"Black" Noise?

So I was reading through the "Black Noise" article and I didn't really expect to find anything interesting because I have no interest in rap music at all. But like Mason, I found the correlation between the popularity of rap music across many races and the angry reaction by many "ghetto" communities about this appreciation very interesting. Instead of focusing on the white fans of rap as Mason did though, I found most interesting how the article treated white rappers, particularly Vanilla Ice on page 11 (7 in the pdf).

I get that the rap genre and community are immensely tied to what I learned in the presentations is called the "hip-hop" culture. Vanilla Ice tried to get into this culture and was ridiculed against. I am not praising what he did (or what the article says he did, i.e. ripping off other artists' work and pretending to be something he wasn't), but as I was reading this part I can't help but think how the odds are stacked against Vanilla Ice in this situation. Was he reprimanded because he was doing terrible things or was he reprimanded because he was white? If race really had nothing to do with it, why are there so few white rappers and even fewer that are welcomed by the genre?

Rose talks about how "ghetto-blackness is a critical code in rap music" (pg. 12). A ghetto lifestyle maybe, but why "blackness?" Why do whites seem to be discriminated in this genre? Or aren't they, and this is my lack of knowledge about the rap industry shining through? Again, I understand that copying a culture that isn't yours can be seen as offensive, but does that mean that one race can claim an art form and exclude others from it?

The lack of white rappers in the industry and the discrimination they seem to face has always been baffling to me. But I'm sure there are plenty of areas where racial discrimination still occurs, and I'm sure most often it's the other way around. It's scary to think that we have come so far and live in a world where we have said for years "all men are created equal" and yet there are still areas where we cannot seem to put that into practice.