Tonight, in this low-income high homicide-rate neighborhood of West Oakland, an unidentified object shoots silently through the air, narrowly missing its victim. Beneath the weapon, a diverse and boisterous crowd spits out racial slurs, as uneasiness and frustration blur the thoughts of the young man—and intended target—standing on the stage that rises before the mob. He ignores demands from the crowd for the deejay to just let the turntable’s spin, and begins his performance with confidence, despite the audience’s disinterest in his lyrical abilities.

The disorderly conduct and condemning attitudes from the predominantly black audience don’t bother him. After all, it’s just an “unorganized, bad night” with peers who don’t understand. Another night of prejudiced people with ethnocentric attitudes. He thinks: “this will always exist in such a diverse area, right?”

Eric “Chinoflaco” Shapiro, a 23-year-old budding rap artist, remembers this night from two years ago vividly, as he smokes cannabis from an iridescent blue bong. A plate of cold, half-eaten ravioli sits on the table before him in the home he shares with a buddy in Oakland, CA.

Eric, an Oakland native, is biracial. His Chinese and Jewish ancestry is an obstacle for this amateur lyricist, who claims he isn’t taken seriously in the genre because of his skin color. Eric is no stranger to prejudice. He recalls witnessing race-wars in Oakland schools, where blacks and Asians often broke into fights because of their ethnic differences.

“All it takes is for one person of a different group, and another from another group to fight and there would be two groups rivaling; and it just so happened that it was between the Blacks and the Asians,” explains Shapiro.

Oakland, the birthplace of such rap-pioneers as Too Short, is statistically one of the most diverse cities in the Bay Area. “The Town” is 35.7percent Black, 31 percent White, 15.2 percent Asian, 0.7 percent Alaskan Native or American Indian, 0.5 percent Pacific Islander; the remaining 16.7 percent of the population consists of “other races”-including multiracial. Today it is a city of many aspiring rap artists like Shapiro.

“Black people opened the gateway for the rap industry, starting with artists like Run D.M.C., Eazy E., and N.W.A.—that is why the majority of rap artists are black,” explains 18-year-old Chris “Lil C” Ebarvia, another emerging rap artist from Oakland.

Ebarvia says rap is derived from a variety of different types of music, including R&B, reggaeton, and jazz— and that is the main reason that rap and hip-hop music attracts such a diverse audience.

Nelson George, author and music journalist, provides his own explanation.

“Black culture in the past century was highly cyclical, with new modes of musical expression rising from the underground, to articulate blacks' shifting social condition,” he says. “I once thought that the new music-driven culture would come from Africa or, perhaps, the multinational ghettos of 'the new Europe'. Though increasingly, I see the hip-hop clichés of the States being recycled with foreign accents.”

Ebarvia and his 17-year-old brother, Mike “Baby Mike” Ebarvia, are Yugoslavian and Filipino. When their brother Junior, an avid rap artist, passed away two years ago, they were both inspired to pursue careers in the same genre. They say that not being black doesn’t deter them from their pursuit, because they’ve never personally been confronted by racist attitudes from black rap artists whom they’ve worked with in the past.

“We only see racism in the rap industry on television, but we’ve never experienced discrimination against us,” says Ebarvia.

18-year-old Eric “Lil E” Bailey, a young black artist pursuing a rap career, says that people will always be prejudice when it comes to having respect for performers in any kind of music industry. He admits that he has witnessed racism between rap artists, from a white rapper getting dissed at a competition, to an Asian artist losing the respect of his fans because he lost one rap-battle.

Shapiro explains that artists who aren’t Black have to be prepared for sharp criticism and he takes it as empowerment to do better next time. The Bay Area is a tough crowd, but he says that the Bay Area is where his taste in music comes from and where he began rapping. Just like many rap pioneers in the Bay Area who didn’t have the luxury of all the various production equipment, Shapiro created his own studio space at his home, with a $5,000 student loan.

Renting studio space is expensive, averaging about $150 per 3-hour session, so artists that have their own studio space can have more time to work on their music without time constraint or spending too much.

In the early 90s, when many Bay Area rap artists began to make a name for themselves, collaboration with other artists was commonplace. One of the first was E-40, a prominent Bay Area artist who formed “The Click” with three other members, who happened to be family and raised under the same roof in Vallejo. Another artist-JT the Bigga Figga, a San Francisco native, built a studio in his mother’s house and began recruiting local artists, forming an independent record label called Get Low Recordz.

Shapiro collaborates with other artists in a rap-group called Slap Game. Being a rap artist who’s not black, Shapiro feels that he has to overcompensate and try harder than artists who are. He claims that, due to the color if his skin, he needs to be more unique on the mic.

“I get a lot of shit all the time because I’m not black. One of my friends always jokes around and tells me, why don’t I let the black people handle the vocal part and I can just mix the beats.” Despite the racist criticism and the assumptions that he can’t flow, Shapiro is aspiring to make a name for himself in the industry.

Ironically, people tend to assume that Shapiro is Mexican, because of his physical characteristics: long, brown, curly hair and thick eyebrows. It’s how he got the stage name “Chinoflaco.” While visiting Mexico years ago, natives mistook him for a Latino, and spoke Spanish to him wherever he went. So his brother created “Chinoflaco,” or “Skinny Chinese,” and Shapiro’s stage alias was born.

Shapiro raps about everyday life while trying to send a message.

He says there will always be racist people, and that that alone cannot discourage a determined and driven person such as himself.

“I ain’t gonna lie, I don’t have hella albums out or accolade," Shapiro adds confidently. "But please believe that I’m ready to sting cause people out there got ammunition and I’m ready to fire back.”