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. A chronological account of development of rap music going back to the era of slavery Drawings and editorial cartoons A multicultural bibliography containing sociological, historical, and legal materials A glossary of many key terms such as "structural racism" and "governmentalism"

Exploring the basic conflict between the legal equality that black men possess as U.S. citizens and their social isolation stemming from white America's perceptions of them as "culturally alien," the author sets out to provoke, stimulate, and change the negative images and stereotypes that indicate a fundamental defect in the mainframe of American culture. As the author states, the purpose of this book is not to defend the black male, but to deconstruct him and to libertate him from the negative images and stereotypes that have stultified his existence. Largely through the victories of the Civil Rights movement, everyone in the United States is--formally--equal. Yet there remains a basic conflict between that legal equality and the social isolation of black men that stems from white America's perceptions of them as, by nature, culturally alien. This tautly argued, eloquently written, and passionate book is must reading for anyone concerned with the ongoing problems of the American dilemma. Each essay in this wide- ranging book will provoke, stimulate, and change one's view of the myths and stereotypes surrounding black men.

An eye-opening, unapologetic explanation of what "racial profiling" is in modern-day America: systematic targeting of communities and placing of suspicion on populations, on the basis of not only ethnicity but also certain places that are linked to the social identity of that group. In 21st-century, post-civil rights era America, "race" has become complex and intersectional. It is no longer simply a matter of color-black versus white-contends author D. Marvin Jones, but equally a matter of space or "geographies of fear," which he defines as spaces in which different groups are particularly vulnerable to stereotyping by law enforcement: blacks in the urban ghetto, Mexicans at the functional equivalent of the border, Arabs at the airport. Dangerous Spaces: Beyond the Racial Profile demonstrates how society has constructed a set of threat narratives in which certain widespread problems-immigration, drugs, gangs, and terrorism, for example-have been racialized and explains the historical and social origins of these racializing threat narratives. The book identifies how these narratives have led directly to relentless profiling that results in arrest, deportation, massive surveillance, or even death for members of suspect populations. Readers will come to understand how the problem of profiling is not merely a problem of institutional bias and individual decision making, but also a deeply rooted cultural issue stemming from the processes of meaning-making and identity construction. Offers a novel framework for understanding the problem of racial profiling that explains how profiling actually involves the intersection of race and space Provides concrete solutions in the form of a civil rights restoration act that addresses the problem of "racial profiling" through a set of innovative community controls on the deployment and power of police Constitutes essential reading for students, lawyers, journalists, and teachers interested in issues of race and ethnicity as well as general readers wanting to learn about racial profiling in American society

This powerful book on racism in the United States argues that a threatening narrative originating in slavery continues to link Black people to inferiority, dangerousness, and crime, causing them to be presumed guilty by society and U.S. legal systems. Why are Black people stopped, arrested, and shot by police at such a high rate? Why are they portrayed in the media as gangbangers and urban thugs? D. Marvin Jones writes that the problem of race lies in the way Blackness has been inextricably knotted together in our culture with presumptions. In the era of segregation this was a presumption of inferiority, but in our era, it is primarily a presumption of dangerousness or criminality. In chapters on slavery, urban spaces, the drug war, media portrayals, and white spaces, he shows how the presumption of guilt continues to shape the treatment of Black people in the United States. Arguing that this presumption is not simply a matter of hate on the part of individuals, but instead a social process linked to a widely shared racial ideology, The Presumption points out the continuation of racial caste in the U.S. as a crisis for democracy and provides a blueprint for a kind of second Reconstruction.