Cheltenham’s student body is is 51% black and 37% white. He’s a graduate of Cheltenham High School in the first ring suburbs of Philadelphia. But Dicky ground this axe all the way to the top: his Professional Rapper album, which he funded through a Kickstarter, hit number one in the Billboard rap charts and featured Snoop Dogg and T-Pain. He’s obsessed with his “outsider” status in hip-hop, which he perceives to be a direct result of being white. Just ask Lil Dicky, a joke rapper whose entire musical career could have been inspired by seeing a black guy make a girl he had a crush on laugh once in eighth grade.
Mac looks like half the Pittsburgh rap lifers I know, or knew, or produced for, or DJed with, or bought drugs from, or who hit on someone’s girlfriend at a party in the East End.īut diverse surroundings don’t automatically make someone racially sensitive.
It’s a central piece of the thriving Pittsburgh scene. From my years as a student to the current day, Allderdice has fostered a diverse hip-hop community that challenged notions of who rapped and what they rapped about. But the school gives its students plenty of opportunities to get to know people that don’t look like them or didn’t grow up like them. That’s not to say Dice is or was a utopian paradise of equality internal academic tracking works against integration within the school, and you can only do so much to combat outside forces in a city with Pittsburgh’s long history of racism. Among the white kids, many come from working class neighborhoods like Greenfield and Lincoln Place and from the large Jewish populations in Squirrel Hill and Point Breeze. The student body is 47% white and 40% black (as of 2014). Allderdice - “Dice” for short - is probably the ideal place for a teenager to learn about race and class in America.
I don’t presume to speak for Mac but I know going to Allderdice helped me understand the complexities of race and class in America and my own privilege.
Even though I’m almost a decade older, his music resonates with me because we have both been really, really high in Blue Slide Park. Our circles overlap a fair amount and he raps about things I did and places I know. We both went to Taylor Allderdice High School in nearby Squirrel Hill (as did Wiz Khalifa, who named a mixtape after it). in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood called Point Breeze. I’m not speaking metaphorically he grew up a five-minute walk away from me down Dallas Ave.
I think about Mac Miller’s whiteness because Mac comes from the same place I do. As he grew as an artist, he came to be recognized not as a White Rapper but as a rapper who happens to be white. But his talent and creativity allowed him to stick around long enough to outgrow his reputation as a red cup-holding bro hanging out with Donald Trump. Being a white dude who liked to party, he got lumped in with the likes of Sammy Adams and Hoodie Allen and subsequently written off. His race might never have come up had he not broken out in the late 2000s when frat rap was kind of a thing. But several years into a successful career, with hours logged at The Alchemist’s “rap camp” with Odd Future and friends, Mac has made his whiteness functionally incidental. No white rapper can ever totally lose their racial asterisk, and as a white person, I’m not qualified to declare anyone’s race a non-issue. Mac is also white, although that hasn’t been a factor in his narrative for a long time. The two linked after Miller drunk-dialed Rubin, a sentence which both explains and illustrates his level of fame and success. It’s also his first after hitting a Behind The Music-esque rock bottom and rebuilding himself with the help of Rick Rubin. It’s his third official album, his first after leaving indie powerhouse Rostrum Records to sign with Warner Brothers.