ABSTRACT
Straight Outta Compton was a product of and a response to a climate of oppression in South Los Angeles County, an environment in which young people were subject to a brutal and indiscriminate “by all means necessary” police plan to eradicate gang crime. At the federal level, the Congressional Black Caucus demanded recognition from Congress that the catastrophe in Los Angeles was emblematic of a national emergency. By the evening, twenty-five square blocks of central Los Angeles were aflame. Opportunists of every race, class, and age had gutted chain stores, strip-mall businesses, and mom-and-pop shops in the area. At the intersection of Florence and Normandie, groups of Black men dragged white motorists from their cars and beat them. Gangster rappers, with NWA as the vanguard, did more than rile critics by muddying truth and fiction, reflecting viscerally on hardship, exposing violent state abuse, mixing militancy with millionaire dreams, and thumbing their noses at every faction.
