Excluding black immigrants from hip-hop's creation

[Sam the Seed]

I keep getting into arguments on Twitter with the "FBA" ("Foundational Black Americans") crowd about hip-hop's origins. FBAs are black nationalists who, because of the reparations discussion, have become hostile to any immigrated black Americans identifying with or using African-American culture. Problem is hip-hop never strictly belonged to descendants of American slaves. DJ Kool Herc (who is credited as the first hip-hop DJ) was Jamaican-American. Grandmaster Flash is from Barbados. The Bronx, where hip-hop originated, has always been a melting pot and black New Yorkers have always been diverse. African-Americans didn't migrate into NYC until after the 1940s when public housing forced them there. Before then, most New Yorkers were immigrants from Jewish to Italian to Irish to Asian to African to Caribbean. There's a reason so many rappers and DJs are descendants of immigrants like Biggie and NORE. And it also explains the pan-Africanism and Islam in early NY hip-hop.

I think of hip-hop as a black American artform. We pioneered this. But to say its by & for African-American ethnicity only is wrong and desperate IMO. These FBA types are mostly Southern types who are uncultured and don't know NYC is multi-cultural and just want to claim hip-hop as a stolen invention because these individuals like co-opting other black people's greatness and excluding some black people. Its very anti-black to me. And being so nationalist and defensive of America against other blacks is pathetic.

It seems this whole debate heated up when BET credited Puerto Ricans as co-founders of hip-hop or something at some recent awards show? That might be an exaggeration but its not erasing black people to admit a lot of the first people hearing and promoting hip-hop were Latinx. They were there before most black Americans even heard of hip-hop.

Hip-hop is the biggest musical genre now and the biggest industry blacks have created, so I get why self-identified FBAs want to claim and gatekeep it and make it serve their agenda only. But its ignorant and against hip-hop's original sentiment of blacks bringing people together. Black Americans created hip-hop but they weren't specifically African-American.

And FBAs like to discredit Kool Herc or any Caribbean 1st generation hip-hop legends and say "hip-hop" started in the Jazz era. But arguing hip-hop is just MCing, "rapping" or looping breakbeats is idiotic because WHITES were doing those things first. Hip-hop in 1970s NYC brought MCing & breaks together. MCs didn't even rhyme until years later.