Do you think the stereotypes in gansta rap make it a new form of minstrelsy?

There's a certainly much more anger in rap than I've ever evidenced in coon songs. Coon songs seem more willing to placate. In the rap which we find degrading, you can hear the rage, you can hear the anger, you can hear the self-hate very clearly defined, in the absence of the same kind of tyranny that those who lived in the coon-song period faced. Those rappers are caught in a trick bag, because it's a way to make unconscionable sums of money and a way to absent yourself from any sense of moral responsibility. It's all in the name of 'that's he way we are.' Well, is there more to us than being just the way we are? Do we have no responsibility? Do we have no sense of dignity?

Harry Belafonte, quoted in The New York Times Magazine, August 26th, 2001.