Rap And Hip Hop By Ruby Ibarra

Rap and hip hop historically served as a vehicle to recognize and empathize marginalized voices. Conveying a sense of dissatisfaction with personal, communal, and global conditions, rap music becomes a mode of edutainment and a calling for social change. However, the grating deliverances of rap songs can ironically alleviate the anger of the community simply through representation and shared narratives. Filipina American rapper and producer Ruby Ibarra continues to rise in fame and engages in this musical therapy. In an interview, Ruby Ibarra committed her work to representing minorities and females on stage (Kollaboration, 2014). However, to represent minorities, typically Asian Americans, becomes too broad as Filipino Americans are racialized
Because Filipino Americans simultaneously diverge and intersect with the Asian American identity, Ruby Ibarra specifically highlights the experiences of Filipino Americans to expose a relatively invisible subgroup of Asian Americans as an act of healing. Ibarra’s conscious musical work in the rap and hip-hop spheres heals a community through media visibility, expression of Filipino and Filipino-American narratives, and the formation of a collective for social advocacy for Filipino Americans. To jumpstart the healing process, her entry into the hip-hop realm requires the acceptance of the hip-hop community and individuals in power. Unfortunately, Ruby Ibarra encounters the “authenticity paradigm” as a non-Black person of color within the hip-hop realm. Asian American rappers are deemed racially inauthentic due to the uncontested normative blackness of hip-hop culture (Wang 36). Race becomes a marketing liability for Asian Americans because the stereotypes of the effeminate, passive, and asexual Asian American are the antithesis to the masculine, aggressive, and hypersexual African American stereotype. In Ibarra’s introduction to the mainstream, her first video posted on WorldStar Hip Hop, a popular urban platform for hip hop music
She particularly raps about the barriers she faces as a transplant from the Philippines and as a woman. Prefaced with childish laughter amongst a nostalgic acoustic melody, the song “Brown Out” cuts into a narration of her mother chastising Ruby and her sister for playing outside because “you and your sister will get dark. You will get ugly if you are dark” (Ibarra). Although not all Filipinos or Filipino Americans share the same exact experiences, she exposes the specific Filipino American narratives involving colorism. Coupled with Filipino colonial mentality, she extensively covers the effects of losing an identity and developing self-hate due to Filipinos’ naturally brown skin tone and the obsession with Western features. Ibarra also writes, “Silly me for thinkin’ these, television imagery / Representin’ me when most these people never looked like me” (Ibarra), specifically referencing the lack of Filipino American representation in the media, where the types of Asian Americans portrayed in media are typically East Asians. The descriptions of familiar Filipino American narratives become a form of validation of the unique Filipino American experience. The culturally congruent lyrics dismantles the stigma of harboring discomforting memories and feelings for the Filipino value of saving face, or hiya (Reyes, 2015). Through the context of