The Gentrification of "Black" in Black Popular Communication in the New Millennium

Abstract

This issue of Popular Communication features two particularly interesting pieces of scholarship whose salience should be noted in that the authors work expressly to extend our ideational boundaries regarding racial identity-in these two instances, the categories of Blackness and Whiteness. The authors share a common goal, though one taken with great care: to disrupt plebeian notions of what is thought to be essentialized Black cultural forms (e.g., hip-hop culture) by studying what they consider out-of-the-common practices of Blackness. Adopting the "different contexts" modality, one author locates the Black popular within Whiteness to reveal the elasticity of performative Blackness as well as evidence an accessibility to, and even mastery of, Black cultural participation by those outside of the African American race. The other author locates Blackness within "high culture" Black communicative practices and celebrates the fact that the presumed prole core of the Black popular can be elevated to a higher and, therefore, more worthy cultural plane. More, the author characterizes this ascent of Blackness as being especially noteworthy because it is facilitated by a figure believed to be marginalized within Black popular discourses-a member of the Black bourgeoisie.