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Inside Dope
BETWEEN GOD AND GANGSTA RAP
Bearing Witness to Black Culture
By Michael Eric Dyson
Oxford University Press
Michael Eric Dyson is one of a fast-growing cohort of African-American
essayists who set themselves the thankless if rarely
unprofitable task of pondering the nation's fast-growing racial
crisis. Like most of them, he's an academic whose career in letters
is based more on the insights at his disposal than raw literary
ability, and like several of them, he has sometimes been an
embarrassingly clumsy stylist. His strength is his deep-seated
sympathy for the black urban poor. Dyson is never more effective
than when recalling the kind of hard life few of his counterparts
know from the inside. A teenaged father who grew up in the Detroit
that inspired Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" and worked many
factory jobs on an educational journey that ended in Princeton,
Dyson is an ordained minister as well as a communications
professor, and he sounds it. Whether in Spin, The Christian
Century, or the New York Times, he often takes a homiletic tone,
and working for general-interest publications has helped relieve
his academic stiffness. His frequent comments on popular culture
rarely reach deep, but have the virtue of promulgating truths that
ought to be more obvious than they are--for instance, that gangsta
rap is both noxiously sexist and a calculated offense against a
complacent black bourgeoisie. Significantly, however, the most
impressive piece here shows off Dyson's area of special expertise:
a celebration of the Baptist preacher Gardner Taylor.
New York Times Book Review, Dec. 10, 1995
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