Even though Heath and McHenry didn’t paint orality in African American culture to be the best practice in their piece The Literate and the Literacy, I believe a certain oral tradition in African American history is striving to bring improved social standing for their community: the art of rapping. One could argue that this practice is not solely oral as much of it is written initially, thus categorizing this practice as Henry Louis Gates’s coined term “speakerly text”–but alas, many categorize this as primarily an oral practice. Regardless of the oral or speakerly text identification, the practice has made an effort to improve African American’s social standing by bringing attention to societal issues (I.E. police brutality, Collin Kaepernick’s practice of kneeling during the national anthem, etc.), letting the world know what it feels like to grow up in poverty, and displaying the capabilities of African American’s rhetorical power–through storytelling, metaphors, general wordplay, and much more. No one other genre has complex subject matter as such, which makes this genre put African American culture in a positive light in most people’s eyes. The genre has even done so well that it currently is the most streamed genre in the United States as of now; in my eyes, that amount of support by non-African-Americans to a primarily African American genre is positive, and most definitely has improved African American’s social standing immensely.
