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There is, however, a negative response to gangster rap common to white students that seems born out of genuine cultural concern rather than racial hatred. Mauricio, for example, can be critical of the music yet supportive of the larger black culture; he draws on Cornel West to critique rap’s commodification: West also mentions that the corporate market has contributed greatly to the “weakening of black culture.” Rap songs are great examples of this theory in affect. The rappers are motivated by the money which their songs bring in. The more shocking their songs are the more money that they are going to make and if this means talking about a life style that maybe should not be marketed then so be it. This market does weaken the black American culture, it makes rappers decide whether they want to have a positive affect on society or to make some serious money.And I will never forget the long e-mail message I received from a slender young white man, David, who waited silently for weeks in the class, and then found a strong, culturally acute voice. He wrote almost always about his position as a young, poor white, living in a racially mixed, often violent area of Minneapolis. His general theme throughout the quarter was struck in that first e-message: I just want to start out by saying that maybe i should have not taken the class with a subject like rap music. It appears to me that I am losing sense of what the class is about and getting too confused with the violent message rap sends out. I hate where I live. It is filled with poverty and despair. The food shelf comes to our block every week to distribute food. A 13 year old boy was shot in our alley two weeks ago. I am not used to this. I live in fear when I go to the market. A few weeks back three hispanic boys chased me and threw large rocks at my head for no reason. If one would have hit me I would have easily been knocked out or killed. I understand where these rap artists get their lyrics. It is perhaps all they know. I don't know how to handle myself in the streets. I sit in my room at night wondering if gunfire will break out and perhaps shatter my window and then I would be the next homicide for the police to sort out. It is an all out war right now and it is in my neighborhood a very race related one. Hispanics against blacks against Indian against white. The low-riders cruise through our neighborhood with the bass on their stereos pumped up. I see it all so clearly. I guess it bothers me to talk about rap music in class because I come to school to get away from the reality that I see everyday and then we talk about it and listen to people rap about how much they like drive-by shootings and how much they don't like a way a person looks. I am always the victim. I have had a lot of bad luck in my life with being the object of ridicule and hatred. Rap music is there for people who live the same life as the rappers or who get off on the same kind of violence. Maybe it’s there so people can understand what is happening to our children and what loss of hope so many of us have. I guess living where i do i have begun to feel that bitterness to an extent. I hate the feelings I have now. I don’t want to be angry at anyone but it’s hard because they put you through the same grief everyday without any reason or thought of it otherwise. I don't know if this is what you wanted me to write but it’s how i feel so I can't hold back what I feel. then it only builds and destroys a person from the inside out.Some compositionists would disapprove of a course like mine, which deals with frank racial content, on the grounds that it inhibits student expression. Hairston, for example, chides those who offer diversity-centered writing courses on just such grounds: We also know that novice writers can virtually freeze in the writing classroom when they see it as an extremely high-risk situation. . . . [T]hey nervously test their teachers to see what is expected of them. (189)David certainly had much to inhibit him: a course content that rubbed in the “high-risk,” volatile drama of his daily life. But rather than “freeze,” David used his experiential authority as a scholarly, critical base for investigating more about the topic. His dynamic in the course ping-ponged between this instinctive distrust of gangster rap and a curiosity to learn more about it. He felt no need to “take refuge in generalities and responses that please the teacher” (Hairston 189); rather, he kept gravitating back to his unshakable condemnation, based on life as he had seen it. The cause/effect logic of rap shaping reality was to him inescapable. The class ultimately worked out well for him; his “bitterness,” unlike Troy’s, wasn’t so strong that it prevented him from entertaining other perspectives on the reality behind rap. And certainly a liberal education is not meant to allow Troy’s sad racism to remain undisturbed, simply because of the high-riskiness of any subject matter that can catalyze it. David couldn’t previously ignore the gangster reality because he lived it every day in his inner-city neighborhood. Most of my white students are suburban; they admit these brutal pictures are foreign to them, and they find the devastation in hardcore lyrics impossible to dismiss. Stacy speaks for so many students who are glad for the noise the music brings: I know that not everyone has to care for the music, but after being in a class that has dealt with these issues for so long I wish that everyone had the time to read the articles and to see that sometimes the education we get . . . isn’t necessarily from the [violence in the] music it is the issues that are being brought up and discussed. If it weren’t for rap the falacy of the world being a perfect place might not of been broken.This is one of the value-added portions of writing about rap, learning about immiseration. (Irony must be noted here in the way mainstream media low-keys information about race and class in our culture to the extent that many of my white, middle-class students need to rely on rap songs for their counter-history—those same rap songs in turn vilified by mainstream media.) It’s like you can almost see stop-action footage of realization dawning on some white students. Take Kelly. After reading some of the articles on the Congressional hearings against gangster rap, then listening to some lyrics (especially early 80s rap), she puts two and two together and urges her reader to take the same mental journey: If you sit down and really listen to rap music, you will find that in some of the songs they are telling a story about how they struggle to survive. These sad and depressing songs are the true everday life of the street that these people live on. “The Message,” a song by Grandmaster Flash and the Fabulous [sic] Five, paints a picture for us of an apartment in an area filled with poverty. They describe the apartment with lyrics like, “Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs you know they just don't care.” If you lived in this kind of ungodly environment wouldn’t you be angry at the world? With that anger would you turn violent? I think that most anyone would become violent and angry.Rap gave Kelly her first peek into the still-kicking drama of the kitchenette, as Richard Wright gruesomely describes the overcrowded, subdivided apartment that too-often proved the only available living quarters for blacks who migrated North: The kitchenette, with its crowded rooms and incessant bedlam, provides an enticing place for crimes of all sort—crimes against women and children or any stranger who happens to stray into its dark hallways. The noise of our living, boxed in stone and steel, is so loud that even a pistol shot is smothered. (108)So gangsta’s not only the CNN for blacks, but for whites as well. Brandie, also from the suburbs, commented in her final e-message, “I give rappers a lot more credit than I used to. . . . Before this class I did not know that these stories the rappers were rapping were true stories. . . . [Rap music] teaches everyone something that they didn’t already know.” Troy, of course, has no interest in learning about the kitchenette; the ghetto for him is already known, it was caused by gangster rap, by black men. It’s only because he doesn’t know his history, or stubbornly lets his racism blur any historical vision, that he can wonder, as he does in one of his papers, “This class says that gangster rap portrays the way it really is in the ‘hood’. Well I ask was it like that: In the hood before gangster came along?” One might wonder, when exactly was gangster not there? Some white students know the kitchenette only too well. Not, like David above, because they’ve suffered poverty in alienation, but because they’ve lived in it as community members united against the problems. Peter was a white student who flourished in one of my courses. His writings were all informed by a lived sympathy. His papers read like a reverse-image of David’s—same scene, opposite inflection: I’ve seen these problems first-hand because I grew up in this culture on the south side of Mpls. I’ve seen little black children called “niggers” and seen the look in their eyes; I’ve seen sons sell crack cocaine to their fathers; I’ve seen smart kids turn to guns, gangs, and drugs instead of books and pencils because their families offered no alternatives to the criminal life; and the saddest thing that I saw was newspaper articles about slain kids who used to be some of my best friends. I truly believe that reasons for criminal and dysfunctional lifestyles are results from racist politics and individual prejudices.Eric responded to one of Delores Tucker’s anti-rap observations (“the first three things to note about gangster rap is it is obscene, it is obscene, it is obscene” [United States 12]) with impatience: “Thats a cute statement, and a nice twist of semantics, but [she] must just be too sheltered to realize that life itself is obscene. Don’t ban rap. Ban ghettos.”
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