White Boston writer voicing black experience — the Entitlement problem, theorized in the open
echoes
From: Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present
- Early text:
[quote|scene] Producer Ralph Stacey corners the authors: "‘Why do you want to write about rap, anyway?’" [m-1a:p93] [e-text]; D. opens 1B by refusing to duck it: "Please know we’re very sensitive to this question: what business have two white yuppies trying to do a sampler on rap?" [d-1b:p3]; the book also prints its own harshest answer, Crouch's "Those whites who felt they were being treated to “the real thing” [in rap] had never before encountered the exotic experience of having a turd pushed into their faces through a hole in the social deck beneath them." [footnotes:p13]
- IJ echo: the Wardine section (scene 008, pp. 37-38) and yrstruly (scene 040, pp. 128-135) — IJ's contested black-dialect ventriloquism, the novel's most-criticized moves; SR shows DFW consciously theorizing (and worrying) the cross-racial-voice problem six years earlier, from inside Boston.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation