| Description |
This thesis considers the social dynamics of race (a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies) as observed among young participants in Salt Lake City's hip hop scene. The author used participant observation techniques to observe the hip hop scene and employed Michael Omi and Howard Winant's concept of racial formation (the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed) to characterize the racial project (a simultaneous interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines) enacted by the hip hoppers as nonracist because of its refusal of essentialist (the assumption that individual characteristics reflect a consistent racial essence) racial conception. The thesis recounts the discovery that hip hop culture is a complex, hybrid form more predicated upon racial diversity and inclusion than racial exclusion, because it coalesces African American, Afro-Caribbean, Puerto ftican, Latino, Anglo, and other cultural traditions. Perhaps because it includes black cultural resistance to white domination, the popularity of hip hop culture among youth of many backgrounds has rarely been considered or explained systematically outside the assumption that the involvement of whites in hip hop amounts, a priori, to recuperation of black cultural resistance. The thesis challenges this assumption through its finding that even among white hip hoppers in Salt Lake, the need to resist a dominant, white, cultural power center structures the choice to participate in an old school style hip hop scene. |
