Part III: Biases against rap music
Rap music provokes strong reactions in people. Jordan Davis and his friends were stopped at a gas station in Jacksonville, FL in late 2012 when Michael Dunn asked them to turn down the loud rap music that they were listening to. His friends turned it down, but when Davis asked them to turn it back up, he and Dunn began to argue, and Dunn shot him several times, killing him. In 2019, Michael Paul Adams walked up behind 17-year-old Elijah Al-Amin and slit his throat. Al-Amin had stopped at a convenience store on his way home, and was standing outside the store listening to rap music. According to the police report, Adams attacked Al-Amin because “rap music makes him feel unsafe, because in the past he has been attacked by people (Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans) who listen to rap music. Adams further stated, people who listen to rap music are a threat to him and the community.”
Rap music, musicians, and fans suffer the consequences of implicit bias as well. Prejudice against rap music manifests on several different fronts: it is the most surveilled/policed genre of music; rap is the only genre whose lyrics are regularly considered as evidence; and studies have shown that rap lyrics are often judged more harshly by respondents.
The long-held stereotypes of Black criminality have resulted in disproportionate outcomes for people of color--Black men in particular--in the system of mass incarceration. It is not surprising, then, that rap music has been targeted by law enforcement since its inception in the South Bronx in the 1970s. New York City Mayor Abe Beame established an anti-graffiti unit of the New York City Police Department; nearly 1,000 people per year were arrested for graffiti-related offenses during the 1970s. Police departments in major cities around the country have units that are dedicated to policing the area’s hip hop scene. The activities of New York City’s “hip hop cops” are widely reported on, and Officer Derrick Parker wrote a book detailing his experiences as a member of the task force. In 2004, several news outlets reported that Miami and Miami Beach police departments were training their officers to surveil rap artists, fans, and concerts.
Rap music is regulated in other ways, too. Three significant copyright lawsuits in the 1990s fundamentally altered the way rap music was created by imposing considerable restrictions on the practice of sampling. Rap albums have a history of being censored as well. In June 1990, a US District Court judge ruled that the 2 Live Crew album As Nasty as They Wanna Be was obscene: this ruling marked the first time a record was sanctioned as such. Local ordinances make it more difficult for clubs to host rap concerts, and rap shows are regularly raided by the police. In 2019, the NYPD sent a letter to the organizers of the Rolling Loud festival, claiming that five of the artists who were scheduled to perform “have been associated with recent acts of violence citywide,” and that “The New York City Police Department believes if these individuals are allowed to perform, there will be a higher risk of violence.” The artists were removed from the schedule two days before they were scheduled to perform: festival organizers gave them no reason for the sudden cancellation.
Several landmark studies demonstrate how the general public perceives rap music and its listeners. Amy Binder (1993) studied the ways in which the press wrote about both rap music and heavy metal, both of which feature violent lyrical content. She observed that mainstream media frequently frames its discussions of rap music in terms of the “danger to society” that it posed. Furthermore, heavy metal fans (mostly suburban white teens) are perceived differently from rap fans (mostly urban black teens): “Whereas ‘our kids’ listening to heavy metal lyrics might stray off their expected social tracks because of their incited disrespect for authority or their early interest in sex, listeners to rap music were lamented not because their self-destructive activities were of great importance or concern, but because they would probably roam in packs, rape women, and terrorize society.”
Carrie Fried presented a group of mostly white subjects with a set of song lyrics. Some participants were told that these were lyrics to a country song; others were told that they were lyrics to a rap song. The groups were asked to rate how violent they found the material to be. The group that believed they were rap lyrics rated them as considerably more violent than those who believed they were country lyrics, leading Fried to conclude that implicit connections among rap music, blackness, and violence were influencing their judgements. Fried’s work was recreated by Kubrin, Dunbar, and Schurich (2016), whose studies produced similar results, indicating that attitudes toward rap music have changed very little in 20 years that separate the studies.
Stuart Fischoff conducted a study in which participants were presented with one of four scenarios that featured an academically and athletically accomplished young Black man, and were asked to give their impressions of the young man in terms of several behavioral characteristics. A set of rap lyrics accompanied two of the scenarios, and two scenarios implicated the young man in a murder case. He was judged far more harshly in the instances that involved rap lyrics (murder + lyrics; no murder + lyrics) than in those that did not (murder + no lyrics; no murder + no lyrics). The findings of Fischoff’s study show that defendants who are associated with rap lyrics are judged more harshly than those who are not.
Given rap music’s ubiquity in popular culture, it is safe to say that these stereotypes exist in the minds of many prospective jurors. This is problematic because stereotypes play a significant role in how our minds interpret ambiguous information.