| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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neck chain and diamond (or was it brilliantly cut cubic zirconium?) stud earrings. He could have been going to a club in any urban city USA and would have blended in seamlessly.
However, this “everyday student,” our homegrown from “around the way” “homeboy,” was white. His “white bread” (translated as plain, boring, and nothing particularly special) biography is somewhat commonplace at our private, liberal arts university. He grew up and continued to live in a predominantly white environment and rarely had any contact with a person of color before coming to college. He sat in our classes, pondered his selection of a major, slow-walked the campus with an invisible (or at least, unheard to us) rhythmic beat, and emitted a mass-marketed urban vibe with his basically store-bought bravado. As two sociologists in this same environment, we were intrigued by this “everyday student's” modus operandi, and we wanted to know, to really understand at an analytical level, what motivated him (and her) to so thoroughly adopt an increasingly made-for-MTV, black-youth persona.
To investigate this “everyday student,” we had to look beyond the obvious and look beneath the surface to unveil certain fundamental social forces that manifest themselves through the “everyday” social structure. The vehicle we used to explore these developments is the hip hop culture of the “everyday student.” This led us to an attentive investigation of the multiple meanings and function of hip hop culture in contemporary society. We sought to gain some insight into our “everyday student” by first conducting six focus groups among this population. The students were all white and from all four years of the university. They were informed that they were participating in ongoing research that we both were conducting. They were also given the option to not participate, with an assurance that no consequence would come from their nonparticipation. We had no refusals, and students enthusiastically participated. The basic questions