Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom 9780804777537

Citation preview

Slam School

Slam School ❚  L e a r n i n g

T h r o u g h C o n f l i ct

in the Hip-Hop and

S p o k e n W o r d C l a ss r o o m  

❚

Bronwen E . Low

S T ANFORD UNI V ER S I T Y PRE S S  

❚ 

S T ANFORD , C A L IFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Low, Bronwen E. author. Slam school : learning through conflict in the hip-hop and spoken word classroom / Bronwen E. Low. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-6365-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-6366-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Language arts (Secondary)--Social aspects--United States. 2. Performance poetry--Study and teaching (Secondary)--United States. 3. Education, Secondary--Curricula--United States. 4. Multicultural education--United States. 5. Intergroup relations--United States. 6. Critical pedagogy--United States. 7. Educational anthropology--United States. 8. Hip-hop--United States--Influence. I. Title. LB1631.L69 2011 428.0071'2--dc22 2010044388 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion

Contents

Preface 1 Toward a Critical Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Pedagogy

vii 1

2 “Keepin’ It Real”: The Discourse of Authenticity and the Challenge for Hip-Hop Pedagogies

29

3 The Tale of the Talent Night Rap: Black Popular Culture in Schools and the Challenge of Interpretation

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4 “Making Sense Out of Worlds that Are Different”: Race and Hip-Hop Pedagogies

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5 Niggaz, Bitches, and Hoes: Hip-Hop Nation Language as Limit-Case for Education

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6 Pedagogic Futures for Hip-Hop and Spoken Word

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Notes

159

Bibliography

165

Index

179

Preface

I a m n o t w h a t y o u t h i n k o f a s h ip - h o p . I am a white, Cana-

dian woman, who at the time of this study had recently moved to the United States to take up an academic position at a private research-intensive college. And neither is Tim.1 Also white, he is a high school language arts teacher, a haiku poet, runner, and committed bird-watcher who self-admittedly knew nothing about rap music. This disjunction helps explain his students’ surprise when Tim announced that the class would be studying hip-hop and spoken word culture in the last term of their senior year. Then he introduced me as the professor who would be coteaching the class. One student asked if he could borrow a tape-recorder, since “there’s a lot going on in the school teachers don’t know about,” a situation he was hoping to change. The “lot” he referred to is the hip-hop poetry, including individual and group (or cipher) improvised freestyling and rapping, which pervades the hallways of urban high schools across the United States but is rarely invited into classrooms. Which doesn’t mean that popular culture, and in this case hip-hop, isn’t already present in schools, shaping the identities of students and therefore how, what, and why they learn. Tim teaches English, specializing in creative writing, in an urban arts magnet high school in a midsized city in the northeastern United States. In the fall of 2001, I was an assistant professor in a local university’s faculty of education. The university suffers from the elitist reputation problems of similar private institutions located in poor urban centers. I had been studying, in theory, the implications of spoken word and hip-hop culture for youth identities and language practices. I met Tim, and he asked me to help him develop and teach a curriculum grounded in hip-hop culture in two of his senior classes. He had been teaching English and creative writing in the city school district for more than twenty years and felt that his ignorance about

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rap music and hip-hop culture was a missed opportunity to engage his students. He wanted “to become a better communicator to the people I serve.” It should not surprise that Tim felt that his lack of knowledge of hip-hop culture was a deficit in relating to his students. Hip-hop is the single most influential cultural force shaping contemporary urban youth culture in the United States, and its international reach is growing. It includes rapping (the  work of the MC), deejaying (or turntablism), graffiti art, and forms of dance such as breakdancing, and it is at the same time a whole culture of style—fashion, idiom, gesture, movement—and sensibility. The culture can offer young people across the spectrum a space of identity-formation and performance, creativity, and political engagement. While its reach is broad, hip-hop has been a particularly important influence on the African American and Latino students who populate Tim’s classes. Rap is the most widespread and commercial branch of a larger movement known as “spoken word,” a category used to describe forms of poetry and performance in which an artist recites (rather than sings) poetry, often to musical accompaniment that might range from a jazz ensemble to a bongo drummer. Although I had taught university students for ten years, I had never taught high school, and my work on spoken word culture had been conceptual rather than ethnographic, exploring theories of language and subjectivity in relation to new “secondarily oral” (Ong 1982) poetic forms such as rap music. I had never discussed such topics with classrooms of adolescents before. The students found what they perceived as a disjunction between my identity as hiphop fan and researcher and a white woman to be a source of amusement and puzzlement. To boot, I am Canadian, which only heightened my strangeness in the eyes of many students who told me this meant I talked “mad proper.” My upbringing in Canada also means that I have not grown up on either side of the U.S. racial divide, produced through particular histories of colonization and racism, which are linked to and yet different from Canadian ones. At some points, this disjunction actually seemed to facilitate class activities that asked students to analyze, and thus to partly distance themselves from, the youth and home cultures they inhabited; at others, it interfered with my ability to understand and interpret. That said, these interferences are also part and parcel of all exchanges of teaching and learning, especially in what Pratt (1991) calls the classroom “contact zone” in which “ideas and identities [are] on the line” (40); I argue in this book that hip-hop culture can foster this pedagogically productive zone.

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I came to hip-hop and spoken word culture after having conducted research at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. I was studying the Jamaican language debates about the public, private, and educational uses of Jamaican Creole versus Standard Jamaican English, where the low level of Standard English literacy skills of many Jamaican students is a longtime source of concern (given that it remains the language of much professional life). However, these debates were complicated by anxieties that many youth were not speaking a language easily characterized as English or Creole. ­Instead, they were using language greatly influenced by the linguistic experiments of the dancehall rappers (known as DJs in Jamaica), who, according to one critic, “so stress their Jamaican Patwah, by exaggerating, stretching, and speeding it up (almost to and sometimes beyond the point of parody), that it is incomprehensible and intimidating to those on the outside” (Chude-Sokei 1994, 82). This suggested that the youth were deliberately invoking markers of generational identity and culture rather than speaking less English due to a failure of the educational system (Low 2000). I also learned that a crucial space within which to investigate the evolution of new language forms is youth-driven popular culture. I brought into a North American context these interests in youth-driven popular language, literacy, and poetic practices as well as their split from those sanctioned by school. In April 1999, I attended the People’s Poetry Gathering, a festival celebrating oral and popular poetic traditions from around the world. As part of the festival, New York City held its first-ever teen “slam,” a performance poetry mock-Olympic competition that held the boisterous attention of an auditorium filled with young people, hollering their approval and disagreement with the judges’ scoring. Largely through the work of community organizations across the country, including Youth Speaks (which claims to serve approximately two hundred thousand youth annually) in San Francisco and Urban Word in New York City, slam poetry is now a vital and growing social movement across the United States. In 2008, the Brave New Voices International Teen Poetry Slam Finals attracted more than five hundred poets from more than fifty cities.2 Making sense of the dynamism and enthusiasm surrounding that teen slam required an immersion in hip-hop culture, since rap music and the wider hip-hop culture are integral to performance poetry’s relevance and coolness to youth. I gave myself a hip-hop education, starting first with the rich academic theory and journalism on hip-hop and then listening to the music, a backward

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approach to popular culture. (YouTube, which did not exist when I was first researching hip-hop, now makes this autodidactic process easier.) My hip-hop education was therefore quite unlike that of many hip-hop-generation scholars who have grown up in and through the culture (Hill 2009; Kitwana 2002; Sharpley-Whiting 2007) and so quite naturally use it as a lens for theorizing the world. As Alim (2004) puts it, “I was one among a generation of young Hip Hop Headz who spent hours crafting my linguistic skillz and pushin the boundaries of the English language in RHYME CYPHAS and FREESTYLES. Wasn’t no way in the world you could get me to see BL [Black Language] as deficient!” (xvi). A hip-hop outsider, I approached my work at the high school as a facilitator rather than as a teacher. I repeatedly described to the students that I was hoping to learn about hip-hop culture in classrooms in order to support other teachers who might want to do something similar, a stance many of the students took quite seriously. One student said of Rashidah, the spoken word poet who was coteaching the class with Tim and me, that “she was coming to tell us something about” hip-hop poetry, while I “was coming to learn more about it, so that was a little different.” Tim also approached many of the course materials as a learner, which was pedagogically productive as we shared expertise and interests with students (Callahan and Low 2004). Developing and Researching a Performance Poetry Course Tim and I first decided to develop and coteach the performance poetry course as a six-week unit during the 2002 winter term to his two classes of senior students, all who were seventeen or eighteen years old. One class was a Pacesetter English (PE) course, an alternative to the advanced placement, college-level English classes, designed to help all students achieve national English standards. Tim used the course as an opening in the curriculum to experiment with content and activities that he felt met the objectives of the PE program without being bound to its curricular materials. For instance, in the term prior, Tim collaborated with another university professor to offer a course exploring “disability” through poetry and fiction. The PE class was a same-sex education option for male students. (There was a similar section for girls concentrating on journalism, offered by another teacher.) Tim called the students in the PE course “survivors”—students who have not traditionally done well in English, but who have managed to persist into their senior year. Of the twenty-nine

