This article, to me, does not seem like a very good source for anything. The writer seems to want to identify himself with black culture and black-upbringing with all the hip-hop game he talks but in the beginning he associates himself with white kids doing the same thing he is doing in the same places he is doing them. "I’m from the small-town South. I remember so many of my white friends quoting Ice Cube or Too $hort lyrics when we were growing up. We’d sit in class, passing copies of magazines like Word Up! and Yo!, wearing tees with Cypress Hill or Wu-Tang Clan on them. Hip-hop “connected” us." Does this snippet right here not equalize the playing field for the subject he is talking about? He was doing the same thing, in the same class. It kind of just seems like he is trying to hype up a fairly non-existant problem in a very hot field of issues.