Why White Kids Love Hip Hop
Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Our national conversation about race is ludicrously out-of-date. Hip-hop is the key to understanding how things are changing. In a provocative book that will appeal to hip-hoppers both black and white and their parents, Bakari Kitwana deftly teases apart the culture of hip-hop to illuminate how race is being lived by young Americans. This topic is ripe, but untried, and Kitwana poses and answers a plethora of questions: Does hip-hop belong to black kids? What in hip-hop appeals to white youth? Is hip-hop different from what rhythm, blues, jazz, and even rock 'n' roll meant to previous generations? How have mass media and consumer culture made hip-hop a unique phenomenon? What does class have to do with it? Are white kids really hip-hop's primary listening audience? How do young Americans think about race, and how has hip-hop influenced their perspective? Are young Americans achieving Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream through hip-hop? Kitwana addresses uncomfortable truths about America's level of comfort with black people, challenging preconceived notions of race. With this brave tour de force, Bakari Kitwana takes his place alongside the greatest African American intellectuals of the past decades.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Caucasian parents anxiously seeking explanations for either the descending waistlines of their children's trousers or the distressing contents of their iPods won't find them in Kitwana's repetitive, digressive and rather dated book, which is better at throwing out questions than following up on them. To the title question, former Source executive editor Kitwana (The Hip-Hop Generation) offers little more than variations on the stock answers of "alienation" and declining economic opportunity. The flip side Kitwana's belief in hip-hop's liberatory potential (he sees it as "the last hope of America") belongs more to the era of an engaged Fear of a Black Planet than the bling of The Game. But a bigger problem is that the book fails to spend much time discussing its putative subject; names are checked and scenes are discussed, but music and lyrics are rarely cited (a long chapter on Eminem quotes his lyrics exactly once). Similarly, the author has a way of invoking "opportunists," "the media" and "the few" with a maddening lack of specificity that blunts the book's already diffuse message.
