Whether it is in popular culture, in mainstream and specialized press, or in scholarship, hip-hop and the “ghetto” (also referred to as the “slum,” “inner-city,” “hood,” or “street”) have been taken as inherently connected. Expanding on the work of Tricia Rose and Eithne Quinn, I aim at questioning the relationship between hip-hop and the “ghetto” as mediated through ghetto discourses strongly invested in ideological dynamics, that is, in the normalization of the socioracial order. Tracing the rise and evolution of the state-sponsored “ghetto pathology” and crime moral panic, this article deconstructs the racist logic at the heart of the dominant construction of the ghetto, and its connection to the dominant interpretations of rap. I critically analyze how, as a discourse, “ghetto pathology” provides “the language and stereotypical explanatory terms” through which the ghetto and rap have been understood and talked about in the 1980s and 1990s mainstream (Hall 67).
Throughout the article, “ghetto pathology” refers to the panic discourse around the ghetto and its residents. Based on Stanley Cohen’s definition of a moral panic, put forward by the state and the media, “ghetto pathology” is understood as a stereotypical discourse constantly defining the ghetto and its residents as a threat to society, and as such, it is an ideological vehicle justifying the implementation of law-and-order crusades to increase social control (9). In this article, I explore the cultural politics of rap and how the dominant “ghetto pathology” discourse central in 1980s and 1990s conservative readings of rap exemplifies the broader systemic power asymmetries of American society. Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I center the following question: are the issues underlying the hysteria around ghetto pathology and rap “‘moral’ ones—or are they racial, economic, political?” (171). By focusing on ghetto pathology as a particular construction of Blackness mediated through race, class, and gender, I critically examine how Black inner-city men have been systematically identified as the threat to society, and how this obsessive targeting has contributed to the erasure of Black women and their specific conditions. I further investigate how the marginalization of Black culture in the United States goes hand in hand with the marginalization and criminalization of Black life by reflecting on the dialectic between spatial constructions of Blackness and racialized constructions of space. Through archival research, I confront the perspectives of rap critics with those of hip-hop artists, who have continuously articulated critical outlooks on dominant ghetto discourses and the conservative interpretations they give rise to.
