Inner-City Rural: The Transmission of Problematic Black Male identities from Urban to Black Rural Communities in the United States

Abstract

This paper introduces the term inner-city rural to describe a conceptual framework that seeks to explain the transmission of urban and street-based alternative constructions of black manhood identities to majority black rural counties in the United States. The central theoretical argument advanced in this paper is that exposure to urban street culture as it is represented in some versions of gangsta rap and hip hop music, videos and culture is a major mechanism by which marginalized African American males residing in rural communities come to internalize and enact problematic urban male street-based masculine identities.