ABSTRACT
Up to this point, we have been examining sociolinguistic interview data from a range of Hip Hop youth living in New York City. This chapter and the following one turn to televised media data, particularly the ways in which white youth are racialized within the cultural black “space” that is Hip Hop (Boyd 2002). George Lipsitz writes that whiteness, “as the unmarked category against which difference is constructed … never has to speak its name [or] acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations” (1995: 369). On the flip side of this equation are people of color who are compelled to measure themselves up to a set of standards based on white American cultural norms. Referring to the mindset of African Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois called this “double consciousness,” which he described as the compulsion to see oneself through the eyes of whites. Spears (1998) describes it as “the dual personality caused by the cohabitation of two consciousnesses or cultural systems within one mind, the white and the African-American” (248).