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boys in the class, twenty-two were African American, three were Latino, and four were white. The second class was Advanced Poetry (AP), a co-ed course that attracted many top academic students in the grade level. Of the nine boys and ten girls in the class, thirteen were white, two were African American, two were Latino, one identified as “mixed race,” and one was Palestinian American. Tim had been teaching in the school district for more than twenty years, the last ten in this school. He grew up in a mostly white working-class neighborhood in the area, went to a college in the region, got into the party and counterculture scene, and dropped out for a while in his sophomore year. He then went back partly funded by a track scholarship; as he told the class, he might not have finished university if it had not been for sports. He is still very active and athletic, going to the gym every day before school. Defying any “jock” stereotypes, Tim’s haiku poetry has been published in creative writing magazines and collections. In the first year of the poetry course, we invited a local performance poet and teaching artist, Rashidah, to run a performance workshop in the class. She was such an asset to the course that she became a coteacher during the last few weeks of the class, a role that continues in different forms up to the present. A range of national and local arts education grants, with the support of the university where I had been on faculty, has funded her work. Rashidah is African American, university-educated, and a graduate of the city school district. She had a career in communications before she decided to commit herself to urban arts education. She offers slam poetry workshops in many local elementary and high schools and is the cornerstone of the citywide slam poetry scene that she developed in 2006. Rashidah—as a black woman in her late twenties who is an accomplished performance poet with a history of engagement with hip-hop culture and who has strong ties to the popular arts community—was invaluable in giving the course credibility with students. In year one, for instance, we were able to invite her friend, the city’s bestknown hip-hop radio DJ, to teach the students about hip-hop history. Rashidah’s experience as a teaching artist also meant she was able to structure and lead performance workshops that helped the students grow as ­performers. Rashidah is “poetry,” as one student put it at the end of 2002. Throughout 2003, I maintained regular contact with Tim and Rashidah and attended the slam that concluded that year’s performance poetry course, and in 2004, we resumed our research collaboration, again with a class of senior Pacesetter English students. In the 2004 course, I stepped back from the role of coteacher

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and concentrated on documenting what happened in the course. That course was term-long and co-ed (it had been all-male in the fall term, but merged with some members of the female course at the beginning of the winter term). In both years of the research, data collection processes were similar. I ­audio-recorded every class and in 2002 also video-recorded some of the inclass workshops and the final school poetry slams. I also did “on-the-fly” inter­v iews with the students, Tim, and Rashidah during the course of the terms, as well as informal, in-depth interviews at the end (Seidman 2006). I took field notes during class, particularly in 2004 when I was more regularly sitting with the students. My data also includes selections of students’ in-class writing, especially their poetry, as well as school documents and the curricular materials prepared by the teachers. I regularly reviewed the data, often through conversations with Tim and Rashidah, about the class and the students, and I transcribed and coded it using aspects of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990). This included open coding at the beginning in relation to themes such as “race,” “language,” “gender,” “voice,” and “poetry vs. rap.” I started coding more selectively as it became clear that the theme of conflict was central to what was happening in the classrooms. I picked some key sections from the transcripts and coded them in relation to conflict and tension, using terms such as (mis)understanding, problem, appropriate/acceptable, offense, mistranslation, not knowing, and difference. I then analyzed selected passages through a combination of discourse and critical discourse analysis strategies (Fairclough 2003; Luke 1995) and close-reading methods from literary studies. Critical discourse analysis sees language as a site of ideological struggle and as both an effect and producer of social change (Fairclough 1992), and it assumes that identities, social relations, and knowledge and belief systems are constructed through language use. It moves dialectically between microand macroanalyses of language, from linguistic analysis of vocabulary, syntax, ­cohesion, and structure, to social-theoretical approaches to discourse that emphasize the role of language in the construction and quality of society and social change. Literary close-reading strategies also involve fine-grained analysis of text, including observations about vocabulary, punctuation, connotation, and denotation, with particular attention to poetic elements of language such as repetition, patterns and absences, rhythm, perspective, imagery, and symbolism. This data collection, review, and analysis process made clear to me that much of the conflict between administrators, teachers, and students involved

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processes of interpretation and misinterpretation around language, identity, and culture, and that these moments of conflict could be central to learning. My relationship to hip-hop as a late and intermittent fan means that I am extraordinarily indebted to my teachers, colleagues, and students (overlapping designations) in the field of hip-hop culture and studies. These include the members of Nomadic Massive, and especially Louis Dufieux (Lou Piensa) and Nantali Indongo (Iamblackgirl), Yassin Alsalman (The Narcicyst), Robints Paul (Vox Sambou), Diegal Leger (Rawgged MC), and Alejandro Sepulvede (Ali Sepu). I thank the many scholars I don’t know who have been so formative to my thinking, as well as those I do know, including Bakari Kitwana, Rinaldo Walcott, Samy H. Alim, Awad Ibrahim, Warren Crichlow, Greg Dimitriadis, and in particular SSHRC Montreal/Toronto multilingual hip-hop crew members Mela Sarkar and Lise Winer. I am blessed with other supportive colleagues with similar commitments to schooling and equity, including Claudia Mitchell, Shirley Steinberg, Michael Hoechsmann, Gale Seiler, Anthony Paré, Elisabeth Wood, Jen Gilbert, Chloe Brushwood Rose, Paula Salvio, and Hodari Davis. Thanks also to wonderful graduate students and research assistants who have edited or contributed in some way to the manuscript—Haidee Lefebvre for careful copyediting support, Lena Palacios for insightful editorial feedback, Jon Langdon for transcription and data coding and analysis, as well as Michael Baker, Eloise Tan, and Jacqueline Celemencki. Colleagues who have helped support this ethnographic research project from its inception include Joanne Larson, Judy Fonzi, Meg Callahan, Raffaella Borasi, Sonia James-Wilson, Mary Jane Curry, and Kimberly Healey. Extra special thanks to “Tim,” “Rashidah,” the administrators who facilitated our collaboration, and the smart, creative, funny, and critical students in the three classes we worked with; without them this book would not have happened. Milles mercis, as always, to David for love and support and to my children, Arwen and Beatriz, who are great reminders of the power of imagined identities.

Slam School

1 T o w a r d a C r i 1t i c a l Hip - H o p and Spoken Word Pedagogy

examines the dynamics of teaching and learning in three high school classrooms that engaged hip-hop culture. This study does so in order to build a new, possibly counterintuitive, argument: the very reasons teachers and administrators might resist the deliberate introduction of hiphop into the planned curriculum—the culture’s complex and contradictory politics of representation on issues such as gender, violence, sexuality, materialism, race, and language—are what make hip-hop so pedagogically vital. In 2002 and 2004, I researched, helped develop, and cotaught a senior En­ glish performance poetry curriculum that included studies of rap music and hip-hop culture. I worked with Tim, a high school language arts teacher, and Rashidah, a performance poet and arts educator. The transcripts of classroom interactions, performances, and interviews with students and teachers were rife with stories of conflict and misinterpretation: high school versus popular culture; white teachers and administrators versus black and Latino students; black versus white students; and adults versus adolescents. While such conflicts are routine, they became important catalysts for debate and analysis in our course. Discussion and debate, for instance, about uses of the “N-word” by hip-hop generation youth brought to the surface some rarely addressed tensions that shape the relations between racially marginalized youth and mainstream education. The spoken word curriculum was a place to air and, at its best, work through these tensions, leading to new insights and understandings for teachers as well as students.

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Chapter 1

This book makes the case for critical hip-hop pedagogies by exploring some of the ways hip-hop’s tricky politics of representation catapulted the classrooms into the center of contemporary cultural debates about culture, language, and identity in real and tangible ways. The “natural order of things” in school was also challenged, from the start, by having students’ out-of-school (and hallway) culture become the explicit stuff of curriculum, given that this is usually part of the “null” curriculum, or what schools don’t teach (Eisner 1994). This move put students in a rare position of curricular authority, testified to by the student’s proud claim that “there’s a lot going on in the school teachers don’t know about.” The mockOlympic poetry slams­—which served as the course’s culminating experience—highlighted the performance and poetic talents of students who were not usually at the center of the literary stage in the school. By tackling taboo classroom subjects and drawing on the cultural capital of youth, we worked to “flip the script” (in hip-hop terms) of the business as usual of traditional schooling. This business includes the explicit curriculum such as course topics, texts, and assessment practices, as well as the “hidden curriculum” (Apple 1990), a product of structures of teaching and curriculum and the organization and administration of schools. The hidden curriculum’s teachings (including the importance of obedience to authority, punctuality, delayed gratification, as well as the naturalness of competition and hierarchy through systems such as tracking) reflect the values and needs of dominant culture and help produce the systemic underachievement of poor and minority youth. According to 2003 census materials, 47 percent of the students in this arts magnet high school were African American, 17 percent were Hispanic, and 33 percent were white.1 There are a larger percentage of white students in the school than across the district at large, in part due to the art magnet school’s reputation, as one student put it, as the “district’s baby.” In this sense, the school fulfills part of the mission of magnet schools to attract white students to inner-city schools (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002). That said, the school was not ranked as “high performing” in the district’s most recent annual report, based on 2005/2006 data, a designation given only to the district’s science magnet secondary school, but fell instead into the “performing/ progressing” category. In the wider city school district, according to a 2008 report, 65 percent of the students are African American, 21 percent are Hispanic, and 12 percent are white. It is one of the poorest districts in the state,



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and 50 percent of the schools have a poverty rate of 90 percent or higher, while 88 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a common poverty index for school researchers). This profile makes the district and school typical of those found in many urban centers across the country. Schools in the United States are actually now more segregated than they were in the early 1970s, prior to the Supreme Court bussing order (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002, 17). This resegregation of schooling means, for instance, that the average white kid attends a school that is four-fifths white, and less than 14 percent attend “multiracial” schools (in which at least three races comprise 10 percent or more of the total student population). The average African American attends a school that is less than one-third white, while the average Latino attends a school where less than half of the students are not Latino (with Latinos being the most segregated minority by race, class, and, increasingly, language) (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002, 17). That Tim is white while his students are predominantly black and Latino is also unremarkable—in a well-established trend in U.S. classrooms, as the student population grows increasingly diverse, the teaching population remains resiliently, and increasingly, white. For instance, data gathered by the National Educational Association indicated that as of 2001, approximately 90 percent of the teaching population was white, with the percentage of black teachers having declined from 8 to 6 percent since 1991 (Reading Today 2003). What is unusual is that a teacher with very little knowledge of hip-hop, and no personal connection to it (other than through his students’ interests), chose to devote significant chunks of his courses to a hip-hop and performance poetry curriculum. This flies in the face of existing scholarship on hip-hop pedagogies in which the teacher usually brings a deep investment and knowledge of the culture to his or her students (Akom 2009; Hill 2009; Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2004; Stovall 2006). Better understanding the dynamics of cultural insider and outsider-ness in teaching is one of this book’s central preoccupations. Given the racial composition of the classes that I taught and studied in this school, Slam School focuses on African American youth in interaction with white youth, teachers, and administrators. While the book privileges the school experience of black youth, I hope that its insights can be built on by other researchers working in the United States and elsewhere with more recent immigrant and refugee students or other racialized, linguistically diverse groups who don’t fit easily within the black/white racial dichotomy. The conclusion sketches out some of these possibilities.

