Quote of note:
There may still be a few people around here "who have a problem," Mr. Rea allows.
"But if they don't like black people," he said, "they're still dressing in the clothes, listening to the music."
...But they have hip-hop in common. They listen to Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Cam'Ron, and Fabolous. They wear G-Unit, Sean John and other hip-hop labels like Rocawear, the same brand-new baseball caps, stickers still affixed to the brims, cocked sidewise. Some stick hair-picks in their headbands, though few of them, truth be told, have hair kinky enough to need one. Like any number of white suburbanite kids, they favor black slang, embellished with the Queens accents of their parents.
"Sometimes, when I'm talking to my friends, it'll come out," said Mr. Martocci. "It's just slang. It's the way we talk. You know, I'm like, 'What up, my brutha.' "
His friends all nodded.
Hip-Hop Is Spoken Here, but With a Queens Accent
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
There is not much racism in Howard Beach, say young people in Howard Beach. Just look at our clothes. Listen to our music. Listen to how we talk.
"In this neighborhood, it doesn't matter what color you are," said Lorenzo Rea, as he sat outside Gino's Pizzeria on Cross Bay Boulevard. "Everyone's listening to hip-hop, wearing G-Unit."
It has been two decades since a gang of whites here chased a black man to his death, and about a year since Nicholas Minucci was accused of fracturing the skull of a black man with a baseball bat. Howard Beach is still a mostly white, mostly Italian neighborhood, with a lingering — and, people there insist, unfair — reputation for prejudice.
But it is now also a neighborhood where the mostly white, mostly Italian kids favor the same style and music as their peers over in East New York and New Lots.
There may still be a few people around here "who have a problem," Mr. Rea allows.
"But if they don't like black people," he said, "they're still dressing in the clothes, listening to the music."
Whether such emulation is heartfelt or superficial is always up for debate, and it is in the hate-crime trial of Mr. Minucci, who admitted to investigators that he called out a too-familiar word beginning with the letter "n" to the man said to be his victim, preceded by the greeting "What up?"
His lawyers maintain that Mr. Minucci, 19, was defending himself against a robbery attempt, and during jury selection last week, they suggested that the word was not meant as an insult.
