Black Popular Culture

While I was reading, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture” by Stuart Hall, I was really confused and felt kind of lost in the piece. Hall discusses three major components that include: the disappearance or shift from European high culture, the United States as a world power and a major center for globalization, and the “decolonization of the Third World.” I understand that these three things have a big impact on culture and how there has been a shift from high culture to popular culture. However, I am really confused about the topic included in the title of the work, the “black in black popular culture.” It seems to me that Hall rejects the biological definitions of race and rather focuses on the cultural aspects of it. Hall states that “black popular culture is a contradictory space,” meaning that it cannot be simplified or really explained. He later goes on to say that “there are always positions to be won in popular culture.” But then he claims that no one culture can win entirely, since it is all about the game of culture and the war behind it. I guess as an example could be The Cosby Show. I remember us discussing this in class and how the family is an upper-middle class family, which was not the overall dynamic to reflect the population at the time the show aired. Rather than focus on the race, Hall would say that the more important factor is the cultural differences of the family. I have no idea if any of this makes sense, since the reading was really confusing to me.