Week of Nov. 17-21

This week was entitled, "Race and Hip Hop and Black Cinema," drawing sharp distinctions with who was in and out of the Hip Hop/Black Gang culture of the late 1980s and 1990s. Even today, these gangs still persist and the culture that surrounds them only serves to help keep up the support system of the gangs. Off the top of my head, there have been two great rappers who have died due to the gang culture that surrounds and inhabits Hip Hop, Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac. Both were taken before their time and I beleive that if they knew what would happen in advance of their deaths, they would have taken more steps to stop the gang-like war between the hip-hip coasts of West and East.

We saw clips from many films that glamorized the gang culture (basically, real depictions), and we saw how it is not only the black male who attaches himself to the cult of power that a gang offers but any male who has been born into underpriveleged conditions and doesn't want to have to work their way up through the society ladder. The gang culture offered an "out" in which those participants in it didn't have to work the daily grind job, or pretend as if they wanted to got to college. They could be in a gang, mafia or mob and just say that is what they wanted to do, no furhter aspirations, just be a gang man for the rest of their lives and that was an okay answer for society because it meant job security and good pay, as long as you stayed alive.

Today, the gang culture has become somewhat less mainstream with rappers emphasizing street roots, but not the gang culture that might have been prevalent in the area in which they grew up. Rappers today are more likely to rap about their money and women than the trials and tribulations they faced in order to get to where they are today. The culture is still perpetuated in their music, just in a less overt manner. 

Week of Nov. 10-14

For one of the last (real) weeks of class, and one in which the one-month countdown until the end of the semester began, the topic up for discussion and analyzation was "Issues of Contemporary Racism in American Society." And not only were we seeing just anaylsis of certain racially tense situations and the response to that certain situation, but we were actually witnessing (via different forms of media) the overt racism that still pervades American Society and threatens to rip our country apart based on a skin color. 

Most striking among the course materials asigned for this particular week was the selection of Naomi Klein's theory about the "Shock Doctrine," and how the government uses natural disasters and times of great distress to pass through unpopular bills while the public is still recovering from the shock of the event, so they cannot be bothered by questioning what might really be happening to them and their country due to their utter zombiefied nature. I do believe that the governement does these types of things, just like after 9/11. After an absolutely shocking and terrifying act of terrorism was exacted on differerent locations along the Eastern seaboard (most notably in Manhattan), the government pushed through the Patriot Act, which inlcuded many provisions which have now been "sun-setted", or taken out as per guidelines in the official rules of the Act. Many parts of the Act have been called unconstitutional, but any law-maker to have voted against this in the weeks following September 11, 2001, would have have been considered unpatriotic at best, and an enemy of the state in some not-so-far-off reality that we now inhabit. Most of their constituents just wanted action from the government, and this Act provided that while also providing America with a major blow to her Bill of Rights. It may not have seemed as if the Bush (Jr.) Administration forced through a lot of bills and legislation, but they never had to because Republicans controlled every branch of the government. With that kind of power, who need a shock doctrine, it's shocking all year long.