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The high school language arts curriculum we developed drew on student interests in hip-hop culture and explored contemporary spoken word forms within the contexts of oral poetic traditions, African American literature, and traditions of art and politics. The course consisted of investigations into and workshops about performance and writing and culminated in a competitive “mock-Olympic” poetry slam. The diversity of poetic forms that we engaged and the importance of slam poetry to the course mean that the book’s emphasis on hip-hop culture and pedagogies is a bit misleading; the course taught the “spoken word” more generally. However, most of the conflict and indeed much of what I saw as the learning in the course existed in relation to the complex nexus of representation, including language and imagery, offered by hip-hop culture and, more specifically, rap music. While spoken word might be an easier sell to teachers and administrators, hip-hop was the hook that captured the attention of our students and then facilitated rich and complicated conversations about language, culture, and identity in these three classrooms. This book takes the reader into the heart of these conflicts by sharing some of the classrooms’ stories. These I read closely, paying careful attention to their language and metaphors through methods of discourse analysis. This focus on language responds to what Pitt and Britzman (2003) have described as the “problem of narrating experience” for both researchers and research participants, “known as the ‘crisis of representation’ in that the adequacy of language to capture experience is considered an effect of discourse rather than a reflection of that experience” (756). This discourse analysis approach is also a study of processes of interpretation because I regularly offer a series of lenses, sometimes competing, through which one can understand a story, interaction, conversation, or comment. I argue that hermeneutic indeter­minacy necessarily shapes all attempts at understanding what happens in the social world, and so processes of interpretive inquiry around human interaction and meaning-making need to be as dynamic and multivalent as possible. The book thus grapples with the conflicts and tensions that shape hip-hop culture’s relationship with formal schooling and processes of ethnographic research, analysis, and writing. The complexity of unpacking classroom events benefits from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework; for instance, I draw on cultural studies, hip-hop studies, sociolinguistics, and poetics. Slam School is grounded in accounts of curricular practices and classroom experiences in order to delineate the space of critical hip-hop pedagogies but also to do analytic work around questions of difference, popular culture, and



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meaning-making in education. The book addresses various forms of social difference in classrooms, including generation, gender, and most centrally race, for the classroom became a dynamic, if fraught, place for explorations of race and racism. Given the North American pattern of increasingly nonwhite classrooms being primarily taught by white teachers, this book also works to be a useful part of the project of equipping teachers with the knowledge and skills required to teach students who share different histories and cultures. Given the divergent experiences, expectations, opportunities, and horizons of meaning and value of members of what has been called the “civil rights generation” from those of the “hip-hop generation” (Boyd 2002; Kitwana 2002), African American teachers might also feel culturally disconnected from hip-hop identified students. Also relevant to this classroom study is its context in the heyday of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal legislation determining educational policy in Bushera schools (building on similar policies from the Reagan-era onward). Tim’s student-centered pedagogy and curriculum is a different kind of response to the systemic academic underachievement of African American and other students than NCLB’s standards-based reform, with the latter’s emphasis on a “back-tobasics” approach to curriculum and high-stakes standardized testing models. Early twenty-first-century schools in the United States are also grappling with continuing funding cuts and “zero-tolerance” policies that criminalize school misconduct and that, along with school-based arrests, heightened police and security presence, as well as disciplinary “alternative” schools, help produce the “school-to-prison pipeline” which increasingly discriminates against African American and other minority youth. (See, for instance, the report by the Florida State Conference, “Arresting Development: Addressing the School Discipline Crisis in Florida,” which revealed that in Florida during the 2004–5 school year, black students received 46 percent of out-of-school suspensions and police referrals statewide, but comprised only 22.8 percent of the student population.2 As part of this inquiry into the implications of hip-hop and spoken word culture for education, I include a discussion of related educational activities developed in out-of-school settings such as community and youth centers. There has been an explosion of such programming in urban centers across North America based on all elements of hip-hop culture and spoken word, designed to engage a range of populations such as “youth at risk.” Here I draw on examples from some of my current research and partnerships in Montreal on informal education, as well as my involvement as a board member with a youth center that has extensive hip-hop related offerings. In this way,

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the book participates in a relatively recent conversation on the pedagogies and curriculum of informal education, invigorated by educational researchers who are exploring alternative sites of learning, having in part lost hope in schools under No Child Left Behind. Hip-Hop Histories Rap music brings together a tangle of some of the most complex social, cultural, and political issues in contemporary American society. Rap’s contradictory articulations are not signs of absent intellectual clarity; they are a common feature of community and popular cultural dialogs that always offer more than one cultural, social, or political viewpoint. Rose, Black Noise (2)

What is hip-hop culture, and where did it come from? In her classic text on hip-hop culture, Rose (1994) situates hip-hop geographically and historically in the “margins of postindustrial urban America” (21). This American/global postindustrial space is characterized by the replacement of industrial factories with information-service corporations; multinational corporations’ growing control over national economies; the international division of labor; the withdrawal, since the 1970s, of federal funding for social services; and the purchase and gentrification of working-class neighborhoods by developers. These all helped produce the shrinking of working-class job opportunities; housing shortages; the entrenchment of racial, class, and gender disparities; decreasing opportunities for social mobility; and the gutting of traditional inner-city community support networks. Such postindustrial conditions of “profound social dislocation and rupture” (39) provide the context for hip-hop’s emergence, first in the Bronx and then in other major metropolitan centers in the United States, including, famously, Los Angeles and other West Coast cities. The DJ was the original artist in rap music. One popular version of rap’s history begins with DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican who brought the “toast and boast” tradition of roots reggae to the Bronx. The Jamaican “Yard DJ” would spin records on a sound system, which included turntables and speakers, and then talk or “rap” over the ska or reggae beats (Toop 1991; Perkins 1996). In the Bronx, Kool Herc and other early DJs would power these sound systems by hooking them up to a public power source, such as a street lamp, entertaining crowds at open-air block parties. Herc became known for producing a continuous danceable beat by cutting back and forth between two turntables



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playing the same rhythm section or “break beat” of an album. Herc and subsequent DJs “extended the most rhythmically compelling elements in a song, creating a new line composed of the most climactic point in the ‘original’” (Rose 1994, 74). While Herc would recite “prison-style rhymes” in Jamaican style over the beats, the practice of having someone “rap” over the music did not become standard until DJs had developed such a following in clubs that they were drawing the crowd’s attention away from dancing. The role of the emcee (or MC) or “rapper” was born to verbally incite the dancing.3 The term “rap music” refers to the combination of the DJs rhythm tracks and the emcee’s lyrics. “Hip-hop,” however, is the larger culture of which rap is just one element. This terminology can be confusing, since “hip-hop” can also describe a musical category that includes rap but also rap’s hybrid forms, crossovers with other genres like R&B and soul as in the music of Mary J. Blige, Angie Stone, and Jill Scott. Adding to this complexity are the “often mystified and emotionally charged meanings of ‘hip-hop’” (Krims 2000, 11) as the term is used to distinguish between music that is considered socially and politically conscious, known as “hip-hop,” from its more socially retrograde forms, dismissed as “rap.” In this book, I use “hip-hop” to describe the larger culture, in the manner of MC KRS-One (2001) who explains, “hip-hop is not just a music, it is an attitude, it is an awareness, it is a way to view the world. So rap music is something we do, but hip-hop is something we live.” KRS-One also expands hip-hop’s typical typology of four elements to include nine: “breaking, emceeing, graffiti art, deejaying, beatboxing, street fashion, street language, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurialism—trade and business” (see Parmar 2009, for a full discussion of this artist’s critical pedagogy). Evidence of hip-hop’s shape-shifting and growth includes Chang’s (2007) most recent collection on hip-hop that documents the emergence and fluorescence of the “hip-hop arts” (xiii), including hip-hop theater, literature, photography, film, spoken word, and journalism. The first rap track to get radio play was “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, produced by independent label Sugar Hill Records in 1979; with its chorus “hip-hop, you don’t stop” recorded over the disco/funk rhythms of Chic’s “Good Times,” it became an easily identifiable early anthem for hiphop culture.4 While “Rapper’s Delight” was the first commercially successful rap party track, early rap recordings also worked in the socially conscious vein. One of the first was “The Message” (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (featuring MC Melle Mel), also recorded by Sugar Hill Records,

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a­ ccompanied by the first rap music video (Keyes 2002, 70). The track documents the struggles and the frustrations of living in the ghetto, as in its chorus: Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge I’m trying not to lose my head It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under

