All in all Dyson's main points to his argument is understanding how rap came to be, the negative and positive images that gangsta rap portrays to the black community, and acknowledging that rap music shows true beliefs about growing up in bad black neighborhoods. Rap originated from the early '70s during the Rosetta stone of black culture. Jobs were being losses in the inner cities. Lack of social services in predominantly black rural areas opened up drugs and violence in black communities. Therefore rap came to be the main way of expressing social oppression in black communities.
Melvin was definitely portrayed as at least an ambitious man by the mostly low angles of him. This allowed for the times of his weakness to be especially impactful. This ‘dream-within-a-dream’ storyline allows for autobiographical honesty and political and social poignancy dealing with racism and unresolved prejudice. A white boy born in the nineties can only go so far to analyze the social commentary of a different time and a different race, but from the history books and fiction, I’ll take a crack at it. Obviously, there was police brutality involving African Americans in the time that this movie was portrayed, and that was the major turn-off of “Song” to the major studios.
The one of the focuses of the film is to convey to its audience that living in the ghetto, like south central los angeles, is an unbelievably tough, but some people don't know what its like to live there. Killings, robberies, rapes and other acts of violence go undetected as certain cities tear america apart. This being said, writer and director John Singleton, wanted to expose the hostility of the Urban areas to society and shed some light on what black people were going through at that time period. Another focus was the absence of strong fatherly role models. Tre's father, portrayed by Lawrence Fishburn, is really the only father depicted in the neighborhood.
Throughout the essay, the author makes his point by providing concrete historical facts, details, and definitions. In this essay, George relies on logos to show how socio-economic privilege and skin color privilege created the conditions that led young Black people to create gangsta rap music. Privilege is the idea that some people are basically born having certain advantages that other people don’t have. What makes privilege interesting is that the people who have it have not really done anything to earn it. In fact, most of the time, the people who have it don’t even realize that it is working in their favor in their everyday lives.
In Brent Staples’s essay “Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Ability to Alter Public Space”, Staples explains how black men are discriminated against in public through the events that happened in his own life and the lives of others. Brent Staple says that stereotypes usually mislead and have bad effects. He says that stereotypes affect the stereotyper. People perceived that Staples was - a black man - as a mugger or sometime even a rapist just because the color of his skin, especially white woman with well dressed, and in her early twenties. The author was known as a night walker.
Yeoman explains, “cost cutting jeopardizes the safety of prisoners, guards, and communities” (508). Another scholar, Paul Wright, advocates against prison laboring. In his article “Making Slave Labor Fly” Wright describes how prisoners are replacing the jobs of the working class Americans and further contributing to an economic downfall. A majority of the articles emphasize the presence of the non-white male caught in the web of our criminal justice system. Jeffery Reiman describes how the white and wealthy slide through the system, while the low income, primarily male sector is targeted.
These films targeted audiences of urban black people and primarily starred black characters. One popular type of blaxploitation films was the action film. These usually took place in the ghetto in an atmosphere of hit men, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes. They included ethnic slurs pertaining to whites and blacks. The 70’s were also a time when women entered film genres that had always been thought of as exclusively male.
Skin Identity We live in a world where ones’ skin color defines who a person is and what one does. One’s personality and non-physical appearance is something rarely looked upon when identifying a person. This is a major problem because people who are mainly affected by this are races other than the dominant white Americans. In “Story of My Body” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space” written by Brent Staples and the film Gran Torino, minorities are perceived as either dangerous or dirty because of the simple fact that they are not part of the dominant race. Staples emphasizes that “Black men have a firm place in New York mugging literature” which has been instilled by the dominant culture who act as victims by stating they recall “growing up in terror of black males” (465).
According to Du Bois the prejudices of white people elicit “self-questioning, self-criticism, and lowering of ideals” among black people. The internalization of anti-black sentiment from the outside world thus begins to shape the black American experience. Through the concept double consciousness DuBois becomes better able to explore the social problems he studied in his earlier work “The Philadelphia Negro”. Double consciousness also creates an element of conflict within the black American, as they struggle (often unsuccessfully) to reconcile their identity as a black person and as an American citizen. Dubois cites the example of the black artisan in “The Souls of Black Folk”.
Relax, sit back and gasp as I display the rich tapestries of black ghetto. Social Factors As Reflected in classical mythology society is complicated. When blues legend 'Bare Foot D' remarked 'awooooh eeee only my dawg understands me' [1] he created a monster which society has been attempting to tame ever since. Much has been said about the influence of the media on black ghetto. Observers claim it cleary plays a significant role amongst the developing middle classes.