Tareeq Jalloh

Self-sexualizing Black women rappers have been criticized as being agents in their own oppression. However, criticism of self-sexualizing rap is just one evaluative response to it. Another response lauds self-sexualizing rap for its empowering effects. In this article, I introduce a framework for understanding these competing evaluative responses to self-sexualizing rap by using Sukaina Hirji’s analysis of oppressive double binds. I argue that self-sexualizing rappers are caught in oppressive double binds, and this framework helps us to understand the dialectical stalemates that emerge in evaluating Black women rappers’ self-sexualization by offering new insights into the complexities involved when Black women rappers self-sexualize. Trapped between the norms of respectability and stereotypes of hypersexuality, it is impossible under conditions of oppression for self-sexualizing rappers to fully realize their sexual autonomy and agency. Articulating this helps to focus our progressive critiques on these constraining norms and on the media that perpetuates them rather than on individual rappers who engage in self-expression.

The critique that rap causes violence (causal claim) goes back as far as the 1980s, but today drill rappers are having their freedoms restricted based on instances of a causal claim. Police in the UK regularly remove drill videos from social media and streaming platforms, and drillers are being restricted from making music and associating with people via criminal behavior orders based on the claim that drill music causes serious violence. If this causal claim is true, it provides potential grounds for such restrictions on drillers. This paper argues against censoring drill on the assumption that it causes violence for three reasons. First, even according to the most charitable rendition of the causal claim, there is insufficient evidence to support it. Second, there are less speech‐restrictive and more effective approaches to violence reduction than censorship‐oriented approaches. Third, critics should not be advancing the causal claim due to its racist public meaning.

Police censor drill rap music based on the claim that drill artists incite violence. In this article, I provide a framework for evaluating whether an instance of drill constitutes a speech act of incitement. I also introduce an alternative speech act that drillers may also be performing, drawn from sociological work on drill artists. I show that those who claim drill incites violence (such as the Metropolitan Police) must meet the explanatory and justificatory burden of showing that the speech act of incitement (rather than something else) has been performed, and that it may often be very challenging to meet that burden. Finally, I argue that where that burden is not met, police interventions in drill would constitute a form of illocutionary silencing and discursive injustice. Drill artists are owed careful consideration of the illocutionary acts they perform in their music – more careful than police assumptions about incitement have been.

This paper offers some further support to Federico Picinali’s argument, in «Evidential Reasoning, Testimonial Injustice and the Fairness of the Criminal Trial», that a trial is unfair when assessments of relevance and probative value includes an epistemic injustice, namely a testimonial injustice. It has been argued that there are barriers to establishing testimonial injustice in specific cases, such as the ones Picinali surveys. This paper argues that even if we accept that there are concerns about establishing the occurrence of a testimonial injustice in the cases Picinali identifies, we can reformulate the epistemic injustice that renders the trial unfair as a contributory injustice. Reformulating the epistemic injustice as a contributory injustice evades the concerns we might have with establishing testimonial injustice allowing Picinali’s broad argument that a trial is unfair when an assessment of evidence includes an epistemic injustice—contributory or testimonial—to remain intact. This reformulation also offers new propositions on how to combat epistemic injustice.

In this paper, I look to draw novel connections between critiques of drill and epistemic injustice by addressing the question of whether the critical scrutiny of drill constitutes an epistemic injustice. I argue that these critiques constitute two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. We see testimonial injustice in how courts and police do not give credibility to drill artists’ testimonies about the storylike nature of their songs, and these credibility deficits are based in racist stereotypes about black criminality and believability. We see contributory injustice in how courts and police, through wilful ignorance, see drill music as violent and criminal rather than expressive and fictional – as drill artists do – which thwarts drill artists’ ability to contribute to shared knowledge.