What Does Hip Hop Culture In Michael Eric Dyson's Know What I Mean

In Michael Eric Dyson’s Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop, he combats the accusations made by social critics. Dyson reflects on his personal experiences to expose the society Black Americans were raised in. In the past social critics like Kilson and Crouch have manipulated the understanding of Hip Hop culture in a negative perspective. Contrary to their ideas, Dyson should be paid attention to because “street culture” and Black English provide literacy, education, and question the cultural values at the period around the civil rights movement.
Dyson expresses how rap artists are intellectuals who directly bring in complex educational works into their music. The language is built up of stylistic words and context that follows a unique
The lifestyle plays a major role in Hip Hop culture and brings awareness and attention to the issues being ignored. The Back community was portrayed as poor and illiterate, but that’s because no one paid attention to the things they were saying. The social critics could not clarify the message they were trying to put out there. For example when social critic Crouch disagrees, “With black teenagers, we have another problem, which is that street behavior is defined these days as being "authentic" and "not trying to be white."(Hip hop Thugs Hit A New Low) Those who take that seriously have been committing intellectual suicide for years by aspiring downward.” For critics like crouch who only degrade the Black culture through Rap music do not focus on the positive things like the artistic expression. In Hip Hop culture everything is out in the open, struggles of life are not sugarcoated like they are in the american culture. The fact that crouch changes the meaning of the authentic black culture is really disappointing because the purity of its culture is that whatever happened in the streets happened in real life. These are real issues that the Black community is constantly exposed to. This “street Behavior” is not something they just picked up along the way, for ceratin people sometimes it’s a means of survival. By not being able to understand what people go through, it is easy to judge them and to say that they promote this Thuggish behavior. Also like any other type of music, Hip hop attracts most of it’s listeners through this “thuggish” and “pimpin” behavior but most of the time it’s not to be taken seriously. I respect a lot of what Dyson writes about, because he stands up for his people and gives them motivation to break out of the stereotypes around them. The media has been filled with white artists and they are trying to break through the traditional white