Muted Group

There is a scene where Ice Cube gets to perform at a local club. Ice Cube is defiantly not famous at this point but still does really well and everyone the club loves it. Ice Cube was rapping and preforming the song “Gangsta Gangsta.” The club owner gets very mad at them because he did not want any gangster music in his club because he is afraid of riots and think people are going to do what the music talks about. This is what the club owner called “reality rap shit”. This is a good example of how the higher power was trying to silence their voice. Ice Cube and his group would be a muted group, which would be muted group theory. The club owner called it reality rap because it is what’s going on in the boy’s daily lives and he did not want them spreading it or rapping about it.The boys come from a low-income family and are happy to get to showcase their talents at the club, but the owner shuts it down fast. In the textbook A first look at communication theory, Kramarae describes Muted group by saying, “Muted group People belonging to low- power groups who must change their language when communicating publicly, thus, their ideas are often overlooked” (p.458). Then they got a letter from the FBI order them to stop singing “Fuck the Police”. Easy E feels they can use the letter from the FBI to come forward and show how bad the law treats them. Of course, this didn’t work because no news stations would pick up their story and tell it. This is yet another example of the higher power drowning out their voice.

Word count — 285

Griffin, E. A., Ledbetter, A., & Sparks, G. G. (2014). A first look at communication theory. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages.