yep, everything you said is true: Here's one of my fav Boyce Watkins vids that touches on what you are saying. Its kinda lenghty so i quoted the 2 most important statements that was touched on and is why partly i feel that rap is playing a bigger role than most people think.
"In order to control a group of people, to destroy a group of people, you TAKE OVER THE MINDS' OF IT'S YOUTH"
"What you do for yourself, what you do to yourself, and what you allow other people to do to you is based on what you think about yourself. What you think about yourself is based upon what you've been taught about yourself. What you've been taught about yourself is based upon everything you've read, heard, and seen about yourself. So when you control the radius of a man's thoughts, you control the CIRCUMFERENCE OF HIS ACTIONS. The mind cant do what it doesn't know. So CONTROLLING PEOPLE"S ACCESS TO INFORMATION , controlling their CIRCUMFERENCE OF AWARENESS is extremely important"
Basicly(compared to the youth of other groups) blacks have a smaller "circumference of awareness". Meaning they have little to no POSITIVE sounds and images of people that look like themselves to draw inspiration from. Instead of positive and motivating images of successful black people the main images black youth see of themselves look more like this:
These are the images that our youth sees of themselves. It lowers their self-esteem. It tells them that there's nothing BEYOND THE HOOD. Our youth cant see themselves off the block because they literally cant imagine anything beyond their own neighborhoods. Their "circumference of awareness" is extremely limited. They cant imagine being a doctor, lawyer, dentist, scholar, physician, teacher, astronaut, surgeon, etc because they've literally never seen anyone that looks like them be those things. again, CIRCUMFERENCE OF AWARENESS. They grow up seeing drug dealers and murderers. THOSE are the type of people they are influenced by. Those are the type of people that they aspire to be. Now this is where rap comes into play. Along with all of these negative influences in these kids day to day life, add on top the massive amounts of negative rap that floods these kids minds. Add the negative images of rappers holding rifles, making it rain in clubs and drinking lean and these kids literally cant imagine themselves beyond the block. Dope video, i hope a few of you take the time to watch it inits entirety. Lots of knowledge dropped
