ed by social structure on one hand but on the other are also uniquely opaque to self-scrutiny or criticism from non-African American sources--to the former in no small part because of hip-hop culture's almost programmatic hostility to bourgeois literacy and mainstream convention, and to the latter on account of would-be critics' apparent reluctance to risk having any such criticism reduced to the label of racism (xxi). Kitwana sees this as a crisis because imperviousness to seeing hip-hop clearly and whole (i.e., for good and/or ill) instead of as an icon of glamour and a beacon of something like hope has perhaps unintended effects. For example, that attitude may be preventing black male youth from achieving access to a whole range of social goo
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