| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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throughout our semester's work. Without fail, it is a question that causes our students—mostly white, middle to upper-middle class—to pause and consider what for them has become the iPodic backdrop of their everyday lives. Based on the lyrics that they have memorized precisely, have ingested wholly, and can repeat readily, they come to “understand” (or think they understand) what it means to be poor, urban, and stereotypically black without ever having personally interacted with anyone of color before coming to a residential, predominantly white, rural university. Further, it gives them an avenue to engage and, many times, reinforce the root metaphors, mores, and norms embedded in the dominant ideology. It makes certain types of actions and justifications for such actions normal, even though those actions may serve to reinforce their own position of unacknowledged privilege. They become connoisseurs of what is good rap and what is not. One twenty-one-year-old white female student said,
What was surprising to us as these students’ teachers was the commonality of their responses to our question and the reasons that they gave us for the general appeal of rap and hip hop to white people.
According to our students, who readily agreed with each other, rap has an urban edge to it that makes them (the students who self-identified as “normal people”) feel less normal. Listening