I was listening to NPR this morning and they were talking about how Prince I-Can't-Remember-Which-One was dating a bi-racial woman. Apparently some of the British newspapers were making some racist jabs at said woman, one of which referred to her as being "straight out of Compton." All of which is sad and stupid of course, and I wish that people who thought this way would just go ahead and evolve or die, but that's not what really caught my attention (racism not being exactly an anomalous occurrence). The NPR woman followed up by explaining that Straight Outta Compton was a movie about gang life.
Say what?
Is it just me, or is that mis-attribution and précis as racist as the newspaper story's title?
So for the record: Straight Outta Compton is indeed a movie, but that's really not significant. The movie tells the story of NWA, a rap group which had great success back in the day, and whose signature album was entitled Straight Outta Compton. And the movie is about the rap group, not about gang life. (Saying that the movie is about gang life is like saying that Les Misérables is about an escaped prisoner. It's not that it's completely untrue . . . it just suffers from a lack of proper emPHAsis.)
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