Artists such as Grandmaster Flash were developing hip-hop as a space of social protest and potential solidarity and social change from the displaced margins. For instance, Afrika Bambaataa, known as the “god-father of hiphop,” a former member of the Black Spades street gang in the south Bronx who found new direction through hip-hop deejaying, started a youth organization in the early 1970s known as the “Zulu Nation.” It attracted youth interested in breakdancing, graffiti, and deejaying and encouraged them to “battle against each other in a nonviolent way, like rapper against rapper rather than knife against knife” (Bambaataa, qtd. in Keyes 2002, 48). Other figures who profoundly shaped the music and culture are DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow who pioneered many of the techniques that define rap’s intense, multilayered sound. Rap DJs and producers made their mark on a number of technologies through “a specific mis-use and conscientious desecration of the artifacts of technology and the entertainment media” (Delaney, qtd. in Dery 1994, 193). These technologies include the turntable, synthesizer, drum machine, and sampler. For instance, the “scratch,” whose development and popularization is credited to Grandmaster Flash, deliberately works against the turntable’s forward movement. DJs such as Kurtis Blow manipulated the drum machine to produce the lowest possible concentrated booming bass sound (Rose 1994, 75). And rap producers “inverted” the logic of the digital sampler, originally intended to mask the absence of a live instrument in the recording studio, by foregrounding the fragment; they also defied central principles of music engineering by detuning the sampler and pushing sound meters into the distortion zone (75). Hip-hop histories often undervalue the participation of groups other than African Americans, such as the Puerto Ricans who were integral to the development of the culture from its Bronx beginnings (Flores 2000; ­R ivera 2003). While Puerto Ricans made a particularly strong mark on break­ dancing (Hazzard-Donald 1996), other significant Puerto Ricans in hip-hop include graffiti artist Lee Quinones and DJ Charlie Chase. Latinos who have



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had a profound impact on West Coast rap include Cuban-born Ace Man, Mexican American b-boy turned MC Kid Frost, and the first Latino rap group to have an album go platinum, Cypress Hill, with origins in Cuba, Mexico, and Italy. Filipino Americans greatly developed the arts of deejaying and turntablism (Wang 2007). Jin, the first Asian American rapper signed to a major label, and Litefoot, self-proclaimed as the first Native American rapper (www.litefoot.com) with his “Tribalistic Funk” style, represent some of the many who have shaped hip-hop. The story of the diversification of hip-hop also encompasses white rappers such as the House of Pain, Vanilla Ice, the Beastie Boys, and top-selling rapper Eminem. Due in large part to the white mainstream’s history of appropriating African American cultural forms (and, most famously, the history of rock n’ roll), race and hip-hop is a politically charged topic. While all of the scholarly literature on hip-hop culture recognizes hip-hop’s African American roots, one strand examines it primarily as a “distinct subset of African American culture,” while the other places emphasis on “the ways it has been adopted, localized, and re(created) by different groups around the world” (Petchauer 2009, 2). Accounts of hip-hop’s origins also regularly leave out women, arguing by omission hip-hop is intrinsically male. Scholars such as Rose (1994), Pough (2004), and Pough et al. (2007) counter this, documenting women’s active participation in every aspect of the culture. Groundbreaking female graffiti artists who have long struggled for respect in what continues to be a male-dominated field include Lady Pink, a Latina who emerged as part of the New York subway scene in the late 1970s and whose work has been displayed at the Whitney and the Bronx Museum of Arts. Other important female graffiti artists include Lady Heart, Abby, and Chick from the 1980s as well as Claw, Ms. Maggs, and Diva from the 1990s. Female breakdancers known as “b-girls” (or break-girls, also a designation for young women interested in hip-hop more generally) developed distinct styles within the emerging artistic genre, though they also faced active discouragement from within the hip-hop community (with many physical moves, for instance, considered dangerous or unfeminine). While all female breakdance crews have been relatively rare (with important exceptions such as the Dynamic Dolls), the famous Rock Steady Crew always had female members such as Baby Love, Yvette, and Chunky. Important solo breakers include Rokafella (now a professional dancer), ­Headspin, Asia One, and Suzy Q. In the world of deejaying, one of the first female hip-hop DJs to gain widespread recognition was Salt-n-Pepa’s DJ ­Spinderella; popular ­contemporary

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hip-hop DJs include New York-based DJ Beverley Bond and DJ Pam (the Funkstress) from the Bay Area. Women have also been active as MCs since hip-hop’s early block party days; as rapper Ms Melodie puts it, “It wasn’t that the male started rap. The male was just the first to be put on wax” (qtd. in Rose 1994, 154). There are many famous female MCs in rap history. Rap trio Salt-n-Pepa’s debut album Hot, Cool, and ­Vicious (1986) went double-platinum, virtually unheard of even for male MCs, and opened up opportunities for female rappers in the hip-hop industry. Salt-N-Pepa were also among the first female rappers to critique the sexism of heterosexual relationships and to point to some of the misogyny present in hip-hop culture. Rapper Yo Yo, working mostly in the 1990s, preached female empowerment and dubbed her rap crew the IBWC (Intelligent Black Women’s Coalition). Another important moment in hiphop women’s history was rapper Roxanne Shanté’s 1984 release, at the age of fourteen, of the single “Roxanne’s Revenge”—a rebuttal to UTFO’s hit song, “Roxanne, Roxanne,” complaining about a woman who ignored them. Queen Latifah continues to be one of the most powerful women in hip-hop culture, and her rap single “Ladies First” off her album All Hail the Queen (1989) and its accompanying video (with images of female African American freedom fighters) became pro-woman hip-hop anthems. Because of the work of hip-hop female pioneers, rap is now an important site of storytelling and critique of sexual politics and gender relations for hiphop generation women (Pough 2004). These women include contemporary U.S. rappers like Missy Elliott, Lauryn Hill, and Eve. Despite the tradition of strong women’s voices in hip-hop, it remains a contradictory space for women. The industry continues to be dominated by men at all levels, rap ­lyrics are frequently sexist and misogynist, and women’s bodies are regularly objectified through the convention of the “music video ho” (or scantily dressed women who dance in rap videos, often for little or no pay) (see Sharpley-Whiting 2007, for a nuanced discussion of this phenomenon). Contemporary rappers such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown have redefined what women rappers can say and do, creating a female gangsta mode and performing aggressive sexuality in ways that complicate discussions of the objectification of women in hip-hop. However, it remains easier for women artists to work and gain prominence in hip-hop culture as singers rather than rappers, as in the case of Mary J. Blige, aka the “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul,” Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, and Alicia Keys. A good deal of critical analysis of the representations and treatment of



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women in the hip-hop industry and culture has been internal, from hip-hop generation scholars such as Joan Morgan and Tricia Rose. Morgan’s (1999) autobiographical analysis of the culture points to some of the contradictions facing women who have grown up with and love hip-hop but who also identify as feminist, and she describes the tensions that can exist between sexual desire and self-interest. Such conflicts also shape Denean Sharpley-Whitling’s 2007 book on hip-hop’s often harmful impact on the identify-formation of young black women. Part of the critical public engagement with negative representations of women in hip-hop was Essence magazine’s 2005 “Take Back the Music” campaign that hosted public discussions and song-writing competitions. These critics, however, avoid blanket condemnations, pointing to the racism of many popular critiques of hip-hop, and instead make clear how embedded hip-hop’s gender politics is within the sexism of North American culture. Hip-hop activism around women also includes organizations such as “Female HipHop” and “femmixx,” which promote female hip-hop artists and producers in the United States and elsewhere and “BlackGirlsRock!” which teaches girls to critically engage with representations of women in hiphop and the media more generally. Recent documentaries such as Lady Beat ­Makers Vol. 1 (2006) and Counting Heads: South Africa’s Sistaz in Hip Hop (2006) tell the fuller story of women in hip-hop.5 The Rapper as “Evil Other” The “contradictory articulations” (Rose 1994, 2) of rap music, of which gender is only one facet, can mean that the anxieties of teachers and administrators about building relations between this youth-driven culture and school are understandable. Such pedagogic anxieties are also not the sole domain of hip-hop: the literature on popular culture and education more broadly includes teacher concerns that being “hip” to youth culture is impossible given generational and cultural differences between teachers and students and the ethereal nature of the popular (Alvermann, Moon, and Hagood 1999). Popular culture can make a teacher feel vulnerable, in that students’ insider knowledge can shift the balance of authority and expertise (Callahan and Low 2004; Mahiri 1996). However, while concerns about controversial language and content dog a good deal of popular music, film, and television, they are especially strong in response to rap music. A discourse of “moral panic” surrounds hip-hop culture, as Koza (1999) makes clear in a study of media representations and public debates “that

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have constructed rap, rappers, and rap fans as the deviant, lacking, undesirable, or evil other” (91). These sorts of anxieties around rap are not confined to the United States; in the political and social fallout following the 2005 Paris suburb riots, approximately two hundred French deputies and senators demanded an inquiry into the role five French rap groups might have played in inciting the rioters (even though three of the five had been disbanded for years) (Rioux 2005). Some of the controversies that hip-hop culture, and rap music more specifically, elicits are due to lyrics that are spoken rather than sung, and so are more audible and prominent than the lyrics of other popular music—and more prone to public attention. Also, central to the scrutiny and controversy that haunt rap is the fact that its artists, consumers, and the wider public tend to mark it as “black.” Anxieties about rap’s lyrics are thus deeply implicated in the social fear and vilification of black youth (Giroux 1996). That rap is predominantly the terrain of young black men, a population in the United States whose staggering incarceration rates make literal Public Enemy’s (1987) dramatic claim that “we are the public enemy number #1,” strengthens the music’s affiliation, in the public mind, with criminality. While these elements suggest that rap is guilty by association, some of its creators and members of the larger hip-hop culture also carefully construct themselves as outlaws and/or figures of resistance to the status quo. As Ross (1994) reminds, rap has broken new grounds of expression as “arguably [the] first black musical form in which anything could be said, and for which testing the limits of free speech in a recognizably racist society had become a matter of conscious habit, if not necessity” (2). It is also important to remember that there are many genres of rap music, some more controversial than others. Both the traditions of party and protest rap, around since the beginnings of hip-hop, continue to the present and resist attempts to reduce rap music to any one thing. Classifications such as “old school,” “underground,” “hardcore,” and “gangsta” rap signal some of the range of sound and semantic content. Krims’s (2000) typology of (overlapping) rap genres is comprehensive, the product of the analytic tools of musicology as well as cultural studies (in its interest in the performance of youth identities). It considers “(1) the style of the musical tracks; (2) the style of MCing (or flow); and (3) the topics commonly dealt with (i.e., the semantic aspects of the lyrics)” (55). The rap genres, according to Krims are: party rap; mack (or pimp) rap; jazz/bohemian (or college-boy) rap; and reality rap (which includes gangsta). The expression of socially threatening and explosive values in rap takes a number of different forms across the genres. “Reality” rap, and in particular



