> Kelley
When I was in Montana for some boring writers' panel, I noticed two young white cowboys in a pick-up blasting some heavy hip-hop -- couldn't make out who it was -- and wondered why the ad culture didn't use this kind of imagery when pushing the new trucks during sportscasts. Clearly, the ghet-boom thang is not confined to the brothers.
Class, class, class -- that's what it all boils down to. A few months ago I attended the funeral of a co-worker's infant daughter (she drowned in the tub), and apart from it being one of the saddest events I've experienced in some time, it was nearly a 50-50 black/white gathering, my co-worker being black, his wife white. It took place in a working class neighborhood that is mixed, and there was, so far as I could sense, no conscious feeling of "race." These were working people grieving together, and I know that certain upper middle class relatives of mine would dismiss the lot as n-words and n-word wannabes. And while I try not to romanticize the working poor or near-poor, my experience so far in this world is that "race" is almost never mentioned, save for those white boys who pine for Hummers and conflate truck size with dick length. Pigment was more of a concern in the white-collar world I was raised in, as well as in certain lefty circles I've frequented.
DP