[...] It's way too easy for the pale to hurry across the deck, past the thick, light-wobbling window, and not once hear rap as anything but the weird anthemic march of one Other'd nation, marginalized and yet trapped in our own metropolitan center, a nation that cannot secede and may not assimilate and is thus driven still deeper inside, evincing all the brute anger and resentment we'd legitimate as political were it not anger with nothing visible else to it, no positive diode, none of the King-like 'vision' we've come to expect from any change that does not yield rubble. As an ever more conservative body politic and media audience, We are being conditioned, in an equation both sides of which may be unconscious, to see today's urban black world not as a demimonde shadowing but more and more as a cancer metastasizing inside our own, our few glimpses of anything like a 'real black world' coming just in statistics and mix radio and political shibboleths [...]