Serious rap's a musical movement that seems to revile whites as a group of Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals—the Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. The music's paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside.