By selling Eminem’s class and personal struggle, Interscope hoped

to draw attention away from the more troubling questions regarding
his status in hip hop as a racial outsider. Both Eminem and Inter-
scope understood that his whiteness threatened to rob him of the
most important credential in hip hop, street authenticity. When
Benzino referred to Eminem as “Vanilla Ice 2003” it was a deliberate
attack on the rapper’s whiteness, a calculated attempt to reestablish
hip hop’s racial borders. In 1990 Vanilla Ice had the best-selling rap
album ever up to that point. But when it was revealed that his much
publicized hardscrabble background was a fabrication, it only con-
firmed what most suspected: white rappers had neither the skills nor
the requisite perspective gained from life on society’s margins to
truly be down with hip hop. Not only was his credibility destroyed,
his name and fame became the butt of jokes. Vanilla Ice, and by ex-
tension all white rappers, became a symbol of cultural theft, thus
severely weakening their status in hip hop.

Like many white teenagers across the U.S. in the nineties, Mathers

found himself drawn to the magnetic world of hip hop. If his itiner-
ant childhood made it di‰cult to find a place to call his own at home
or at school, rap music provided a refuge. But his move across Amer-
ica’s racial tracks was not easy or always welcomed. He was a slight,
unimposing white boy embracing what is vigorously touted as a
black art form. In those early and harrowing years, he learned that
being white and poor was a dreadful combination. Despite the large
numbers of poor whites in America, their image barely dots our
media culture or public consciousness. White poverty, unlike black
poverty, violates the nation’s myths about race and class and can pro-
duce a striking sense of shame. Years later the stain of Eminem’s im-
poverished life would establish a deep sense of anger and provide
ample ammunition to launch an avalanche of lyrical bombs that
would gain him widespread notoriety and scrutiny.

As a kid growing up in and around Detroit there was no reason,

other than perhaps desperation and youthful innocence, to believe
that he actually had a future in a musical genre so closely associated

F E A R O F A W H I T E P L A N E T

91