On Rap and the 'N-word’
(Photo by Colin Boyle / The Daily Northwestern)
My friends often joke that when I talk about my favorite stories I’ve ever written, I never fail to mention a specific one: “Rap and the N-Word.”
It’s true. This story is extremely important to me for a couple of reasons.
First, I first started working on it as a class project for my Reporting and Writing class in November 2017, when a controversy arose on my own college campus. I quickly realized it was too big of a topic to fully attempt to cover in four weeks, and for the next ten months, I woke up every single day thinking about it. The story engulfed me. The amount of time I put into thinking, writing, interviewing, thinking some more, re-writing, editing, interviewing again, re-re-writing, re-editing…it’s impossible to quantify what goes into the creative process, to make the reader comprehend the sheer number of hours put in unless you’ve delved into a project like this yourself.
Second, the topic itself. This is a topic that’s been at the forefront of my mind since I first started listening to rap at the age of nine. The genre—and, in turn, some of my favorite artists—has been right there alongside me, through some of my highest highs and lowest lows. This story started as an interview-based piece looking to push a conversation around something bubbling under the surface, but it became even more than that to me. Coming from a town I believed to be pretty diverse and an upbringing I thought to be modest, the story ended up being an examination of my own privileges and biases that I live with to this day.
I mean, even this past December, I was back home for winter break and one of my childhood friends—a white dude—used the N-Word in front of me. A year after writing my story, I still wasn’t able to strike up an open and honest conversation about the topic.
Sometimes, you have to do more than hide behind a computer screen, typing and tweeting, in order to create change. This story showed me that, and it’s why I aim to start a dialogue with the projects I take on moving forward.
You can read At the Intersection of Language and Culture: Rap and the ‘N-Word’ here, and learn more about UNPLUGG’D MAG here.