ABSTRACT
Following up on the theme of authenticity touched on in Chapter 2, this chapter investigates how white youth attempt to qualify and justify their participation in Hip Hop discursively. It also explores the ways in which Hip Hop mediates the adoption of an African American English-influenced speech style by such young people and how this phenomenon complicates traditional patterns of identity formation. Although Hip Hop has a multi-cultural ideology, there is a discourse that privileges the urban black street experience as the locus of authentic Hip Hop (Alim 2004a; Rose 1994). This creates an intriguing double-bind for white middle class Hip Hop youth whose race and class origins distance them from this socially located space.