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“gangsta” rap, developed by artists such as N.W.A., Ice Cube, and 50-Cent, engages and arguably celebrates the (real and fantasy) conditions and often nihilistic values of the violence-ridden lives of gang members, living in neighborhoods victimized by the ghettoization of poverty and the so-called war on drugs (Quinn 2005). Reality rap is the most controversial of the genres, the “culturally charged (and most lucrative) area of the rap music industry” (Krims 2000, 70). A central value in hip-hop culture is authenticity, expressed in terms of the importance of “keepin’ it real”; authenticity in hip-hop is intimately related to gangsta values such as “hard” masculinity and the “very specific and idealized community that is located in African American-­dominated inner cities” known as the “streets” (McLeod 1999, 142). The mack or pimp vein of rap, as in the work of 2 Live Crew, Jay-Z, and Too $hort, exalts the trappings of an imagined material luxury- and sex-filled “good life.” Less commercially successful, and therefore less known than the gangsta and mack rap genres, is the jazz/bohemian genre of groups such as the Roots, De la Soul, Common, and A Tribe Called Quest. Even rappers considered by many listeners to be “positive” or “conscious” (some of whom Krims connects with the jazz/bohemian genre and others with reality rap) often advocate for the politicization of black people in Black Nationalist and Afrocentric forms. Their revolutionary rhetoric (see KRS-One and his “agitprop preachiness” [Ross 1994, 2], Public Enemy, or the more contemporary Dead Prez and Immortal Technique) is significantly more threatening to the general public than the hedonism or “gangsta” talk of these other genres for it advocates fighting the status quo. As Au (2005) has demonstrated, rap lyrics pose a sustained challenge to mainstream schooling: “From the perspective of rap music, the discourse of education is largely dysfunctional when it comes to meeting the material, social, and cultural needs of African American youth” (213). Also complicating distinctions between positive and harmful rap expression is the presence of themes across genres easily characterized as misogynist, homophobic, or advocating violence or criminality. Spoken Word and Slam Rap music is a subset of “spoken word culture,” a category used to describe forms of poetry and performance in which an artist recites poetry, often to musical accompaniment ranging from a jazz ensemble to a bongo drummer. The 1960s-style coffeehouse is back, in a multitude of forms. In 2001, HBO began airing “Def Poetry Jam,” a half-hour of spoken word poetry hosted by

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well-known rapper Mos Def and orchestrated by famous rap producer Russell ­Simmons. One of the most dynamic branches of spoken work is slam poetry. In a slam, poets perform original works before a live audience, and they are ranked from one to ten by a panel of judges.6 This panel is usually selected at random from the audience. Poets use neither props nor musical instruments in this war of words, relying instead on the expressiveness of their bodies and voices. No performance can exceed a three-and-a-half minute time limit. Slam poetry emerged in the 1980s, first at the Get Me High bar in Chicago and then in other major urban centers. Venues such as the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City host regular slam poetry “open-mics.” Slam poetry is populist, designed to win the hearts and minds of the audience: it tells stories that blend and move between the personal and the sociopolitical; it is often urgent, sometimes sexy, and regularly funny, and its language tends to be vernacular and reflect the multilingual contexts of its emergence (Low 2006). The yearly Slam Poetry National competition, hosted by Slam Poetry, Inc. (www.poetryslam .com), brings together approximately eighty teams representing different cities to a different U.S. city each year (in 2010 it will be held in St. Paul, MN). Individual poets can compete at the World Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. Following a similar model, the Brave New Voices International Teen Poetry Slam Finals is held every summer in a different U.S. city and attracts more than five hundred poets from more than fifty cities. One of the pedagogical benefits of slam poetry is that it is both like and unlike the rap lyrics and freestyling that so many of the students in the three classes were deeply into and in some instances already writing and “spitting.” Slam poetry’s urban origins and the central role of black and Latino poets in its emergence have given it a hip-hop sensibility and aesthetic; at the same time, slam is less marked as black than rap, with prominent slam poets coming from all cultural groups. Though some have criticized slam poets for their lack of stylistic diversity, a study of poets who have risen to prominence reveals their wide range of styles (compare, for instance, the poetry and performances of slam veterans Patricia Smith, Taylor Mali, and Beau Sia). This can mean that slam poetry is less intimidating and more inclusive than rap music to students not already invested in hip-hop. It is also not bound by the template of hip-hop authenticity and “hardness.” As participants in what remains a grassroots scene (despite HBO’s series on the Brave New Voices festival), slam poets are not burdened by the demands of marketability found in the corporatized hip-hop industry (though at the same time, few earn a living just as slam poets).



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The Performance Poetry Course Into the charged context of hip-hop culture enters the performance poetry course (which I will also refer to as the spoken word course and the poetry project). It evolved from 2002 to 2004, shaped by the needs and interests of the students in the classes as well as our teaching experience in 2002. In both years, the course culminated in a poetry slam held at the end of the school year in an auditorium filled with all of the senior students, selected classes of juniors, and some invited members of the community. We also aimed to have the students write as much as possible in the journals that they kept with them for the duration of the courses. Classes often began with “writing practice” about which Tim says, “Don’t edit yourself. Be adventurous with your language. No talking.” The students write to specific prompts, such as William Carlos Williams’s “Men die every day for what they miss in poetry,” “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason,” and “Write down the words for a song or poem you wish you’d written. Then explain why.” The students are also given the following series of sentence openers to help them to formulate in writing their “first thoughts” about something: “I don’t understand / I noticed / I wonder / I was reminded of / I think/ I’m surprised that/ I’d like to know / I realize / If I were/ The central issue here is / One consequence of ________ could be? If _______ then _______ / I’m not sure / Although it seems . . .” Tim would assign particular kinds of poems to write such as a “persona” poem, spoken in the voice of another, and a “Dear America” poem. These poems were workshopped in class. He would also give students concrete strategies for responding to each other’s work, such as “pointing,” where the students write down words and phrases that jump out at them from the poem. Tim recommends the students initially structure their responses around one or more of the following prompts: I believe your poem because __________ I doubt your poem because __________ When I hear your poem, what goes through my head is ____________

These prompts ask the students to be specific in their feedback and help them avoid simplistic judgments about something being either good or bad. They also make clear the subjective nature of all responses. Near the beginning of the project in both years, we screened the film Slam (1998); it became central to the students’ interest in and understanding of the genre. The film tells the story of Ray Joshua, spoken word poet

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and ­subsistence-level marijuana dealer, and his experiences with both the criminal justice system and the redemptive force of poetry. Slam examines the power of poetry to help the socially marginalized temporarily transcend the prisons that constrain them, a theme taken to an extreme in a freestyle between two men behind bars in adjacent cells. Viewing the film was powerful experience for the students in all three classes, but particularly in the 2002 PE class for it opened up a discussion about freestyle poetry, a genre Tim had not yet heard of. In response to Tim’s questions about it, two black students, known as the school’s most gifted freestylers, performed for him individually and in a “cypher” in which they stood in a circle and improvised poetry in turn. Tim was very impressed by the freestyles, and that moment seemed to confirm for the students that their skills and interests were valued. The course also immersed students in as many forms of poetry and performance poetry as possible, with a special focus on African American literature such as blues and jazz poetry and poetry from the Black Arts Movement. We would screen and discuss parts of videos such as The United States of Poetry, the Slam Nation documentary about the national slam poetry scene, and, particularly in 2004, selections from HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” In the first year of the project, we examined various contexts in the history of poetics for thinking about rap’s experiments with word and sound, including dada sound poetry, Stein’s modernist decompositions of language, jazz ­poetry, and blues poetry. In 2004, led by a literature professor from the local research university and Rashidah, we explored some of the history of Black poetics: spirituals, the blues, and poetry from the Black Arts Movement. However, we dedicated more time in class to writing and performance workshops leading toward the school slam, in part because this second group was much less interested in the more academic investigations into poetry than the two classes in 2002. Hip-Hop Culture, Spoken Word, and Education This research and curriculum development project must be set within the context of the literature on spoken word, hip-hop, and education more generally, for we were certainly not the first to build bridges between hip-hop culture and school curriculum. Even though community-based organizations that offer spoken word programs for youth have been going strong since at



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least the mid-1990s, performance poetry and its implications for education are just beginning to garner academic attention. Bruce and Davis (2000) offer an early account of a high school language arts unit that brings together hiphop and slam poetry, designed in part to offer an expressive outlet “as a strategy for violence intervention” (119). Fisher (2003, 2005, 2007) lays important conceptual groundwork in her study of the intergenerational and “adult participatory literacy communities” developed at mostly African American open-mic events as well as in her ethnography of the Power Writers, an afterschool spoken word poetry club at a high school in the Bronx. By paying careful attention to the teacher’s creative writing pedagogies and to the words of his students, Fisher (2005) builds a vision for literacy education grounded in respect for the experiences of young people, multilingualism (including “Bronxonics”), poetic traditions, and the potential of youth to “aspire beyond ‘ascribed lives’” (19). In previous writing on Tim’s classroom, I also did close readings of student poetry, describing common themes and students’ experimentation with different personas and voices (Hoechsmann and Low 2008). Not confined to spoken word poetry but exploring similar themes of empowerment through the development of poetic voice, Jocson (2005, 2006, 2008) details the transformative potential of the June Jordan poetry program in urban classrooms. Testament to hip-hop’s cultural importance and growing spheres of influence, a near-academic industry has developed around it over the past ten years in fields such as cultural studies, black studies, literary studies, sociolinguistics, and sociology. Academic attention to hip-hop and education has come later but is now burgeoning. A recent review of the state of the field (Petchauer 2009) maps out the central approaches and themes of this body of research about, or with implications for, schooling and education. It identifies three principal currents: “(a) hip-hop-based education—studies that use hiphop, especially rap songs and lyrics, as curricular and pedagogical resources; (b) hip-hop, meaning(s), and identities—studies that focus on how students mobilize these texts and how they intersect with identities; and (c) hip-hop aesthetic forms—studies that conceptualize the way of doing or habits of mind produced by hip-hop practices” (7). This first current includes Alim (2007, 2009), who develops critical language-awareness skills among hip-hop generation youth by arming them with sociolinguistic tools for studying the language practices of their ­communities. It also includes Stovall (2006)’s social studies course that

