The Black Community Analysis

Culture has a significant meaning to every individual belonging to that community, however, culture has the ability to expand between communities and create meaning to individuals of other backgrounds. Beginning in the 1990s communities in Los Angeles developed distinct cultures portraying core values and sentimental outrages. When looking back at Los Angeles history in the 1990s, there was widely known police brutality among underrepresented groups. In 1992 after Rodney King’s unjust homicide the Black community, along with the most of the United States, demonstrated their disapproval through media, music, films and most commonly protests and violence in the streets. The Black community was directly affected given the years of police brutality …show more content…
But not me!” the singer Dr. Dre is talking about societies attempt to systemize people into conforming into the mainstream media. The song finishes this verse by saying, “[they]Forget about the ghetto, And rap for the pop charts, Some musicians curse at home, But scared to use profanity, When up on the microphone.” In these lyrics the artist mentions how people from their own communities try to ignore their roots just to be in the mainstream music charts. The reason why people avoided rapping or even mentioned the “ghetto” during this time was because it had been intensely negatively stigmatized by the media, news, police enforcement and even in politics. Lipsitz calls this systematic racism, in which the main group in society evoke negative ideology of said groups in order to stigmatize them and see their community as a “problem.” N.W.A’s music group was seen as a breakthrough during this time because the member were challenging these social norms in which “gangsta rap” was forbidden, and most importantly Black communities voicing out their problems was forbidden. The artist says that most people were willing to change their identity in order to make money and be accepted by the white community, but the artist himself was not going to …show more content…
Gaye Johnson describes in her book Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, And Spatial Entitlement In Los Angeles as form of social meaning known as spatial entitlement. Johnson refers to Spatial Entitlement to a group of people who know they have been marginalized and abused by the systematic social structure, yet the people refuse to give up the rights and create social meaning of the area in which they reside. Johnson gives the example of the low-rider culture predominantly in East Los Angeles during the late 50s when people, predominantly Latinos, were forced to move into the Whittier area after the city had forced people out of neighboring cities through eminent domain to build the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium. The people who had moved to the new area reclaimed the landscape by using low-rider shows as a form of expression. According to Johnson, the purpose of painting and fixing their low-riders was deemed as meaningful because many times that was all they had and it was also a form of showing their art through their cars. Using low-riders became a form of art that symbolized the unification of people who had been abused their rights but used an external force to bring them together to become a stronger

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