Snitches and Rats: The Disloyal Slave, the Hip Hop Plantation, and the Ontology of the Snitch

Snitches and Rats: The Disloyal Slave, the Hip Hop Plantation, and the Ontology of the Snitch

“Snitches and rats/snitches and rats/snitches and rats/they all get whacked” 

 —21 Savage, “Snitches and Rats” 

“Her heaven would be a love without betrayal”

— Warsan Shire, Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) 

“The agents have not come to burn the pages or cut out my tongue. They are here to arrest the delusion of a moment when anybody had one.”

 — Jamaal May, “FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration”  

In anticipation of the spring release of his fourth studio album 4Real 4Real, Compton rapper YG previewed the album’s single “Stop Snitchin” in  April of 2019.  The official music video for the single is singular not for its popularization of the track itself but rather, for its narrativization of the antebellum plantation as the formative site for the development of  “snitching” as a phenomenon in (the) colonial America(s). The video begins and the opening sequence reveals a black screen with two words in red font: “f*** slavery.” What follows this sequence is a series of jarring antebellum scenes that construct the visual language of the hip-hop artist’s neo-slave narrative.  As the video unfolds, a fictional slave revolt on a cotton plantation sets the stage for a cautionary tale about disloyalty. Opening on a night in the slave cabins, the first dramatic scene in the music video features a gathering of the enslaved. Huddled in their shared quarters, this assembly quickly evolves into a meeting of co-conspirators. YG, who assumes the role of the narrative’s enslaved mastermind, fashions himself as the brains in an elaborate plan to escape bondage. We soon discover that the group before him is eager and familiar with the game plan. And thus, all but one of them express their interest in bringing YG’s freedom dream to fruition. The odd slave out, an enslaved man named Henry sits in the corner of the cabin drinking his soup while the others engage in sedition. Hesitant in the face of their haste, Henry attempts to reason with the group by remarking upon the alleged domestic comfort he and his fellow slaves enjoy on the plantation. “What’s wrong with what we got right here?” Henry asks. His question, foreshadowing the dissidence to come. 

The next scene in the video returns the slaves to the fields as the music is finally introduced. With the prologue established, the music video subsequently spirals into antebellum absurdity and abjection, its slave narrative collapsing the colloquial with the colonial.  The enslaved crip walk with hoes in hand. YG hangs from a noose as he raps a verse. Revolt begins with dance. Flooded with flashbacks of the brutalities they have suffered, the slaves are driven to mutiny. In a rushed sequence of events, YG’s unspoken plan for insurrection begins to play out. White men are tied up in their homes and the group of fugitives flee the plantation in mass. Lagging behind, Henry resigns from the rebellion out of fear of retribution. As the other slaves run off into the night, Henry kneels before his white captors and is taken off for interrogation. Buckling under the pressure of white authority, he folds quickly, revealing the group’s escape plan. Abruptly, the video cuts to the consequences of Henry’s confession. In the foreground, an undead YG appears lynched from a tree. Behind him, runaways are assaulted by masters and overseers. The rebellion has been thwarted. Hanging by his neck, the rapper recites the lines which constitute the single’s chorus: “bitch nigga, snitch nigga, hoe nigga, snitch nigga,” he raps in repetition. His words, an indictment of the traitor he holds responsible for his morbid condition. 

Suddenly, the scene cuts away from YG and we see Henry, the titular “snitch,” once more. Stripped of his shirt and tied to a tree, Henry returns to the center of the narrative as a target for graphic violence. Vulnerable as ever, he bears his back before what appears to be a master or overseer with a whip in hand. As the scene progresses, Henry wails, bracing himself for the promise of more lashes. The scene, which follows just a few seconds after his betrayal of the runaways, unsettles all expectations that Henry’s established loyalties to the white plantation authorities would be enough to spare him during the onslaught of retaliatory violence. Yet, just as one comes to grapple with this development, the video’s narrative is quickly inverted, undoing all assumptive logic. It turns out, it is not, in fact, the white man who holds the whip over Henry. Rather, it is another slave, wearing the face and flesh of the (presumed dead) white master, who has set out to punish this disloyal slave for his treason. Whilst brutally whipping Henry for his breach of security, the enslaved man in question grins with satisfaction, laughing at Henry’s anguish.  As the video comes to a close, we are asked to find closure in Henry’s flagellation, to think it a comeuppance fit for a coward. 

