http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/fashion/yale-graduates-seek-a-degree-in-hip-hop.html?ref=technology&_r=0
This news article expresses the increasing popularity of a website called Rap Genius, founded by three Yale graduates, that deciphers hip hop lyrics. Recently, this website has garnered attention due to racist comments coming from both the rappers and the people who work on the site.
This article is an example of racialization, the process in which racial meaning is given to something that is non-racial, because those in hip-hop and often the industry itself have constantly been surrounded by racial stereotypes and stigmas against black people causing such statements to be said aloud.
The last paragraph of the article states:
"Mr. Moghadam [one of the founders] insists that the beef was largely tongue-in-cheek, and that the bluster is just part of the pugnacious hip-hop world. 'Dissing is their vocabulary,' he said. 'If they're dissing you, they're showing you respect.'"
I feel this could fall under Bonilla-Silva's ideology of color-blind racism, in which people aren't directly racist but use a cover-up explanation in which they talk about it in a different way, because this quote makes it seem as if rappers and hip-hop music may not always explicitly express racist comments but it doesn't mean that they are not still in the music only covered up by various other methods.
As a side note, I wanted to write about this because I really don't know much about hip hop music so I was curious and interested to write about something I hadn't really thought that much about. I am interested to know what people think about the article.
While it is true that Hip-Hop did serve as a Racialized device for African Americans, the Racialization has grown to include most minorities, specifically the impoverished groups. What this "Rap Genius" site has done is also a form of Hegemony, wherein the misconstruing of definitions of words and actions, can help control the racialized group by kindling a fire within the community, and lead up to a sort of "crab" mentality, thus keeping the opposed group at bay. The reason hip-hop was a chosen (and quite popular) racialized device, is that it was a form of expression of the oppressed groups. This can be seen through texts such as “Boyz 'N the Hood,” or “Hip Hop Mestizaje: Racialization, Resonance and Filipino American Knowledge of Self”
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