IPR is interlocked with a history of exploitation and commodification of black culture that reinforces white supremacist oppression – blackness is mocked while whiteness is held on a pedestal.

This leads us to a discussion on how the appropriation and commodification of Black culture have served to enact white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy as interlocking systems of oppression. In the introduction of The Black Culture Industry, Ellis Cashmore (1997) writes the following:

Any residual menace still lurking in African American practices and pursuits has been domesticated, leaving a black culture capable of being adapted, refined, mass-produced, and marketed. Whites not only appreciate black culture: they buy it. A great many blacks have become rich on the back of it. An even greater number of whites have prospered. (p. 1)

The integration of Black culture in contemporary capitalist frameworks has served to “domesticate” the stereotype of the dangerous African American, but only insofar as it can be consumed. This consumption, Cashmore is pointing out, is not universal. Black culture is intentionally being made palatable to a White audience, with the goal of making a profit. This is neither an accidental development nor the natural progression of anti-racist activism. It was a planned transformation orchestrated by capitalists who saw an economic opportunity.

In the text, Cashmore emphasizes the dangers of forgetting this fact, as he states, . . . inflating the significance of black culture may work against tangible enhancements to the lives of African Americans. The most significant value of black culture may be in providing whites with proof of the end of racism while keeping the racial hierarchy essentially intact. (Cashmore, 1997, p. 2)

Rather than being a successful integration of Black people into the public sphere, the commodification of Black culture is a superficial show of tokenized representation that serves to obscure the ways in which this process has not only failed to create deep social changes but has effectively enacted existing power dynamics.

This becomes particularly evident once questions of intellectual property and ownership are brought into play. A recent example is the difference in popular discourses regarding Taylor Swift’s decision to remove her content from streaming services versus that of Jay-Z to do the same and launch his own streaming platform named Tidal. In 2015, Swift, supported by her label, announced the decision to remove her works from Apple Music following the company’s decision not to pay royalties to artists during new users’ 3-month free trial (Tiffany, 2017). The singer argued it would detrimentally affect less known artists (Tiffany, 2017). Her published statement received an outpouring of support from artists, labels, and fans, and media outlets framed this as her standing up against big corporations on behalf of small creators (BBC Staff, 2015). That same year, Jay-Z launched the streaming platform Tidal with 15 fellow Artist Shareholders1 with the goal of ensuring that artist be paid fairly for their work (Flanagan & Hampp, 2015). From its announcement onward, both business experts and the general public predicted that it would fail, and Jay-Z was mocked incessantly (Kosoff, 2017; Willens, 2015). Both Taylor Swift and Jay-Z were making the same argument: Companies that made enormous profits should respect artist’s work and pay them properly. Yet, while Taylor Swift, a White woman, was praised, Jay-Z, a Black man, was ridiculed. In the end, while Apple Music agreed to change their policy regarding free trials in response to Swift’s critique (BBC Staff, 2015), Jay-Z sold Tidal to telecommunication company Sprint (Rys, 2017). The discrepancy in support that was provided to Taylor Swift and Jay-Z reflects Cashmore’s argument because it reveals how racial dynamics affect the ability of Black artists to defend their intellectual property the way White artists can.