For all its insistence on visualizing the punishment of the disloyal slave, the music video for “Stop Snitchin'' interestingly refrains from showing any direct violence toward its white characters or the white-owned power structures which inspire disloyalty amongst the enslaved. Instead, the video makes clear, through cartoonish displays of white-led brutality, that little decency is to be expected of its white characters. The master and the overseers have limited screen time in the video and are featured primarily to indicate the social hierarchies that marked plantation life. And the video’s slave-led revenge plot against these white characters occurs entirely off-screen as the implied result of the four-minute insurrection.  For this reason, despite the centrality of anti-blackness—the social and political vectors which overdetermine the position of the slave and the expansion of the plantation—to its story, the music video ultimately zeroes in on Henry as the proper target of narrative punishment. In this way, the whipping of the narrative’s “snitch”  functions as the video’s true resolution. This narrative prioritization of Henry as the villain of the story suggests that whiteness serves as a mere decoration to the theater of anti-blackness.  For, as the music video would have us believe, it is the cowardly slave who truly threatens the well-being of Black communities seeking to thwart white supremacy’s grasp.

 In just four minutes, YG’s music video transforms the plantation into the stage of a dramatic reckoning, not simply with the institution of slavery, but rather with an antagonist who remains ever-present in Black historical, political, literary, and artistic traditions—the figure of the “snitch,” “race traitor,” “sell-out,” and/or “Uncle Tom,” who ‘betrays their own’ for physical, social, or economic safety. Set across the various geographies of the archetypal Southern plantation, “Stop Snitchin” uses its setting as an opportunity to single out the character of the “snitch” as the true antagonist of its antebellum saga. Establishing the “snitch” as a figure born of the plantation, the music video asserts that slavery represents the originary site of intraracial betrayal in the Americas. In doing so, the video offers a distinct artistic vision of justice where the slave is concerned. By equating Henry, an enslaved man, with the figure of the “snitch”—an urban pariah whose disparagement marks a political, geographic, and social posture toward community loyalty—the video collapses time and cultural context. The end result is a cultural product reflective of a zeitgeist increasingly shaped by popular skepticism regarding the prospect of community. Following in this tradition of communal skepticism and disillusionment within hip hop music, the music video for “Stop Snitchin” joins this discourse to name the plantation as the mainspring from which a narrative of intraracial enmity springs forth. 

In law scholar Andrea L. Dennis’s  “A Snitch in Time: An Historical Sketch of Black Informing During Slavery,” Dennis sketches a lineage between the enduring Black communal stance of avoidance with regard to criminal investigations and prosecution, and “America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime, and Gangs.” Dennis’ work, which centers on the popular discourse of anti-snitching in order to provide a historical and narrative lineage for its associated sentiments, also stages an intervention where the association between domestic slavery and disloyalty is concerned. As Dennis notes, the work sets out to “[defend] domestic, or house, slaves who hold an especially negative place in the mind of the modern Black community.” Of the negative social regard held for the so-called “house slave,” Dennis turns to the archive of Southern plantation slavery to contextualize the link between Black domesticity/domestic servitude and narratives which insist upon the figure of the “house slave” as the perennial plantation informant. 

In the July 1833 issue of Farmer’s Register: A Monthly Publication, a reprint of The Virgina Farmer’s “Prize Essay, on Agriculture in Virginia” appears.  The prize winner, a one C.W. Gooch, a Virginia-based planter from Henrico County, Virginia, speaks in his award-winning essay about the state of Southern agriculture, “the first and noblest of human pursuits,” in the midst of burgeoning industrialization. Naming the factors which have contributed to the destruction of Virginia’s agricultural industry, Gooch spends extended time not only on the issue of slavery as a unique threat to the planter class’s ability to profit in full from their land’s harvest. Of the late 19th century slave, he remarks that “our slaves are now as well fed and clothed, and enjoy as many comforts as the laboring classes in some countries; they have improved proportionably in their appearance and intelligence.” Despite the alleged promotion of the Virginia slave class, however, Gooch proceeds to blame the enslaved for toiling at the expense of white utility. “The possession of slaves has had too great a tendency to make the owner and his family unwilling to take upon themselves any part of the drudgery of out-door business,” he writes. Making brief mention of the role of the enslaved with regard to the “in-door business” of domestic duties, Gooch notes the “repugnance to domestic duties'' which has spoiled the white daughters of the South. 

The most interesting of Gooch’s observations however are not those which concern the enslaved as laborers but rather, those which remark upon the enslaved as having an idiosyncratic obsession with loyalty above all other virtues. “There seems to be almost an absence of moral principle among the mass of our colored population,” he writes. “The vice which they hold in greatest abhorrence, is that of telling upon one another.” Citing Gooch in “A Snitch in Time,” Dennis notes the Virgina planter’s attention to the matter of communal obligation and the unexpected insights he offers into the social currency of loyalty amongst the enslaved. Turning once more to the archive of slavery, Dennis also refers to the work of American historian Eugene Genovese whose Bancroft Prize-winning 1974 book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made contributes a Gramscian theorization of the plantation South. In Roll, Jordan, Roll, Genovese takes a particular interest in the interiority of enslaved life and explores the concept of resistance as one which incorporates any and all acts which sought to overturn the “cultural hegemony” of slave masters. On the matter of loyalty amongst the enslaved, Genovese writes, “while in slavery, Blacks protected eachother much more readily than they undermined or betrayed one another.”  To establish this phenomenon within the archive, Genovese cites both the enslaved and the broader white observational class (made up of slave owners and the like), all of whom speak to the matter of slave solidarity from different vantage points. 

