Counterknowledge, racial paranoia, and the cultic milieu: Decoding hip hop conspiracy theory
Highlights
► Hip hop culture uses conspiratorial ideals to challenge racial inequality. ► Conspiratorial claims are meant to explain continued race-class disadvantage in an era of color-blindness. ► Hip hop borrows themes found in popular culture, prison culture, black books, and Black Muslim religion. ► Conspiracy theories fuse entertainment and calculated identity politics. ► The Internet and other new communication technologies allow conspiratorial and alarmist claims to impact public discourse.
Section snippets
Travis L. Gosa is an assistant professor of social science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from The Johns Hopkins University in 2008. His research examines the social and cultural worlds of African-American youth. He is currently working on a manuscript examining hip hop culture and the black-white achievement gap.
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Cited by (25)
(Un)conscious (popular) underground: Restricted cultural production and underground rap music
2014, PoeticsCitation Excerpt :Moreover, when there was reference to politically-oriented themes, a broad range was covered, from criticism of the government to skepticism surrounding the 9/11 attacks—artists expressed counterknowledge, or unexamined, unproven, verging on illogical, propositions detailing how the state or secret societies attempt to overtake or dominate members of marginalized groups (Gosa, 2011). Moreover, even though Gosa (2011) selected his sample with an eye toward such oppositional rappers, my findings corroborate his speculation that conspiratorial claims are found in some politically-oriented and socially-conscious rap music considered “underground.”28 Furthermore, Wright (2004) critiques underground artists for primarily playing at predominantly white venues, such as college campuses, because the students at these locations “are better off than 90% of the world's population” (Wright, 2004, p. 17), thus elitist populations pay exorbitant ticket prices to receive rappers’ messages.
Conflict Over Conspiracy Theories: Face-Work, Epistemic Identity, and the Structure of Interactions
2024, Symbolic InteractionRed-pilled mama bears and enlightened power goddesses: Discursive constructions of feminine identities in a conspiracy theory space
2023, British Journal of Social PsychologyLinking good counter-knowledge with bad counter knowledge: the impact of evasive knowledge hiding and defensive reasoning
2022, Journal of Knowledge Management
Travis L. Gosa is an assistant professor of social science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from The Johns Hopkins University in 2008. His research examines the social and cultural worlds of African-American youth. He is currently working on a manuscript examining hip hop culture and the black-white achievement gap.