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draws on socially conscious rap lyrics as prompts for critical discussion and Morrell and ­Duncan-Andrade’s (2004) language arts unit that scaffolds canonical ­poetry with rap lyrics. Recent contributions include Akom (2009) and Rodriguez (2009), who both develop hip-hop pedagogies with preservice teachers in order to explore themes of social justice and to increase their awareness of the everyday realities of poor students of color. Particularly significant is Hill’s (2009) book-length ethnographic study of a high school English class that explores the elements of literary analysis through rap lyrics. Given its relevance to my project, I will say more about Hill’s book below. The second current consists of ethnographic studies inside and outside schools on hip-hop-identified youth. A significant contribution to this current is Dimitriadis’s (2009) study of the ways the young people in a community center used their “affective investments” (13) in rap texts and movies as coping strategies and narratives to make sense of their lives, build relationships, and construct a sense of place, identity, and history. These identities were generational, raced, and localized (for two participants, this meant forging connections, through Southern rap music, to a construct of the American South). Also key are Forman’s (2001) and Ibrahim’s (1999) studies of how Somali immigrant youth in U.S. and Canadian high schools learned to perform black identity in North America through hip-hop (and in Ibrahim, through hip-hop language in the context of an ESL classroom), and Clay’s (2003) research on hip-hop as cultural capital among black youth at a community center. The third current, hip-hop aesthetic forms, consists of studies of hip-hop communities of practice, such as graffiti writers, and the implications of their situated models of learning, collaborating, and “doing” more widely. Examples of this are Pennycook’s work (2007) on the hybrid language practices of local hip-hop communities as new forms of language awareness, Rice (2003) on hip-hop sampling as a model of argument in college composition, and Petchauer (2007) on the ways of conceptualizing and doing higher education of “hip-hop collegians.” This book is more or less in conversation with the three research streams. It fits most within the second stream in its emphasis on the ways hip-hop culture provided a lens through which the students made-meaning of themselves and each other, performed raced and gendered identities, and thought of themselves as writers and poets. This hip-hop lens also includes particular theories of language use and change, as well as understandings of orality and



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writing, which also fall into the third current’s interest in hip-hop’s aesthetic forms and their implications for education. Given that the book’s data stems from a hip-hop/spoken word curriculum in a language arts course, it also contributes to research current one, hip-hop-based education. However, my emphasis is less on pedagogical strategies and the intended curriculum (see Hoechsmann and Low 2008, for some other details of these) and more on the operational curriculum, the “unique set of events that transpire within a classroom” (Eisner 1985, 47). In particular, I examine the unanticipated curricular detours, roadblocks, and false starts that I argue provided much of what made the course so worthwhile. Petchauer (2009) notes that much of the literature in the hip-hop-based education vein works in a “how-to” mode and emphasizes “what works” to the detriment of examining “how it works, why it works, or what may be some of the unintended implications” (9). This book’s examination of the unintended and unexpected in classrooms works to fill that gap. The book is also a critical engagement with hip-hop culture as well as with the dynamics of teaching and learning in our classroom, features that Petchauer identifies as missing in much of the “how-to” mode of the hip-hop and classrooms literature. (I will say more about what I mean by “critical” rap pedagogies below.) And it broadens the focus on economic class found in the literature that is “critical” by also considering “racial identity and formation through hip-hop” and “how hip-hop-based curricula establish racial(ized) contexts of such programs or how they might shape racial, identity, awareness, or development of students” (11). In fact, race as theme weaves its way throughout the book.7 Slam School remains hampered by a lack of “measurable outcomes” for determining academic achievement, often collapsed in the literature into “academic engagement” (Petchauer 9). The performance poetry course was a success on a number of grounds, including student attendance, participation in class discussion, in quality and volume of poetry writing, and commitment of the student poets in the final slam. While the students were assessed, their (mostly good) grades do not, however, offer comparative data on how or whether our curriculum helped the students do better than they would have otherwise in similar subsequent courses. Nor can we determine if it might have helped students achieve on the statewide language arts exam, taken in their junior year. There are increasing numbers of courses on hip-hop culture being offered in university-level courses across the United States, and

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our course might prepare students to take one of these; we have no data on whether this has happened.8 Overall, assessment of effects and impact is limited by the fact that the course was held during the last term of the students’ final year of high school, and even more significantly, it established its own criteria for academic success, including student participation, effort, and willingness to experiment with poetic forms that were new to them. We feel strongly that the poetry that students wrote, the performance and writing peer evaluation sessions they participated in, and their performances at the slam helped and will continue to help them be more confident and enthusiastic writers of poetry, and perhaps writers in general, and performers. That said we do not have data to support this (which could be the work of another, longitudinal study). Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogies What might make a hip-hop pedagogy critical? Akom (2009) maps out the core tenets of a trans-disciplinary critical hip-hop pedagogy that explores racism in intersection with other modes of oppression and is centered on the experiences and knowledge of students of color. Committed to teaching for social justice, Akom and hip-hop teacher-researchers such as Rodriguez (2009) and Williams (2009) explicitly build on Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogical praxis, including its emphasis on problem-solving methodologies, dialogism, and conscientização (or the fostering of critical consciousness) in their development of a critical hip-hop pedagogy. Scherpf (2001) also suggests that rap lyrics can be used to foster critical consciousness and question dominant ideologies, similar to Stovall’s (2006) critical social studies and Baszile (2009)’s counternarrative and curriculum for social justice with preservice teachers. While these theorists note that hip-hop is a complicated space, none explores the concrete difficulties this poses to pedagogy and so do not emphasize that rap lyrics themselves require critical reading and analysis. This mirrors a strong tendency in the hip-hop and education literature: in the push to legitimize knowledge and literacy practices that mainstream schooling has ignored or disparaged, scholars gloss over the tensions between hiphop and school. They thus fail to address in a sustained fashion reasons why teachers and administrators might resist hip-hop’s deliberate introduction into the planned curriculum and so potentially weaken their argument. For instance, educators who develop curriculum using rap music tend to side-



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step the politics of representation by carefully selecting texts for use. Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004) pair the study of canonical poetry with particular rap songs that they pick; they note that students commented afterward that they would have liked to be involved in the selection process. Mahiri (1998) tries to offset the problem of rappers who “use explicit language and sometimes incorporate images that denigrate women particularly” by having students critically engage with articles on rap music and hip-hop culture rather than rap itself. He insists that “our intention was not to use the actual music in class or in any way reinforce negative images” (112). Stovall (2006) notes that his project “was absent the various problematics in the politics of hip-hop” (599), and that his students also wished they had been able to include more material of their choice. The teacher as filter shapes other teaching projects: Jeremiah (1992) advises teachers to “choose rap lyrics whose content may not be offensive to students” (99); and Anderson (1993) advocates using the “contents or messages of videos of rap music that give a positive message” (219). There are some important exceptions to this trend of glossing over, or ignoring, tension and conflict, including articles that point to the “contradictory articulations” of hip-hop culture. Koza (1999), for instance, makes the case that rap is a “significant cultural artifact” whose representations can be both empowering and oppressive and suggests studying with students the influence of its contradictory cultural, political, and economic contexts. ­McLaren’s (1995) “gangsta pedagogy” engages rap as both “oppositional political practice” and “a problematic cultural practice” (23), product of histories of exploitation. Ibrahim (1999) terms rap and black popular culture more generally as curricular sites of “critique” and “hope” and advocates that they be “critically framed, studied, and engaged with” (367) in the ESOL classroom. These works, however, do not include examinations of what engagements with rap music as a contradictory text might look like in classrooms, including the difficulties these pose to educational values and objectives. For critical rap pedagogies, in my mind, not only need to use rap texts to do critical thinking about the world but also need to be aware that the students themselves might be deeply invested in some of hip-hop’s more oppressive representations and narratives, and that these can prove powerfully resistant to the pedagogic impulses of well-intentioned teachers. In this vein, Tan (2009) offers a typology of the features for a critical hip-hop pedagogy  (CHHP)

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that  grapples with its own internal contradictions, claiming that CHHPs need to be: 1. Rooted in hip-hop culture while recognizing that its histories and ideologies are socially produced and at times must be challenged and reworked. 2. Socially conscious of how hegemony operates within society, while paying particular attention to how hegemony and power operate within hip-hop culture to marginalize populations it seeks to liberate. 3. Responsive to marginalization whether it be through structures of gender, class, race, religion, sexuality, or ability. 4. Culturally productive by encouraging learners to be producers of their own hip-hop culture. 5. Inclusive of multiliteracies across forms of media, technology, and culture. (59) She includes a sixth element for researchers within CHHP, indicating that they need be “cognizant of the complex ways that positioning (including hip hop insider or outsider) affects research within the CHHP community” (59). At their best, our classroom pedagogies enacted aspects of a CHHP, asking students to reflect on and sometimes critically distance themselves from their popular investments and worldviews; as Dimitriadis (2009) argues, “if texts and practices are always in performance, they are open to rearticulation by interested educators” (127). As I explore in Slam School how hip-hop shapes youth identities and ideologies, I examine the possibilities the culture opens up, as it validates experiences of social marginalization and dispossession, as well as those it closes down, for instance, in its reliance on increasingly narrow templates of what it might mean to be young, black, and urban. A few researchers grapple with similar dilemmas. Newman (2001, 2007) makes clear that critical rap pedagogies bring with them conflict in his study of a high school creative rap-writing course in which the commitments of hip-hop educators to politically engaged, “conscious” rap clashed with those of students to “hard core” and “gangsta” rap. The students in the class he worked with were “not willing to condemn message rap, but they rarely listened to it,” expressing such sentiments as “if you want to do politics, you should be a politician, not a rapper” (2001, 59). These students admired what they saw as the entrepreneurial and survivalist spirit of many of the hard-core rappers



