Old-school hip-hop has always defined what it means to be an artist by their background. Artists like Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. built their reputations on narratives of poverty and street survival, and Jay-Z's credibility came from his story of hustling in Brooklyn's Marcy Projects. As long as an artist could prove they were poor enough, close enough to crime, and masculine enough, they were accepted as authentic. But when Drake entered the industry, his early sound was nothing like that. He leaned into emotional vulnerability and mixed R&B melodies with rap verses, talking about relationships and personal insecurities instead of street narratives. In an interview with the Village Voice, Drake said, "I mean, I'm so light that people are like 'you're white,'" which shows that his emotional openness was not some marketing decision but came directly from the identity confusion he dealt with his entire life. Yet in 2015, with the release of If You're Reading This It's Too Late, critics like Pusha T and later Kendrick Lamar started publicly questioning whether Drake had earned his place in hip-hop, even though he holds the record for the most Billboard Hot 100 entries of any artist in history. By popularizing a melodic rap sub-genre rooted in his own reality, Drake rewrote the rules of the hip-hop canon, but his success is constantly dragged down by critics who use his biracial, middle-class background against him. Really, the gatekeeping in hip-hop has less to do with musical quality and more to do with enforcing a narrow racial and socioeconomic identity, and Drake's career shows just how contradictory that thinking is.

What made Drake's rise work was that his genre-blending actually felt natural. The professional review of If You're Reading This It's Too Late by Craig Jenkins in Pitchfork notes the project is "best enjoyed as an exercise in the casual excellence of the artist as rhymer and purveyor of hooks." Drake has also pulled from international styles in his music. In an article for Across The Culture defending Drake against cultural theft allegations, accusations that got louder after he started using Caribbean sounds on tracks like "Controlla," Zander Tsadwa writes, "To scream 'cultural appropriation' as someone who isn't of an Afro-Caribbean identity when you hear 'Controlla' or when you see Drake tweet in patois is funny." Tsadwa explains that people have "rigid expectations of a popular artist once they're popular" and a "limited understanding of cultural exchange and identity." And honestly, Tsadwa has a point. Drake spent years in Toronto, which has one of the largest Caribbean diaspora communities in North America. Assuming he has no real connection to those sounds says more about how narrowly people view identity than it says about Drake.

The cultural theft accusations also feed into a bigger argument: that Drake is not just borrowing sounds but using the whole genre for profit. In The Philadelphia Citizen, Michael Eric Dyson writes about Drake and Kendrick Lamar's rivalry. Lamar goes directly at Drake on the track "Not Like Us," saying, "No, you not a colleague, you a... colonizer." Lamar uses the word "colonizer" to say that Drake treats hip-hop like something to profit off of, not something he actually belongs to. But that argument does not hold up when you look at the fact that Drake has been making hip-hop since he was a teenager, way before the fame and way before there was money in it for him. Calling someone a colonizer means they showed up from the outside, but Drake grew up inside the culture.

On top of that, Dyson notes that Drake has been called a "tribal impostor" and "bi-racial culture vulture." Dyson says the "rapid pace at which Drake was able to be labeled as not being authentically black reveals the boundaries that are established around race and the genres that are based upon it," and describes this as the "reactionary nativism of cults of pure identity that police the boundaries of Blackness." What Dyson is really talking about is a purity test, and it is one that no biracial person can ever pass. If being accepted in hip-hop means you have to be "fully" Black by somebody else's standard, then the genre is not actually celebrating Black culture. It is gatekeeping it.

Drake knows about this scrutiny, and he has addressed it himself. In "You & The 6," he raps:

"I used to get teased for being black / And now I'm here and I'm not black enough / Because I am not acting tough / Or making false stories bout where I'm actually from."

He gets criticized for not acting tough, which is what the traditional rap canon expects, but he is not going to make up a fake past just to satisfy those expectations.

Academics have studied this too, and the research backs up what Drake has been saying. In her article, "Musical Artists Capitalizing on Hybrid Identities: A Case Study of Drake the 'Authentic' 'Black' 'Canadian' 'Rapper,'" Amara Pope looks at how Drake deals with his complex identity. Pope writes that when Drake lived with his mom in Toronto, he was called "different" by the Jewish community and "too Black" by others. But then when he moved to Memphis to live with his father Dennis Graham, a drummer who played for Jerry Lee Lewis, he was around Black musicians all the time and still got called "Too White." As Pope puts it, "Hence, Drake cannot escape the prejudice of being labeled black or not black enough, nor ever being labeled fully white." That is the trap that biracial identity creates in a genre that is obsessed with racial purity. Wherever Drake goes, somebody tells him he does not belong. His music ended up being the one space where he could actually define himself on his own terms.

Drake's story matters because it goes beyond just one rapper's career. It is about who gets to be part of a culture and who gets to make that decision. The traditional hip-hop canon was built around a specific image, and if you do not match that image, people call you a fraud no matter how talented you are. Drake showed that the audience was ready for something else, that being emotional and melodic could work alongside commercial success. The fact that his race and his neighborhood got used against him shows something deeper about hip-hop: a genre that started from people who were shut out is now shutting people out using the same kind of thinking. As somebody who has dealt with my own questions about identity, I think Drake's refusal to fake who he is might be the most real thing about him.

There is always one particular week in the fall semester at Howard when the yard completely transforms. Posters that weren't there yesterday suddenly appeared overnight. You can tell which students are members of a selective organization before they even introduce themselves. Model Inc walks around campus and the dining halls in their signature jackets, and they never seem to take them off. The Ladies of Quad roll deep in matching fits, moving together, and you already know which org they belong to before anyone says a name.

