White Power, Black Aesthetics
Yikes.
At the top of last year, the rapper Sexyy Red became famous. Billboard magazine writer Kyle Denis characterized the defining feature of her stardom as her embodiment of “an unapologetically hood energy.” Her manager, Dave Gross, spoke on the record to invoke the highest value used to measure industry bona fides - authenticity: “For Sexyy, it’s that she’s independent, fierce, strong, unafraid of the world’s opinions and unbowed by backlash. It’s not about whether she’s acting ‘hood’ — it’s about expressing those qualities and aesthetics authentically in her music and performance.”
Now, Sexyy has leveraged her authentic expression of those qualities and aesthetics in support of Donald Trump’s candidacy for president. After first announcing her support for him on Theo Von’s Joe Rogan-adjacent podcast last October, arguing that “they support him in the hood” because “at first, they thought he was racist and against women, but, [then], he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money,” she featured a giant inflatable red cap with the phrase “Make America Sexyy Again” emblazoned across it in MAGA font on stage during her performance at the 2024 Roots Picnic. The same Billboard writer captured it this way - “Throughout her hit-laden set, Sexyy conjured up, if only for 30 minutes, an America that embraces and exalts the most ratchet edges of everyone’s personalities.” To paraphrase the rest of the article, her “embodiment of the hood” represents an escape from allegiance to social standards, which, then, translates to a political allegiance to Trump who also represents an escape from social standards. And she isn’t the only one. YG, who previously recorded the anti-Trump anthem “Fuck Donald Trump” with Nipsey Hussle in 2016, also appeared on Theo Von’s podcast around the same time as Sexyy Red to say that black people, again, specifically those living in the hood, forgave Trump after receiving PPP loans and stimulus checks.
From Sexyy Red and YG to DJ Akademiks and Kanye West, more than a handful of black celebrities have leveraged their “authentic” investments in black aesthetics to articulate solidarity with Trump as solidarity with the oppressed and irredeemed. And this was before Trump officially became a convicted felon a week and a half ago, which has, predictably, introduced even more analogies to blackness through the aesthetic of criminality - “My mug shot — we’ve all seen the mug shot, and you know who embraced it more than anybody else? The Black population,” Trump said as he received the Black Conservative Federation’s “Champion of Black America Award.” “You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know, they do shirts and they sell them for $19 a piece. It’s pretty amazing — millions by the way.”
Watching those black artists believed to be the among the most resistant to both white supremacy and black respectability align themselves with right-wing fascism as a means of addressing the material conditions of black existence reveals both the limits of black aesthetics and radical liberalism as liberatory politics. Ultimately, Sexyy Red and YG named colorblind economic policies and selective prison releases as the reasons why they, as ostensible representatives of the hood, support Trump. Nevermind that he established a conservative majority on the Supreme Court which overturned abortion rights and affirmative action, passed a tax cut that disproportionately left out black people, and tried to put the prisoners released under the First Step Act back in jail.
To be clear, politicians (whether Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show or Hillary Clinton telling the Breakfast Club that she always carries hot sauce in her bag) routinely perform black culture as a way to demonstrate their particular fitness to be in charge of managing black suffering. But Trump is doing something distinct. Different from even the appeals to white suffering espoused by those who spent all weekend crying about how Caitlin Clark should have made the Olympic Team, he’s advancing the politics of white nationalist power by performing black suffering itself as an aesthetic. Instead of offering us a savior, his appeal to black people is based on his willingness to put on the cloak of criminality and dishonor. His brand of antiblackness mocks the position of the outcast while also laying claim to it. I’m not saying that everyone’s falling for it, but, in a popular culture as obsessed with celebrity and black aesthetics as this one, I’m saying it’s something to behold.