ABSTRACT
Hip hop, as a form of music and popular culture, has become one of the foremost arenas in which discussions of race, racial injustices and the transformation of racial meanings occur. Through song and celebrity, hip-hop voices offer immediate commentaries on newsworthy racial events as well as critical observations on historical and ongoing patterns of race-based inequality. Some scholars of hip-hop music have hailed it as a postmodern multicultural form that reflects the fluidity and malleability through which young people today fashion their identities; still others view it as perpetuating some of the most damaging ideologies of race and models of racialized behavior in contemporary society.
