What are they really afraid of?

For decades there has been major backlash and panics over new, popular trends. Mainly by parents who are unfamiliar with the popular culture of their children's generation. In Karen Sternheimer's article titled, Media Phobia, she says, “Panics about popular culture ebb and flow throughout history. They are often masked attempts to condemn the tastes and cultural preferences of less powerful social groups.” By this she is calling out the (mainly white) parents, for panicking because they're afraid of the integration between their children and children of minorities. We are more than aware of the systematic racism and white privelage that blankets our country and a lot of adults who grew up with this privelage don't want to lose it, so they blame things like music for being too sexual or violent thus masking their true opinions. When Rock 'n' Roll first swept the country parents panicked because Rock 'n' Roll was created by people of color. As more artists began to play this music white children, and children of color were seen dancing together and enjoying themselves. This obviously struck a very sensitive cord with the parents and the music became the issue. They said Elvis was too sexual and they only allowed television networks to film from his waist up, but he was just moving his hips, is this really something so terrible? That was the idea that they conveyed, but the real deep rooted idea of what was really 'terrible' was the integration of people from different cultral aspects enjoying themselves... together. Just like Hip Hop, people of color finally found a way to express and voice their troubles and hardships and when all kinds of people started listening and loving the music it was immediately deemed violent music and had to be marked as Explicit. It wasn't the music that made people panic and categorize it as violent it was the fear that people of color were succeeding in spreading their important messages. There is almost always an underlying cause to the panic that comes with new and popular media, you just have to look a little deeper.