Don't Ignore the Context

I do believe that we, as a nation, have progressed socially. However we are still living in a world where everything is still unjustly skewed especially in the context of hip hop culture. One can say that more women are in positions of power and they get generally more respect in different mediums, but one cannot ignore the fact that all of this improvement mainly applies to white women. Women of color have a harder time getting jobs and when we do get jobs we get paid less than white women. "According to Census data, for each dollar a male earns, a female receives only 77 cents. The wage gap is even wider for women of color, with Black and Hispanic women receiving 61 cents and 52 cents, respectively, for every dollar
paid to a white male." (http://wagner.nyu.edu/wocpn/publications/files/Pay_Equity_Policy_Brief.pdf) Our race creates one more barrier that white women do not have to go through. The same thing applies to LGBTQ people of color. We may see more representation in media of LGBTQ people, but again most of that are white people. I bet you can name more publicly gay white people than you can name publicly gay people of color. LGBTQ people of color undergo more discrimination than their white counterparts "The report documents 27 anti-LGBT murders in 2010, which is the second highest annual total recorded since 1996. A whopping 70 percent of these 27 victims were people of color; 44 percent of them were transgender women. The study also found that transgender people and people of color are each twice as likely to experience violence or discrimination as non-transgender white people. Transgender people of color are also almost 2.5 times as likely to experience discrimination as their white peers." (http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/70_percent_of_anti-lgbt_murder_victims_are_people_of_color.html) So before you praise how far we've gotten as a nation, think about it on a broader scale and how hard it is and why it's still so hard for people of color to live in this society.

This brings me to my next point relating to my discussion board post about dominant culture. To me, dominant culture equals straight white males. Producers will play to this dominant culture when they make music so they can make more money. We can acknowledge that the misogynistic homophobic music that hip hop became has been detrimental to hip hop culture, minorities and their thinking and the thinking of those around them, but we can’t ignore the reason hip hop evolved to this. We must also acknowledge that dominant culture is a main culprit to the faults in hip hop.

Here are some more texts I am basing my post on: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters/657_ch1.pdf

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2012/04/16/11376/idea-of-the-day-gay-and-transgender-people-of-color-face-a-greater-struggle/

(I have two blog posts because the first one was a request from Dr. Kuriloff. We were discussing dominant culture and I sourced an article and she wanted me to share it on the blog so I did)