   downunder underground  the outbreak of "race riots" in sydney
should have come as anything but a surprising development,
especially for expatriate lebanese-australians or, say, anyone
who paid attention to the recent insurrection in paris. indeed,
given the similarities between that flare-up and the still
smoldering cities of france, i'm surprised that no one has yet
fingered hip-hop.  seriously though, how do we reconcile
sydney's seemingly serious social rifts with what appears to be,
if perhaps a more marginal subculture than the "surf movement,"
a downright vibrant hip-hop scene? maybe it's elementary: hip-
hop's embrace on the part of certain australians makes plenty of
sense against the backdrop of a pervasively, and sometimes
explicitly, racist society. and though i wouldn't want to
generalize too strongly about who constitutes the "hip-hop
community" in australia (as if any such monolith ever exists), i
think that the recent riots do call our attention to one partial
answer to bakari kitwana's under