The destruction on minorities, specifically the African American population, culture is at a point of waging war. In Stuart Halls, What’s this Black in Black Popular Culture, he attempts to describe how popular culture has attempted to explain a culture that is not their own. Through the use of a combination of, as Cornel West defines it, “cultural politics and popular culture" society is constantly searching for a definition to describe everyone, except themselves.
Hall explains 3 main theories of how popular culture is attempting to define Black popular culture. Through the use of (1) Displacement of European models of high culture, (2) the Emergence of the United States as a world power, and (3) the Decolonization of Americans who were colonized to only find out that everything they had been taught was false. African culture has been shifted by colonialism. Hall notes that American popular culture has always had certain traditions that “could only be attributed to black culture vernacular traditions”.
Black popular is excluded from the mainstream view for many reasons. Most of the reasons stem from the postmodern slavery that still occurs in today’s society. Hall explains how the goal of popular culture is to exclude the margins (the outcast or the minority) and show the life of the center power (generally a white, male, Christian). The “center power” attempts to describe the margin but only through their own experiences, rather than through the life of a person in the margin. One of the most powerful statements made throughout Halls exert is, “popular culture is not where you can find yourself but instead a theater of popular cultures and beliefs”, so in essence we can not let anyone define who we are but ourselves.
Source: Hall, Stuart. "What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?" Social Justice (1993).
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