hip hop is colonizing america

Things I Do Know:

These two readings were so packed full of knowledge and scholarly vocabulary that it took me a second to find the meaning of the text, but I think I have.

Professor Ball argues that the media is designed to brainwash the masses, making them turn a blind eye to racism, sexism, ageism, and all the other isms that society places upon us from birth. Maybe turn a blind eye is the wrong term because as Ball argues we are so desensitized to seeing these ism projected on us by the media that we don’t even notice they are happening right in front of our faces.

Hip-hop is a great example of how the media creates a false image that "colonizes" a certain group of individuals in society. The music industry sells a lifestyle to its consumers, one of bling, nice cars, hard lives, and violence, but not all raps meets this criterion, and neither does the real image of the hood- life. The music industry makes these raps marketable by adding big names, product placement, and lyrical lines full of false stereotypes. These raps are sold to the consumer and present an image of the hoods and ghetto lifestyle as something normal. These raps also project a false image of the black community in America; an image that presents blacks as violent people by nature, uneducated, unemployed and people that deserve to be living below poverty level. These images are not only projected on the white society about the black community, but also upon the black community themselves. These false images "label" this group of individuals and these labels become self-fulfilling prophecies for most.

The lifestyle presented by hip-hop artists is not the average life of an African- American living in the ghetto. With more and more artists rising to power and fortune you would suspect to see a change in the dynamics and statistics about the black community, but that is not the case. Ball argues that the media uses the hoods and ghettos as a colony, using the community for cheap labor and entertainment. The images presented in the raps may help one black man or woman rise to fame, but in turn subjects the rest of the black community to be stereotyped and oppressed by the images these few represent.

Things I Did Not Understand:

"Continued references to Frantz Fanon, too often made with no equal reference or focus on what prompted his brilliant analyses, ignore the fundamental colonizing process still underway."

I wish I knew more about Frantz Fanon and what his book toward the African revolution has to say about how media plays a role colonizing and oppressing the black community.