In Roll, Jordan, Roll a Reverend C.C. Jones is cited for the following declaration on the issue of slave secrecy: “[T]he Negroes are scrupulous on one point[,] they make common cause, as servants, in concealing their faults from their owners. Inquiry elicits no information; no one feels at liberty to disclose the transgressor; all are profoundly ignorant; the matter assumes the sacredness of a ‘professional secret.’” In the opening for the chapter entitled “Brothers, Sisters, and No-Counts,” Genovese opens with a quote from the perspective of the formerly enslaved on the very issue of slave solidarity. As he cites her, an “ex-slave from Missouri” by the name of Susan Davis Rhodes remarked that “people in my day didn't know book learning but dey studied how to protect each other, and save em from such misery as dey could.” Providing yet another perspective, Genovese also notes the 1844  juridical declaration of  Judge Green of the Tennessee State Supreme Court, who stated that “a slave who supported his white folks by exposing or betraying a fellow black” was likely to, in his words, become “an object of general aversion among negroes.”  

In his 1992 book From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, Genovese explores the phenomenon of rebellion amongst the enslaved in the Americas. On the matter of maroons—fugitive slaves who escaped slavery and subsequently preserved and defended settlements in various regions of the Americas—Genovese dedicates a section to the subject of “Black Maroons in War and Peace.” Troubling the assertion of enslaved solidarity with regard to runaways fugitives, in From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese cites H.C. Bruce’s The New Man in which Bruce asserts that “slaves often refused to betray organized runaways not because of a sense of solidarity but because of fear of ghastly reprisals.” Given this vast discourse regarding the de facto codes of silence which proved pervasive within slave communities throughout the Americas, Genovese’s intervention by way of Bruce proves to be a crucial one. With regard to Denis’ efforts to link the disparaged position of the slave informant with that of the contemporary “stop snitchin’” movement within Black American urban (and even rural) communities, the archive suggests that notions of loyalty and fear of retribution are prominent considerations for both the secretive and the seditious. 

Exploring the notion of slave solidarity as projection, historian Jason T. Sharples writes the following in a section of The World Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America entitled “The Risk of Relations Community-Seeking and the Politics of Association”:

Officials in the eighteenth century projected onto the diverse people of the African diaspora a solidarity that never existed, and that is tempting to believe even today, supposedly rooted in “the Affection that naturally arises from a Fellowship in Slavery.” During conspiracy investigations, if they forced informants to identify fresh suspects, they believed that they convinced them to break a deep trust. They congratulated themselves for overcoming the “extraordinary . . . fidelity of Slaves to each other,” including their “best Friends and Relations,” but they summoned these visions of a unified community only by compelling informants, through violence and fear, to speak certain words.

In “A Snitch in Time,” which situates Black ill-regard for snitching within a history of loyalty and disloyalty that begins with the plantation, Dennis, as a legal scholar, makes use of historical analysis in order to testify to the figure of the traitorous slave’s as an origin point for the colloquial condemnation of the “house slave” and thus, the cause for popular consensus amongst Black slave descendants in the United States that snitching does more harm than good. Furthermore, in naming the plantation as a central site in the tradition of Black informacy in the U.S., Dennis’ argument contends that postbellum Black American codes of conduct regarding snitching, informancy, and other actions which treat intramural insights as intel are, in fact, the legacy of slavery. In this way, Dennis’s work articulates how the contemporary snitch, a sort of boogeyman within modern urban Black life, can be understood as a descendant of the “house slave” whose political, rhetorical, and narrative afterlife has been mired by enduring allegations of traitorous behavior. 

Still, as a legal scholar whose analysis of these historic intracommunal dynamics hopes to “facilitate nuanced conversation as to whether and how modern Black citizens and the government should approach using informants in current time,” Dennis’s own engagement with this phenomenon both in the archival-historical sense and the legal-juridical context functions not unlike a kind of academic informancy. As she elucidates the Black community’s intramural politics in order to inform those external to its historic interests, Dennis must act as a cultural informant to an intellectual audience presumably uninitiated in the logics which underwrite Black resistance to state informant work. Ironically, she performs a breach of security in the very act of exposing the community’s inner-workings and interiority to those who seek to infiltrate it. Dennis is not the only one snitching, however. After all, in a nation where it has become increasingly common for civilians to identify heavily with the state, snitching in the name of safety and security should come as no surprise.