Word: underclass
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...finding poetry in the colloquial, beauty in anger, and lyricism even in violence. Hip-hop, much as the blues and jazz did in past eras, has compelled young people of all races to search for excitement, artistic fulfillment and even a sense of identity by exploring the black underclass. "And I know because of [rapper] KRS-1," the white ska-rap singer Bradley Nowell of Sublime once sang in tribute to rap. Hip-hop has forced advertisers, filmmakers and writers to adopt "street" signifiers like cornrows and terms like player hater. Invisibility has been a long-standing metaphor...
...many college men are only eyeing underclass women...
These terrific artists also illustrate a pretty little truism about modern culture. In the first half of the century, pop culture imitated the upper class, and in the second half it aped the underclass. Once we gazed on high; now we play limbo with cultural norms...
California Republicans have railed against bilingual education for years, accusing it of producing a culturally alien, economically hopeless immigrant underclass. So when millionaire businessman Ron Unz placed a measure on this June's ballot that would abolish the program, the state G.O.P. jumped onboard, right? Not exactly. "I have not endorsed [Proposition 227]. I will not put a penny into it," says state party chairman Michael Schroeder. The likely G.O.P. gubernatorial nominee, Dan Lungren, hasn't taken a position. Neither has Bill Leonard, the party's leader in the state assembly...
...race, however, that caused Baltimore's schools to congeal but rather the ingrown nature of bureaucracy. Race, in a city that remains deeply if informally segregated, merely intensified the us-against-them outlook of school administrators. Many outside observers say the school aristocracy came to view the black underclass as beyond help. David Rostetter, now a court-appointed overseer of schools in Chester, Pa., once studied Baltimore's school system at the request of the city's federal court. "What you have," he says, "is a black middle class being created on the backs of their own failure to educate...