Hip Hop's influence on black/white relationships

One time I was having a spat with this hispanic guy(brown). He pretty much didn't like black guys because most white women preferred black guys over him and his 'vatos. Anyways, he said 'non-black girls didn't even like black guys until the creation of rap'. And I know that there've always been girls somewhere that liked black guys but it does kind of seem like Hip Hop/R&B made us more popular. I know that a woman can be wooed by music. Like that Nyeo(or however u spell it)guy, he's pretty ugly but since he can sing really good girls fall at his feet. What do you think?

 

Of course Hip Hop/R&B made us somewhat more appealing in America. Although some still look at it as... "all black people can do it play sports or entertain us" it still made us more of a "popular mainstream" image in many younger people's lives. I'd say Hip Hop also has had negative affects as far as the "image" thing goes because of gangster rap.

But when it's all said and done, some Rock[Metal, Death Metal, etc.(you get the point)] is JUST AS BAD. I mean c'mon, there's skulls, black finger nails, blood drinking, and devil worshiping all throughout mainstream/underground hard rock music. I'm bringing that up because they constantly are pointing the finger at rap music like it's "ruining the country" or whatever, but they never once bring up crazy ass rock music and the devil worshiping associated w/ it. And not literally taking a devil statue and praying before it, but more so glorifying death, skulls, and pentagrams. I'd say gangster rap is just easier to put on day-time MTV shows and things of that nature. So for the most part, yes, Hip Hop/R&B always helps somewhat.

 

This phenomenon is not new. All one has to do is look back to the 1920s, when Jazz music was the rage. The Jazz Era helped to produce a new era of interracial socialization and mating among the youth of the era. That was the era of the Greenwich Village and Harlem Renaissance, when many liberal whites of the era began to defy the racial system. The same teens and young twenty somethings of the 1920s who embraced interracialism during the Jazz Age would go on to push America towards anti-racism.

During the 1930s, many of these same people would fight against Jim Crow and racism. These are the types of youth who formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations with the explicit goal of racial equality and brotherhood among its members. The same people who defied racial conventions of the 1920s pushed black entertainment to national life during this decade. By the late 1930s, FDR made an unprecedented stance by saying that blacks were Americans.

During the second world war, many people of the same age group would work on the Manhattan Project, which involved both black and white scientists. Many people of the same age would be the most changed by Hitlerism and extremist racial ideology. For these people, Hitlerism and the Holocaust made racism look like a severe mental sickness, a severe evil. Also, twenty and thirty somethings who fought overseas had interracial relations. In the Pacific theater, relationships with Asian women were commonplace among black and white soldiers. In the European theater, relations among black American soldiers and European women also became commonplace. The second world war caused a large jump in interracial relations. Segregation in the armed forces was dismantled just after that war. In intellectual circles, racism had become repudiated and now became viewed as pseudo-science.

By the 1950s, these people were now middle-aged. These were the people who now organized the Civil Rights Movement. By the 1960s, these were now the politicians who pushed Civil Rights legislation, and pushed boundary breaking movies, such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

This same age group, throughout its life, turned the balance of racial life from the KKK style mass extremist racial hate and violence of the 1920s to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

If the pattern holds, when we are in for a new era of increased racial harmony.

 

That was really interesting!

 

I remember I read a poem by this guy about white and black people coming together for a Boyz 2 Men concert and I believe he ended the poem saying 'music conquers all', it is amazing what we can wield through music.

 

As a lifelong musician, I'd have to agree with you there. :wink: