ABSTRACT
IS THERE SUCH A THING AS GENUINE BLACK CULTURE? The black culture industry has an interest in promoting the idea that there is. Its products are created by blacks in concert with whites and consumed, in the main, by whites. The industry that started with the rough recording of blues players now recycles itself into cassettes, laserdiscs and cd-roms; it begets baseball caps and other apparel, it becomes a movie, a novelization and, perhaps soon, a theme park ride-Disneyworld’s “Hood” where visitors can sample life as it is in LA’s South Central.
