Abstract

Engaging prominent theoretical depictions of black men’s struggles to access work, in this article I discuss how black men’s inaccessibility to the American labor market jeopardizes their roles in urban poor communities. Using hip-hop masculinity as a case-in-point, I apply the gender concept of “marginalized masculinity” to these analyses as a modern-day “public fiction” that, through its usurpation by mainstream media and advertising, offers marginalized black men a way to claim dominance within their worlds and encourages participation in America’s economic system, despite it having failed them. In this way black men’s relationship to American capitalism has transitioned from producer to consumer.