Then there are the Men of George Washington Carver, Incorporated, otherwise known as "The King$." Their three pillars are short and clean: Brotherhood, Manhood, Community Service. On @mogwcinc, their bio calls them "Freshman Organization of the Year Four Times Running." Their mission, in their own words, is to "push boys to become men." They bring in each class by number (K-10 is the tenth class of brothers) and unveil them at a Coming Out Ceremony that pulls a full crowd. For Black History Month they put Dr. King on their feed:

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

The selective organizations at Howard University (MOGWC, Ladies of Quad, and many of the modeling organizations like Model Inc) should stay selective. Selectivity doesn't make an org cruel. It's what makes the org worth joining in the first place. As soon as the bar drops, the prestige drops with it, and you're left with nothing worth earning. The Mecca did not get its reputation for being the "Mecca" by lowering the bar. A Fizz post from the last election cycle said it flat: "Yall be so surprised when the selective orgs are... selective." 362 upvotes, no further explanation needed.

This argument isn't new, and Du Bois wasn't just a theorist. W.E.B. Du Bois was the first Black man to earn a PhD from Harvard. He helped found the NAACP, and in that same year, he became an honorary member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. To this day, Alpha calls him their "spiritual inspiration." So when Du Bois wrote his 1903 essay "The Talented Tenth" and argued that civilizations don't get built from the bottom up, that the most capable rise first and then "pull all that are worth the saving" up with them, he was describing the exact kind of selective Black org he would later join. Look at who else came out of that same fraternity. Martin Luther King Jr. Thurgood Marshall. Paul Robeson. Edward Brooke, the first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Alpha Phi Alpha was founded at Cornell in 1906 and chartered its Beta chapter at Howard in 1907, nearly 120 years ago. Howard's own Alpha Kappa Alpha, founded in 1908, gave the country Vice President Kamala Harris. MOGWC, Ladies of Quad, the entire Divine Nine. They're all running a play Du Bois drew up over a hundred years ago. Call it gatekeeping if you want, but history keeps showing it produces leaders.

Not everyone agrees with that. A staff writer for Kulture Magazine argues selective cultures at historically black colleges and universities like Howard do more harm than good. The piece claims they isolate certain students and shut them out of the full HBCU experience. "Historically Black or Historically Harmful?" relies on personal accounts from students who felt excluded based on appearance and social connections, including one who said: "there's still a lot of genuine people at Howard but the school definitely has an elitism problem." The author seems to believe selectivity is a symptom of organizational toxicity rather than a feature of HBCU culture. And it isn't just the magazine. One anonymous Fizz post put it harder: "The selective orgs at Howard are horrible. Their selection process sucks, their hazing process is disgusting, and most of the people in it are entitled assholes." That post got 1,400 upvotes. That isn't a frustrated outsider. That's a Howard student seeing this play out on the yard right now.

Those stories are real, and they matter. But the article mashes two different things together. People being socially ostracized because of how they dress or who they hang around with isn't the same thing as an organization deciding who gets to join. MOGWC and the Ladies of Quad are looking for specific characteristics: character, commitment, and what each member brings to the table. Getting rejected by an org stings. That doesn't mean the process is broken. The org saying no is not the same as Howard saying no.

Selective HBCU orgs carry a real history. E.M. Price II has written about how many HBCUs and Divine Nine chapters functioned as "Brown Paper Bag Schools," places where skin tone decided who got through the door. That wasn't a rumor. It happened. But look at what those same orgs select for in 2026. Alpha Kappa Alpha's individual chapters use GPA cutoffs and campus leadership benchmarks. MOGWC names its three pillars out loud (Brotherhood, Manhood, Community Service) and unveils new brothers by class number, not by complexion. Imani Smith, the current president of AKA's Alpha chapter at Howard, told Fortune last year that what drew her in was the "level of service" the org showed on campus. That's a different test than the paper bag, and it produces a different product. The 1930s AKA chapter fought to make Black Americans eligible for New Deal jobs. The 2020s AKA chapter helped organize the campaign that made Kamala Harris Vice President. Same org. Different century. It got there by changing.

None of today's members were alive for the Brown Paper Bag era, and holding them responsible for it freezes the org in time. You can hold both things at once: the history was painful AND today is different. If we refuse to let institutions change, then no institution in America could ever claim to change. That's a trap.

Here's the part that usually doesn't get said: selective orgs are solving a real problem on this campus. One Fizz post, 555 upvotes, read simply: "I just feel like at Howard (outside of joining a selective org) it is so hard to make new friends once you're a junior. This is lonely." That post comes from someone who sees what the orgs actually build: community, on purpose, tight because the bar to get in is real.

Rejection hits, and nobody's pretending it doesn't. But getting cut from one of these orgs doesn't mean Howard rejected you. Howard already chose you when it sent you that acceptance letter. The org is just a second filter on top of that. When it says no, it isn't saying you don't belong at The Mecca. It's saying this one specific space isn't your space. That's a redirect, not a failure.

Selectivity isn't a flaw in Howard's system. It IS Howard's system. People fight to get here. People fight harder to get into the orgs once they're here. Both of those fights matter because the prize on the other side is real. This is my first year at Howard, and I've watched campaign season play out from the outside: the matching fits moving across the yard, the IG flyers dropping at midnight, the Fizz debates at 2 AM about organizations I'm not even in. The people who didn't make it are loud on the internet. The people who did are quiet on the yard and busy building. They're picking up where Du Bois left off in 1903 and walking it into a Coming Out Ceremony in 2026. The Mecca wasn't built on participation trophies and it surely won't survive if we start handing them out now.