Photo by Chris Tuite

"I feel like, in this country, whenever it comes to our things, like black issues or black politics or black music or whatever, there's always this undercurrent of kinda like a 'fuck you,'" said Azealia Banks in the now viral clip of the Harlem rapper’s nearly hour long interview on Hot 97. At this point of their talk, Banks had been asked about her ongoing feud with Iggy Azalea, one that began when XXL chose Azalea as part of the Freshman 2012 cover even after making a runaway slave master joke in a song. "I'm pro- black girl," she said then. "I'm not anti- white girl, but I'm also not here for any1 outside of my culture trying to trivialize very serious aspects of it. In any capacity."

-=-=-=-Almost exactly thirty minutes after beginning the discussion on what makes the success of white rappers like Azalea or Macklemore so difficult to digest in the context of hip-hop’s history, Banks broke down. The conversation turned towards black erasure, and Banks’ defense of black culture was profound, intense and necessary. "At the very fucking least, y’all owe me the right to my fucking identity," she says. Nicki Minaj serves as her example and calls Azalea’s choice of the name Reclassified for the re-release of her album The New Classic "cultural smudging." Between Banks’ interview and the past few months of heightened attention to the injustices plaguing black Americans by those who should be protecting them serve as a reminder that to be black in America means that you are drawn in pencil and readily available to be erased at any moment.

Erasure is what systemic racism and oppression feed off of. Erasure of black bodies and black voices is what allows officers of the law to walk away from the homicides they’ve committed before even being taken to trial, which would have at least humored us into believing that the government can be just and fair. Erasure is everywhere, from our justice system to our art and popular culture where being a black creator has typically meant that you are only valuable if appetizing to a white consumer market, and, in turn, able to be reimagined as a form of art without non-white origins.

Last year, Grantland named cultural appropriation as the winner of 2013, and the claim is far from untrue given the uncomfortable conversation about race it dredged up about forms of entertainment that are seen as trivial or even lower class. But it’s not like that discomfort or the act of appropriation ended once the calendar flipped to 2014. Like the police brutality that became the center of our news cycle in the later half of this year, the act of copying style heavily associated with being a person of color in America, and, most importantly, a dangerous or "thug-like" person of color in America, was not a new trend. The aggressions of white people as either murderers or appropriators has become so laughably effortless, making it seem like prejudice is something inherent rather than learned and that alone is terrifying. It’s as if once someone declared our society post-racial that all the stops were pulled out to remind the country that equality is an illusion and to be white in America is the only way to survive in America.

We ask of hip-hop, a genre gripping on to its roots in lower class black and brown communities as it continues to rise as our most omnipresent form of pop music, to be a beacon of hope and prove that its gain and value of earned status has been worth it. Kanye West and Jay Z are our living proof of not only black genius but of black luxury, where skin color cannot stop talent from being rewarded in abundance and excess. We want them to be our leaders and to rally from their platforms, though they’ve been warning us and relaying their experiences with racial profiling and corrupt cops from the moment they rose to prominence.