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they envisaged as role models “making it” against the odds. The “message” rap that was often anticapitalist and that seemed less committed to economic stability and success did not impress them. In another rare discussion of the lived tensions between hip-hop culture and education, Petchauer (2009) describes how in his study of “hip-hop collegians,” “habits of body and mind in hip-hop may undermine educational goals and practice” (18). For instance, it seemed that one participant, a graffiti artist, experienced dissatisfaction with her college art program, eventually changing majors, because its expectations that she purchase art materials and work individually clashed with graffiti’s guerilla and communal ethos. (While this choice might be the right one, strategically, in protecting the radical and creative power of this student’s street art, it opens up the question of how educational institutions might better bridge school and out-of-school cultures.) Hill (2009) published the first book-length study of a classroom curriculum based in hip-hop culture, in this instance a language arts course that aimed to teach students the elements of literary analysis through close examinations of rap lyrics organized into thematic units such as “family” and “love,” and “the hood.” Despite the powerful exchanges made possible by Hill’s culturally responsive teaching and curriculum, including the sharing of stories by students and teacher in a process of “wounded healing,” Hill also described how a curriculum based in hip-hop “inevitably creates spaces of both voice and silence, centering and marginalization, empowerment and domination” (10). Some of these silences were a result of curricular choices, including a unit on abortion that distressed one female student in particular. But the politics of authenticity and blackness that accompany hip-hop produced other silences, with the result that some white students felt that they were unable to participate in class discussion. This is an example of looking for the ways “interventions produced new cultural margins and, thus, new forms of marginalization” (64). And even within a classroom in which the teacher, an African American hiphop-generation male, shared many of the cultural and linguistic references of the students, there were conflicts of interpretation about what was a good rap song or not. There were also discussions that Hill found problematic, and “that were in direct conversation with, and sometimes buttressed, prominent themes within mainstream hip-hop culture” (10). There are many resonances between our studies and projects, both of which see critical rap and hip-hop pedagogies as difficult engagements with the pedagogical possibilities of hip-hop’s pleasures, promise, and limitations.

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That said, there are significant differences between these two texts and their classrooms. Hill (2009) is a “hip-hop insider” (by which I mean he is deeply invested in and knowledgeable about the culture), who researches a class on rap lyrics as literature that he taught (the white teacher he collaborated with preferred to take a background role). Slam School features a performance poetry course that drew on rap lyrics as part of a larger inquiry into the elements of spoken word culture, in the service of helping students learn about and practice performance poetry. It was led by a white teacher who self-admittedly knew almost nothing about hip-hop, in collaboration with a white university researcher and a black poet and arts educator. The distinct subject-positions of the teachers and researchers in these two studies lead to different, yet related, dynamics of teaching and learning. Opening Tim’s Classroom Door This section’s subtitle refers to one of Tim’s strategies for doing this kind of work, which is to close the door in the face of sometimes suspicious, uncomprehending, and critical colleagues and administrators. This book opens that door in order to reveal the important teaching and learning that can happen when teachers are willing to take risks. Tim, Rashidah, and I feel that the courses were successful on a number of levels. Most importantly, students in the classes consistently produced power­ ful, thoughtful poetry; many of these students wrote poetry (and most performed it) for the first time. In each class there were at least a few students who got deeply inspired to start and continue writing, including a student from 2002 who had been failing grade-12 English, who performed a great poem at the slam, and who, when he saw Rashidah at a local college the next year, announced he’d since been doing “nothin’ but writing.” Or Darren, who felt that writing poetry “gave me my emotions back” and took “so much weight off my shoulders.” The quality of the performances and poems at the slams was generally very high, and the school’s graduating class regularly voted the poetry slam as the “best school event.” Due to the popularity of the courses and to the quality of students’ work, spoken word poetry has now been institutionalized in this school as part of the middle school creative writing program and as a senior English option. Ever since Tim introduced the course to the PE class in 2002, students clamor for a spot in it, and there are regularly nonregistered students sitting in the back of the class. Attendance is consistently



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high, in contrast with some of Tim’s other classes, a point Tim made clear to me in 2002 by holding up a thick pack of absentee slips and tardy notes from the year prior (despite Tim being one of the best-liked teachers in the school). We had no such stack. A regular theme across the two years in the student inter­v iews was surprise about their classmates—about how smart they were, or how emotionally or politically aware, or what good writers or performers they were. In class, student writing tended to prompt engaged and interesting class discussions and the students were frequently careful and supportive listeners and constructive critics. The slam also reworked school hierarchies, with the “winning” poets in the slam rarely those who usually would win the school’s creative writing honors. Before this starts sounding like a victory narrative, I will note that I am more interested in the many moments when things did not “work” according to plan, when people were in conflict, or when students resisted an assignment. In one such moment, in the first week of the course in 2002, a white student in the Advanced Poetry class withdrew quite dramatically, penning a long letter in which he railed against the “dumbing down of the curriculum.” In 2002, when I was doing some of the curriculum planning, much of the rap music I brought in as the basis for lessons was met with disinterest and even disdain (an experience shared by Newman [2007] and Hill [2009]). This music included selections from Public Enemy’s album Fear of a Black Planet; most of the class had never heard of it, with one student describing it as “weak” and another as from the “Stone Age.” The selections certainly did not lead to the discussion of experimentation, through sampling, with language as sound that I had planned. Similarly, most of the students in 2004 reacted very negatively to Dead Prez’ “They Schools,” with its hook “They schools can’t teach us shit,” which I had envisioned as a controversial but productive prompt for a critical discussion of schooling.9 Their dislike of the song shut down conversation and might have been a reflection of their struggle to make it to their senior year of high school, unlike peers from some of their neighborhoods who had dropped out. In year two, a series of classes on some of the literary antecedents to hip-hop, such as gospel and blues and jazz poetry, taught by a local university professor, left many of the students disengaged. Their lack of interest was surprising since this African American professor is an award-winning teacher who had tried to bring the works to life by bringing in music and historical anecdotes. It made me worry about how the students would fare in the two-year colleges most were planning to attend the next

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year (where they would be expected to listen to and take notes in large lecture halls). I do not think our course helped them prepare for these learning situations. One of these “failures” was particularly generative for the writing of this book: in 2002, we had hoped to negotiate a set of content guidelines with the students for the course, an assignment both classes adamantly resisted, which prompted discussions that I explore in Chapters 2 and 4. Finally, testament to the dangers of students feeling like we were “co-opting” their culture, a number in 2002 rejected the close analysis we were doing of lyrics; one student felt this just “confused people,” while another offered as analogy that we were “explaining how a magic trick works.” Or, as another student described in response to Tim’s question of whether rap was poetry, “we don’t need you to accept it as poetry, we need us to accept it as poetry,” which Tim described as both an “ouch and a liberation.” These kinds of tensions arose in both years and all three classrooms, and they could fill the pages of many books, though here I chose to make more of less of them, subjecting them to close scrutiny, trying to make sense of what any of it might mean. Mapping Out the Book Slam School gives me the luxury of something teachers do not usually have, which is a prolonged space for pedagogical reflection on practice based on actual transcripts of our classes. This allows me to look at what we did do, what we did not, and what we might have done differently. The movement between planned, actual and potential, or ideal, classroom situations is the gift of time and data, but at the same time it mirrors the messy work of curriculum development with its intended curriculum and operational curricula and reflection on how and why these were the same and different. My reading method, which proposes multiple interpretations of singular events, argues against easy analyses of what actually happened, mining for insight the places of not knowing in teaching and learning. Chapter 2, called “‘Keepin’ It Real’: The Discourse of Authenticity and the Challenge for Hip-Hop Pedagogies,” serves as a theoretical framework for the entire book since notions of “keeping it real” are central to hip-hop culture and to the students who identify with it. In the first half of the chapter, I construct a typology of hip-hop realness that helps make sense of its many different yet overlapping dimensions, and then in the second half I examine the uses of authenticity in the spoken word classroom, including the



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ways they collided with creative writing discourses of “voice.” I argue that notions of the “real” in hip-hop circumscribed the range of identity options available to the students and can prevent the development of an analytical detachment necessary to explore both the possibilities and limitations of rap’s representations of urban youth and life. Instead, I advocate for a critical hiphop pedagogy in which rap music is studied as aesthetic and cultural production rather than mirror of the real—as a product of the imagination shaped by, inventing, overturning, and sometimes transcending certain conventions of representation. Chapter 3 begins building the book’s themes of the pedagogical value of conflict and of the complexities of interpretation, and it focuses on an almost paradigmatic example of tensions between black popular culture and schools: a student rap act performed, and cut, at the school’s talent night. (These are traditional showcases in schools for students’ interests in popular culture.) During an early classroom conversation in which Tim attempted to negotiate guidelines with the students, a student interjected the story of what had happened to him at the school talent night. The story gets told and retold, in different ways, as the student first brings in the lyrics and glossary he was asked to produce by organizers worried about controversial content, and then another student offers a competing glossary, arguing that the original intentionally mislead the administration. The student’s narrative is multivalent, contradictory, and slippery, and it is complicated by his interviews with the teacher and researcher, the glossary and counterglossary, the teacher’s conversations with the principal, and the school’s written “code of conduct.” All of these I read closely for insight into the complex conversations and interactions between students, teachers, and administrators across cultural, linguistic, and generational difference. Chapter 4 examines how discourses of race shaped conversations about hip-hop, student identities, students’ poetry, and students’ engagements more generally with the course, each other, and their teachers. I first explore questions about race, culture, and ownership in hip-hop, such as the debates about the marketing of blackness to white suburban youth through hip-hop. I then map out some of the ways race became a theme of the course, including hiphop as “black,” and students’ interests in and frustrations with these conversations. I explore the implications of the dynamics of race for white people doing hip-hop pedagogies with racialized minority students (in this instance where the white teachers are themselves the minorities in the school population) and

