Yo Mama's Disfunktional Analysis

In modern America, race, gender, and class are important societal concepts that reinforce and uphold the social, economic, and political structures of the country. These three pillars have played important roles in our nation-wide community (and in many countries apart from our own) in terms of labeling people and layering them into a hierarchy. Race has separated people since the first slaves from African countries were brought over to serve as soldiers or plantation laborers. Gender has made a clear-cut distinction in value and power in both the public and domestic spheres. And class has been used as a divide between the rich and poor based off of financial and economic standing. In this paper, I will examine the social implications associated …show more content…
Race tends to be a defining factor in the way people identify themselves and others, both historically and currently. In “Yo’Mama’s Disfunktional”, modern sociologist Robin Kelley examines the relationship between the views of “progressive” social scientists on “black” culture and their contribution to the social construction of cultural and racial inferiority. In the late 1960’s, these ethnographers, anthropologists and sociologists determined that the correlation between race and culture was very strong and that culture was the same as behavior was the same as class (Kelley, 18). The focus of the research they conducted was on culturally “black” forms of expression, with the conclusion being that each was a “coping mechanism(s) to deal with racism and poverty”, a stylistic way of handling and resisting against the blatant domination and discrimination experienced daily by minorities from whites (Kelley, 17). But in researching communities with a majority of African American residents and coming to this conclusion about their dress, their music, and their language, these scientists (unintentionally or purposefully, but ultimately) gave these neighborhoods and the people living within them a bad name and a bad reputation, which further put African Americans below whites by judgment (Kelley …show more content…
Linguistically, black culture can be identified by verbal play or music. Soul and the dozens are both outlets for maintaining images of dominance, “cool”-ness, and control. Soul is an indefinable talent that only “authentic Negroes” have and is an expressive way for (primarily) black men to handle their politically and economically marginalized identities (Kelley 24). With soul, came the stylistic choice of an afro, which began as an additional way to appear “cool”, masculine, natural, and traditional and later transformed into a form of masculine rebellion used to cope with the daily, blatant racism and discrimination (Kelley, 31). The dozens refer to a back-and-forth verbal play with the goal of insulting the mother of one’s opponent as much as possible. Because many of the people who play the dozens have grown up in single-parent homes without their fathers, players insult each other’s mothers as a way to show their own masculinity (Kelley, 34). While soul is more of an expression of self identity in an environment of oppression and racism in the public sphere, the dozens is a more masculine form of self-expression created from a community-wide sense of masculine abandonment in a private environment, overrun by stereotypically single women. Another form of expression is music, where the two main styles are rap and hip hop. Both genres are aggressive art forms