Hip Hop Culture In Mcbride's Hip Hop Planet By James Mcbride
921 Words4 Pages
Hip Hop was the wildfire that started in the South Bronx and whose flames leapt up around the world crying out for change. James McBride’s Hip Hop Planet focuses on his personal interactions with the development of Hip Hop culture and his changing interpretations of the world wide movement. Many of his encounters and mentions in the text concern young black males and his writing follows an evolution in the representation of this specific social group. He initially portrays them as arrogant, poor, and uneducated but eventually develops their image to include the positive effects of their culture in an attempt to negate their historical misrepresentation.
McBride begins his essay in high contrast to his intended purpose with an anecdotal discussion of his first encounters with Hip Hop music that inevitably represents black men as arrogant, aggressive, and poor. The introductory paragraph details McBride’s fear of his daughter marrying a black rapper that he describes as having “a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out of his arms, and a thug attitude” (McBride para. 1). This stereotypical description of a rapper, as well as the sense of fear McBride feels, contributes to his initial representation of black males as aggressive thugs that are unsuitable to become husbands. He then describes a physical altercation between his friend and another black man from the poor south bronx region that he describes as “a big guy, a dude wearing a do-rag who’d