about later Eminem. The Eminem of Relapse and Recovery. Emimen the pop star. The Eminem that white people who don't care about hip hop regularly say "I don't really like rap....except some Eminem".

If he was black he wouldn't have been shit from the beginning, but not for any of the reasons you named above. Part of the reason early Emimen (The Slim Shady LP) came onto the scene and flipped the whole damn rap world was because he was well aware of what he could and couldn't do as a white man. If he were black, he would've done what other new rappers did, pick whatevers hot and run with it. In that era, probably some type of gangster rap, if he was black he would've came in and talked about that rough hood life in Detroit, acted bad as hell and went with it.

Since he knew no one was buying that shit from a white guy, he didn't come like that. He came like a psycho, emotional, drug abusing, funny as fuck rapper and got everybody (regardless of race, revisionists can say what they want, but in the early days it wasn't just white people bumping him) playing his shit and buying his albums.

The guy went around something that was supposed to hold him back and found a way to rap and get taken seriously, as opposed to early attempts by people like Vanilla Ice and such.

Although in truth, this is still a simplified attempt at explaining why he's popular without chalking it all up to race.

Some would say that Redman did the a lot of wild shit Eminem did years earlier and didn't get nearly as much attention.