Music has long been understood as a site for the negotiation of racialized forms of difference. Across Arab-majority societies and diasporic spaces, however, difference often figures primarily through Orientalism and sectarianism, rather than racialization, per se. In this paper, I take up Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s call for anthropology of Arab-majority societies to engage with the “critical tension” between one’s analytical categories as a researcher and the ways one’s associates consider and mobilize difference in their day-to-day. This paper asks what utility critical race theory—a model of difference based in Euro-American milieux—may have as a framework for understanding contemporary Lebanese hip hop. I begin by laying out a framework for adapting structural insights of Anglophone critical race theory to this system of what we might call race in Lebanon. I am working with two racial formation theories: contributions from Stuart Hall I call race-as-discourse and from E. Patrick Johnson I call race-as-performance. I then introduce the ways the term “race” has entered my ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon’s independent music scenes before applying these notions to a case study of battle rap in Beirut involving a Lebanese-American named Dizaster and an Ivorian-Lebanese named Edd Abbas. In analyzing the two rounds of insults or “bars” that Dizaster and Edd trade off, I suggest that masculinity enables an aggressive anti-blackness to grind across the cultural formations of US-American and Lebanese conceptions of phenotypic difference. Indeed, the success of the gestural and linguistic elements of Dizaster’s claim to Lebanese-ness rely on the denigration of Edd’s blackness. And yet, both Edd and battle rap league organizer Chyno know that Dizaster’s fame in the US battle rap world has allowed them to build a following for their own league. Thus, this case study not only provides an entry point for discussing the relevance of “race” for anthropology of the Middle East, but it also opens important questions about the late capitalist extraction of value from racialized masculinities packaged in expressive culture.