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or we could go a little further. racism in the states isn't that distant from older forms of class prejudice (obviously the triggers are a bit different, but not as much as you'd think)...one older form of "thinking" about working-class and/or poor folk which was big in the 19th century england/france anyway is "miserablism" which equates class position and mental capabilities directly, so amounts to the idea that if you're poor or sell your labor power for a wage, you do so as an expression of essence--so it is assumed that you can't do anything unless directed by your "betters"--who are of course motivated by the finest of selfless motives in that white man's burden kinda way. this isn't that far removed from contemporary modes of class reproduction, particularly in the more rigid spaces like schools, which function to open up possibilities by positioning students in a particular set of relations to those possibilities which is co-ordinated with class position. funny how that works.
anyway, say you're in a poor urban school district and along the way the possibilities of, say, university are presented to you, but at the same time it's presented as something you will not access, can not access because ambient conditions--which are a strict class function--prevent it. these conditions could be anything from the notion that school represents the System organized by the Man and that resisting that System can be coherently carried out by refusing to play the School game--which of course results in rebellion-as-self-neutralization in many cases (see paul willis' really interesting book on uk punk in the 70s: learning to labor, how working class kids get working class jobs).
following this line out because it's kinda coherent, if you're in that position (a student at such a hypothetical school) and you reject the System for whatever reason, that cuts you off from an entire sequence of possible moves/personae/options. within the logic of the existing order, then, you've made one of your only two possible moves: you either move through the legitimate order, or you position yourself outside of it, excluded. "doing something with your life" is typically defined as moving through the legitimate system---outside, you're "nothing" or "aren't doing anything"---so the legitimate order comes wrapped in the norms that define not only success but even legitimate doing.
if this is clear, then a distinction can be made: institutionalized racism operates much in the way that class reproduction does in that it circumscribes a space of "legitimate achievement" based on "legitimate competences" and in the process also defines what it outside of that space as Other--but in a negative sense, so nothing, nowhere.
you could also say that the furthest expression of the power of institutionalized racism is that folk who pass through this system internalize these same norms. *that* is an expression of racism--the power to exclude wholesale as a function of race/class intertwined position.
hip hop is like a host of other forms of art expression (dippin mentioned some of them already) that you have to look at in at least two ways---for what it does and for what it says---and this even before you start breaking up the various subcultures that are lumped together by the term in pop-cult.
one thing hip hop does is to empower modes of expression and/or creative action that are *outside* the dominant order, the legitmate skills that are *not* validated by the dominant order, but which are nonetheless skills with enormous creative potential. so one thing hip hop does is enable a rejection of institutionalized racism and it's class correlates in the sense outlined (too fast, i know) above. this is what dd was referring to, i think, when he mentioned that "real" hip hop is about breaking a "slave mentality"--which is imprinted on folk as a function of the normal operation of class stratification--social reproduction.
so from this, more structural viewpoint, the claim that what hip hop *does* is of a piece with the existing systems of social reproduction, in which racism and class stratification are tightly intertwined, is absurd.
but you can ask a series of other questions about what hip hop artists *say*---and these are different questions, more to do with staging an imaginary african-american community---but you can't isolate what is *said* from the processes of *doing* that enable them--so you can't just flatten what is said into some documentary relation to an Outside.
i think you can talk about contemporary forms of racism through hip hop, in other words, but the discussion would have nothing to do with the way the op proceeds. maybe we can have this other conversation. hard to say.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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