“He Yells at Me Three Times: Stay in Your Car!”: Rap Culture, Black Identity and Reception of the Message of Police Brutality in Quebec City

An earlier version of this paper has been presented online at the annual Conference of Canadian Sociological Association, during the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences in Toronto in June 2025. It explores how rap music in Quebec, particularly through the work of the rap artist Webster and his collective Limoilou Starz (LS), serves as a tool for meaning-making, political expression, and resistance against racial profiling and police brutality experienced by Black youth in Quebec City. The study focuses on the song “SPVQ” (Service de police de la Ville de Québec) as a case study to analyze the encoding and reception of anti-racist messages within rap culture. Webster draws from a global tradition of socio-political rap—like that of African-American rappers KRS-One, LL Cool J, and Tupac—while anchoring his critique in the local realities of Limoilou, a marginalized, racially diverse district of Quebec City. Through a narrative, figurative, semantic, and ideological analysis of the song, the paper reveals how Webster articulates themes of police brutality, structural discrimination, economic marginalization, and resistance. The rapper’s message is both a form of testimony and a civic intervention. His broader activism is analyzed through ethnographic techniques—including participant observation and interviews during workshops, media appearances, and online campaigns. It translates these messages into tangible social practices. To explain the persistence of these injustices, the paper situates the issue within Quebec’s interculturalism framework, which ostensibly promotes dialogue and integration but often masks or even reinforces structural racism. This model maintains a symbolic majority/minority duality and conditions inclusion on conformity to a dominant White Francophone identity, thus rendering racialized youth as perpetual outsiders.

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