That they get off on listening to lyrics / watching videos that objectify and demean women and perpetuate violence, black women for the most part, as a way to prove masculinity?

Interestingly, author Bakari Kitwana offers an alternative reading in Why White Kids Love Hip Hop, stating that the subversive socio-political critiques in much old school and underground hip hop lyrics resonates with many white youth who are disillusioned with the capitalist white supremacist society they have grown up in...

It's important to remember is that mainstream hip hop is VERY different from old school and underground hip hop, and to conflate the two by saying that hip hop is this or that is not a sufficient analysis. Hip hop generally just refers to music with a funky beat with a bpm around 90 and rapped lyrics... the content of such lyrics are highly variable.

Another thing that we see happening in mainstream hip hop videos is the reemergence of racial hierarchies, with the majority of "video vixens" being of a very light complexion with long straightened hair, sometimes even blond. Several hip hop feminist scholars have asked where are all the dark-skinned women?? Sharpley-Whiting, author of Pimps Up, Ho's Down, comments that "the vast majority of the young women in these videos are either fair-skinned, ethnically mixed, or of indeterminate ethnic / racial origins, with long, straight or curly hair would suggest that along with the stereotype of hypersexuality and sexual accessibility, a particular type of beauty is offered up as ideal, ... what historian Tiffany Patterson calls "ascriptive mulattas", that is those whose physical beauty transcends characteristics such as darker hues, full lips, and the like, historically prefigured as less than ideal (non-European)" (p.27). Sharpley-Whiting describes how the term "mulatta" is a pejorative one meaning "in between", and although it had typically been depicted as tragic, not fitting in to this race or that, film and literature annals also reveal that "the mulatta" is one of the most (secretly) sought after ideals of feminine beauty in the heterosexual marketplace of desire, mixing the "black" and the "white", the "sex" and the "physical beauty". The violent history of this racial mixing is often one of slavery and rape, as historically many mixed children, or mulattas, were born from white male slave masters raping black female slaves. It's interesting that mulatta women are presented to the white male youth for consumption in hip hop / rap music videos, women who at once stimulate erotic desires for the "exotic", the traditional appeal of European beauty standards, and the sadomasichistic fantasy of rape and racial domination.