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THERE ARE PROMINENT MEMBERS OF THE LABOUR PARTY, BOTH ON THE LEFT AND ON THE RIGHT, WHO DON'T SEEM TO RECOGNIZE THE SEVERITY OF THE BEATING WE SUFFERED IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OF JUNE 1983. BUT SOME OF US AT THE GRASS ROOTS, AMONG THE MEDIA, FEAR THAT WE ARE IN DANGER OF BEING ELBOWED ONTO THAT OLD "RUBBISH HEAP OF HISTORY," WHILE WE WITNESS THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE BRITISH POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT.

Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1 Crimes of Identity: The Slave Ship, the Plantation, and the Presumption -- 2 "This Is a White Man's Country!": The Eviction of Ossian Sweet -- 3 Makes Me Wanna Holler: The Making of the Second Ghetto -- 4 The New Black Codes: The Presumption and the Drug War -- 5 Strangers in Paradise: The Presumption in White Spaces -- 6 From Blackface to Sidney Poitier: The Presumption on Our Screens (Part I) -- 7 From Blaxploitation to Hood Films: The Presumption on Our Screens (Part II) -- 8 Conclusion -- Afterword -- Index.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1 The Blessings of History -- 2 Gangs of New York: The Story of the Jogger Trial -- 3 What's My Name: The Politics of Reception, and the Politics of Rap -- 4 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner -- 5 Will You Let the Tiger Loose? The Rhetoric of Race in American Criminal Trials -- 6 Crimes of Identity: The Birth of the Racial Profile -- 7 Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Black Male As Athlete -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Is Gangsta Rap just black noise? Or does it play the same role for urban youth that CNN plays in mainstream America? This provocative set of essays tells us how Gangsta Rap is a creative "report" about an urban crisis, our new American dilemma, and why we need to listen. Increasingly, police, politicians, and late-night talk show hosts portray today's inner cities as violent, crime-ridden war zones. The same moral panic that once focused on blacks in general has now been refocused on urban spaces and the black men who live there, especially those wearing saggy pants and hoodies. The media always spotlights the crime and violence, but rarely gives airtime to the conditions that produced these problems. The dominant narrative holds that the cause of the violence is the pathology of ghetto culture. Hip-hop music is at the center of this conversation. When 16-year-old Chicago youth Derrion Albert was brutally killed by gang members, many blamed rap music. Thus hip-hop music has been demonized not merely as black noise but as a root cause of crime and violence. Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma explores—and demystifies—the politics in which the gulf between the inner city and suburbia have come to signify not only a socio-economic dividing line, but a new socio-cultural divide as well.