roachboy was making a good point. a lot of people in the world only understand what they see on TV, 'mainstream hip hop'. 'Hip hop' and 'mainstream hip hop' are two different things. Hip hop, true hip hop, has goals, one of which is bringing the minds of black people to a higher level, out of the 'slavery mentality' which can (on some levels) lead to selling drugs and going gangs.
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but some of the forefront hiphop artists are 40+ y/o adults and still embrace this culture as if it's some sacred representation that they must continue to perpetuate
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True Hip hop has little to do with drugs, or kills, or hoes and bitches. real hip hop is trying to pull people away from everything you see in black music thanks to TV. so true hip hop IS something sacred and if it is continued to spread and grow, what you understand as 'hip hop' would began to see a decline.
As far as rappers and mainstream hip hp artists, they continue to do what makes them money. because in american without money you are nothing. if you get a chance, listen to some stuff off Kanye West's first album 'college dropout' (like 'it all falls down' and 'we don't care what people say'). He and Common are the closest you're get to true hip hop on a mainstream circuit - and even Kanye begins to come away from it.
Just as many young white men listen to rap as black man do. however, in white neighborhoods there is wealth, making it harder for them to do the things that some black man have to in order to eat. Or the things that some black man have said they did, in order to make a quick buck.
I agree with everything Jewels said in the first post. And must of the second one ... BET is an interesting thing, it makes me think of house slave. Or the black man put charge of the others so he would feel big and important and keep the 'niggers in place' while the master was away. But TV ONE, that, from my watching, is better, if only because it is not shoving music videos (or should i say 'half of the videos) in you face, over and over, all day everyday.
And unlike the in the 50s, the media has decided to show us all types of people on TV, including blacks and gays (my mind is coming up short on other examples, most likely because I am both black and gay). And in both of these cases, what we are shown makes up a 10% of who we are. (I'm still waiting to meet a "L word' type lady - smile). The media shows us, and the rest of the world, what it believes we need to know. I watched a thing on PBS about these Black students who went to Africa and couldn't believe their eyes, it was nothing like what they saw on TV. And the Africans were surprised, as well, their TV experience did not prepare them for educated Black people.
And i believe racism had grown and changed, as does everything else, with time, with a lot of help from people 'educated' by the media. But it is also helped by the people who run into the 10% during their life, (people are usually louder about negative things.)
squeeeb, only people who have meet, talked with, and befriended, a black person (who did not fit into any of their negative stereotypes), would have to go out of their way to be racist. but there are, like Zeraph said, a lot of white people who are clueless. Either because they already racist and have no reason to 'befriend' a black people, or because they live in one of the many places that have no black people. And in the cases where there are no black people, they are stuck with nothing but the media and tales told to them by people who are there.
About six years ago, i worked at an convenience store (a CoGo's, or Hess, or 7-11 - depending on where you live) and a white woman, around the age of 50, asked me, while I was bagging her stuff, if it was true that black people bleed green. My first was, didn't you fuckers rip enough skin off our backs to know what color it is? But before I could get my lips moving, my manager, a white woman in her late 40s, began talking to the woman, my ears and brain were not connected, i was too angry, so i don't know what she said, but the customer asked me to forgive her, and my boss almost cried, she wanted me to know that not all white people were so .... clueless. But we are all clueless, just in different ways.
For now, we hate because we don't know any better. Once we know, we will hate because we don't like it. Or because it's evil, or because it's below us, or because it's "just not right."
So while the type of racism that lived in the 50s may be dead, there is still racism and the people who are teaching it to their children, in some way or another. (There are still white people out there who believe if a black person touches them, they will become black - i've met one, and where there is one, there is two...)