Bomb the Suburbs : graffiti, freight-hopping, race, and the search for hip-hop's moral center

Sociology by William Upski Wimsatt

Blurb

Bomb The Suburbs is a collection of essays by William Upski Wimsatt, a former graffiti tagger and imitator hip-hop subculture. It is a mix of storytelling, journalism, photojournalism and original research, on a broad range of topics, such as suburban sprawl, hip hop culture, youth activism, graffiti, and Chicago. It was photoedited by artist Margarita Certeza Garcia, and published in 1994 by Subway & Elevated Press, a division of Soft Skull Press, with ISBN 0-9643855-0-3, and republished in 2000. The first edition had 3,000 copies.
Bomb The Suburbs led to subsequent books and political activism. In an essay in his No More Prisons compilation, entitled "In Defense of Rich Kids", Wimsatt responded to classist criticism of his affluent background:
"You can hate me if you want to. I am the beneficiary of a very unfair system. The system gives me tons of free money for doing nothing, yet it forces you to work two and three jobs just to get out of debt."

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