When mainstream institutions fail to provide adequate avenues for black Americans to develop humanizing understandings of their identities and exclude them from full citizenship, how do black Americans develop identity, belonging, and community within structures of oppression? Through ethnography and archival research this study documents how the aesthetic realm historically and contemporarily serves as a site of articulation where rural black Americans recast notions of black subjectivity and local belonging. To understand the process of rural black Americans using the aesthetic realm to reposition the importance of mainstream institutions, this research uses a 'socio-diasporic' framework to view the ways those socially positioned as black come to understand that positioning via the way institutions structure their day-to-day reality; and how through the forging of diasporic connections black people have been able to construct knowledge within, alongside, and independently of those institutions. Specifically, this ethnography situates the criminal justice system as a primary institutional apparatus in defining the societal significance of blackness in northeast North Carolina. Hip-hop has served as a performative avenue to engage negotiations of identity, and through this search for identity black centered epistemological and ontological understandings of black subjectivity have been created. To appreciate black Americans' unique understandings of the world that I argue they construct, I advance the notion of "vibe" as a methodological tool to conceptualize the way specific aesthetic and cultural sensibilities are used to construct understandings of blackness, gendered identity, and local belonging.