“’What Makes football or basketball players more inclined to abuse women?’ Equal numbers of hockey and baseball players are accused of domestic violence, yet I have never been asked this question about them.” (Sport in America: The New Racial Stereotypes) This is an interesting point, when I read it I immediately was brought back to an idea we learned at the beginning of the semester, the ultimate attribution error. It seems to me that the general public’s stereotypes of African Americans as being violent, and dangerous are just being “proven true” by all the news stories about black athletes committing crimes. On the other hand, those white athletes that abuse women, and commit other crimes seem to be somewhat brushed aside. In the most part these crimes are ignored, or at least don’t make as big of an impact, since the average white American believes that basketball and football (sports mostly dominated by African Americans) players are more prone to violence than other sports players.
It seems to me that this idea of the ultimate attribution error was also expressed in the hip-hop video we watched in class. One guy in the video mentioned that by acting tough and violent in the mainstream ghetto rap scene, rappers are perpetuating horrible black stereotypes. They are just making the white suburban people believe that they are right about inner city black people being criminals. These negative actions are seen as proof that black stereotypes are true.
On the flip side, if you watch movies or television shows, there are loads of overly buff white guys shooting people left and right, without thinking twice about it. Look at any James Bond movie, Indiana Jones, The terminator, Kill Bill, Face Off, and the list goes on and on. Somehow the American public doesn’t see this as suggesting that white people are just as violent and criminal as black people. When you consider it further, many of the white criminals in movies have more calculated, violent, farther reaching, and sinister murders than the ones suggested in rap music. Some example of this can be seen in the Saw movies, The Silence of the Lambs series, Perfume, and again the list goes on and on. Why is the violence in rap music more shocking and criminal to white society than these gory images we’ve been presented with for years?
The idea that symbols are polysemic also ties into the hip-hop video we watched in class. The consumers who listen to hip-hop may see the hypermasculine messages as good music, and as something they can relate to. Contrastingly, the outsiders, the upper/middle class white people look at the hip-hop lyrics and overly masculine messages of manhood being about conquering and violence as, like I stated earlier, proving their stereotypes of inner-city blacks. The sad thing is that the up and coming rappers that rapped for the camera said that they didn’t believe the stuff that they were saying, they were just saying it because that’s what sells. Why do violent and criminal messages sell?
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