Add to that basically an entire political wing ceaselessly telling black people that they're victims, they're oppressed, that the bogeyman is out to fuck their lives up, you have a pretty miserable set of boundaries in place for black people to deal with, on top of what actual racism they do deal with.
Victim rhetoric is often thrown about without much consideration, that I'll agree with and say it's something that I've probably come to believe more in recent years.
I don't think that general intellectual sense that informs that rhetoric is inaccurate, I just think the rhetoric augments it (as rhetoric often does).
Mass fear has existed throughout history and is often not founded in reality, obvious examples are mass fear about Jews.
The media cherry picks incidents involving cops and black people and then says, perpetually, that it is a systemic problem, failing to point out that you don't tend to know the name of damn near every single victim of a systemic problem.
If you have a systemic problem of say, insurance companies racially discriminating against blacks, we don't know 98% of all victims' names.
Also, a cynical observation on my part but I see a shitload of bourgeois blacks and others pushing this narrative as well as joining things like BLM and not a lot of lower class blacks and others doing the same.
This is the same problem that Louis Althusser diagnosed decades ago: that the bourgeois produces the means of studying and understanding the circumstances and dynamics of social disparity, but by definition those who then study these circumstances aren't affected by them (or are significantly less affected). On the flip side, those who are significantly affected by them (i.e. the working class) don't have access to the means of studying and understanding them.
It's a conundrum to be sure, but it doesn't mean that those who don't have access to the means wouldn't be swayed by the arguments should they have the time to spend studying them. It just means that it's easier to accept the general attitudes of cultural hegemony.
That's all a lot of Marxist hullabaloo, but I think there is something to the notion of cultural hegemony.
Genuine question: have you studied Antifa and the history of the movement, collective (or organizations, whatever you want to call it)?
Genuine answer: no.
But I'm inclined to believe that none of that would challenge the point I'm making, which is that you can't essentialize its behavior.
I know, I'm being what rms calls "sensationalist."
But what you'd suggest is that hip hop feeds a violent mentality within black communities while metal doesn't (or does to a lesser extent). In order to do that, you'd have to show a) that music carries more weight than other cultural factors, including history and current social conditions; and b) that African Americans, for some reason, don't understand the content of their music as an aesthetic and symbolic element, but as encouraging real behavior, while metal listeners are able to make this distinction (which would carry an implication that metal listeners are more intelligent than hip hop listeners).
Heavy metal contains a comparable amount of transgressive material, and has been linked in the past to notable instances of violence. If we are saying that music is an important cultural factor, then it makes perfect sense that music of all kinds contributes to behavior.
I don't believe this, of course. While there are isolated examples of people seeming to emulate musical artists, I don't think music should be blamed for cultural behaviors; and I think this holds for metal as well as hip hop.