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draw on some of the literature on teaching African American students as well as interviews with students about their teacher. The second half of the chapter is a close reading of one of the stories Tim told the class about his own racial formation for what it reveals about the complex work of sharing the self across the fault lines of race in North America. Chapter 5 explores the language of hip-hop culture and the controversies that rage both inside and outside of the hip-hop community over the widespread use of expletives and provocative terms such as the “N-word,” “bitches,” and “ho’s.” This chapter tackles these controversies head-on by exploring their significance for critical hip-hop pedagogies. I first focus on the N-word, which is central to rap music yet one that white teachers, among others, cannot, should not, or will not utter, bringing the already tense relations between black popular culture and schools into crisis. This chapter also includes discussion of students’ in-class debates about the words “bitch” and “ho,” including who is allowed to use them and under what circumstances. Chapter 6 carves out more specifically the terrain of critical rap pedagogies in school and out, drawing on my current research with hip-hop and spoken word activists and educators in Montreal who are developing programming, often designed to serve youth “at risk,” in urban community centers. I set these within the context of the explosion of community-based hip-hop education across North America, and I argue that building links between schools and community centers is integral to critical hip-hop education now and in the future. I also examine the implications of hip-hop’s growing internationalization for making critical hip-hop pedagogies global, multicultural, and multilingual.

2 “ K e e pi n ’ I t R e a l ” The Discourse of Authe n t i c i t y and the Challenge for Hip-H o p P e d a g o g i e s

Popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the area where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic. It is a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time. Hall, What Is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture? (477) I’m so full, I’m so good I’m so straight, you so fake I’m so real I’m so hood Lil’ Wayne in DJ Khaled, “I’m So Hood”

T h e t h e a t e r o f p o p u l a r f a n t a s y is staged large in hip-hop culture, with its iconography of extremes; paradoxically, the culture is often at its most hyperbolic when married with the persistent and pervasive commitment to “keepin’ it real.” A complex discourse of authenticity permeates hiphop, expressed in terms of the importance of “realness” and of “representing.” This preoccupation with the question of what it means for a culture, art work,

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art form, or artist to be authentic is not hip-hop’s alone: Armstrong (2004) makes the case for the concept’s longevity and reach, calling it “the central issue in folklore studies,” a key concern for musicology, and crucial at “every point in the history of popular music” (336). McLeod’s (1999) inquiry into the discourses of authenticity in hip-hop draws comparisons with similar preoccupations in other music subcultures including rave, country, and rock. Nevertheless, the emphasis on authenticity in hip-hop culture verges on obsession, and it is used to convey so many values and commitments—usually imbricated, at points contradictory—that it deserves its own examination. Given the centrality of debates around authenticity to hip-hop culture writ large, it does not surprise that the concept of the real played an important part in our classroom discussions. In one of these moments in year two (2004) of the project, Rashidah broached the subject directly: When you look at the poetry that we see so much now, which is hip-hop, people tend to think that hip-hop has to be literal, that there is one side. People say if you’re going to talk about it, be about it, you have to do these things, you have to validate yourself by being hard, being a gangster, instead of looking at someone like a poet, that just, you know, “I’m just talking about something that I saw, or something that happens in the world, and I may be using ‘I’ but I didn’t really do this stuff.”

When Tim asked the group, “How important is it for the person who is doing the rap that they own it. That it’s based on an experience that they’ve had first hand?” about half the class put up their hands to talk. All of the respondents agreed that in order to write a rap, in the words of one student, “You have to have experienced it.” One student added that in poetry one “is able to take on another’s voice,” while rap “needs to be something you are a part of.” Rap’s fidelity to real life was central to the students’ sense of its importance and value. When Tim asked the students how to validate rap in light of mainstream society’s prejudices toward it, one girl responded, “All this really happens.” Another added that people needed to hear “the message behind the lyrics” that is “reality.” To unpack the students’ sense that “all this really happens” is to get at many of hip-hop culture’s complexities and contradictions and, key to this book’s project, some of the challenges and possibilities of hip-hop pedagogies. This chapter jumps into the debates around authenticity in hip-hop, developing a typology of hip-hop realness to help make sense of the many



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things referenced, sometimes simultaneously, when members of the hip-hop culture invoke “keepin’ it real.” This analysis frames the study of the students’ discourses of hip-hop authenticity, but also the book as a whole, given the centrality of notions and debates around authenticity to hip-hop culture and identities more generally. My typology of authenticity in hip-hop includes the following, often interrelated and overlapping, six elements: 1. blackness 2. the “streets” 3. “hard” heterosexual masculinity 4. the importance of representing the place and culture you are from 5. the importance of being true to yourself 6. politically conscious, “underground” hip-hop.1 To start, I confess that I am wary of authenticity as a concept, relying as it often does on essentialist notions of identity and culture. I write from a vantage point informed by poststructural theories of language and representation within which identities are performative, dependent on context and purpose. One enacts identity through and in relation to available symbolic systems, some inherited and some adopted, and most significantly language. An emphasis on a “true” or “real” self or culture therefore seems to reify what are in fact constant and dynamic works in process, as well as deny the realities of hybrid or blended identities and cultures. That said, Guignon (2004) pokes a hole through any easy dismissals of authenticity by asking the following question: If there were a drug that “would provide you with nothing but pleasurable feelings for the rest of your life, but would make you a mindless slave to society’s conventions” (148), would you take it? He posits that even hesitating to say yes indicates some kind of commitment to authenticity, a sense that one has a distinct self to be honored. A trip through most bookstores makes clear that authenticity, conceived in terms of the “true self” or “real me,” has a great deal of contemporary purchase outside of music subcultures, particularly in the “self-help” industry. Figures like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Phil advise their followers that self-­f ulfillment, or actualization, requires turning inward in order to discover the “constellation of feelings, needs, desires, capacities, aptitudes, dispositions, and creative abilities that make a person unique” (Guignon 2004, 6). Once found, this uniqueness needs to be expressed and to shape our relationships, choices,

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and general way of being in the world. The concept also has a long reach, having guided philosophy and human thought throughout history. Guignon describes it as a recurring answer to the key question of how we can “achieve the most fulfilling and satisfying life possible” (10). However, Guignon (2004) and Charles Taylor (1991) have both argued that current incarnations of the answer emphasize the self to the detriment of others, part of the “culture of narcissism” (Lasch 1979) that arguably shapes a good deal of contemporary North American society. Contemporary versions of the journey to self can come at the detriment of a sense of commitment to others or of belonging to a larger collective. This is unlike previous incarnations of the search that emphasized the relationships between the individual and wider contexts.2 While some of the rhetoric around individual rappers is in thrall to the cult of the individual, in its origins hip-hop celebrates what Perry (2004) describes as the “self and the we . . . [hip-hop’s] consciousness is that of the ego and the collective” (89). In this way, rap texts work in the traditions of some African American folklore, such as the stories of Dolemite and Stagolee, where individual exploits are oft repeated and thus made collective, vessels of “the community’s sentiments” (89). That rap artists all too often forget the individual’s ties to the collective is a charge made by founding hip-hop figure Afrika Bambaataa (2007), who claims “a lot of brothers and sisters lost knowledge of self. They’re losing respect of the ‘us syndrome’ and getting into the ‘I syndrome.’ You can’t build a nation with an ‘I’ you got to build a nation with a ‘us’” (54). The examination that follows of the multifaceted uses of the concept of authenticity in hip-hop culture gives evidence that the envisioned self in hip-hop can be profoundly relational. The social is integral to the hip-hop “real” in its commitment to documenting the experiences of a class, people, and specific communities. Hip-hop journalist “Angela N.” complained in a newsgroup posting that “‘you haven’t lived until you’ve edited a 2-hour interview and heard ‘keepin it real’ after every other sentence, tried to cut most of them out of the finished product, then have your boss ask could you do ‘something’ about all of these ‘keeping it real’s?’” (McLeod 1999, 139). The phrase is ubiquitous, a hip-hop speech habit in the mode of “you know what I’m sayin’.” But the charge to “keep it real” has so many different, sometimes conflicting, meanings that one might wonder if it continues to mean anything it all. I argue instead that this polysemy and malleability is at the heart of its power and usefulness. The concept contains an entire hip-hop belief system, even an ide-



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ology, used in ways generative and restricting, creative and policing. Speakers use the concept to do different kinds of identity, aesthetic, cultural, and political work, drawing on their context of utterance, audience expectations, and knowledge in order to make “realness” signify. This does not mean, however, that the signification is always clear. Hip-Hop Authenticity The first three elements of the typology—blackness, the “streets,” and “hard” heterosexual masculinity—come together in the image of the MC or rapper that dominates most popular representations and perceptions of hip-hop both within and outside the community. (It is a given that the model rapper is, as with most popular culture, also young.) A couple of hours watching Black Entertainment Television makes clear that this is the image cultivated by the largest number of artists recording and performing today, and that it forms an authentic core in hip-hop. I stress that this discussion of the commercially dominant image of the black male MC means focusing on U.S. rap rather than hip-hop culture’s global reach and evolving forms not dominated by African American men (see Chang 2007). Blackness

Hip-hop histories regularly elide the participation of women and groups other than African Americans. Although this elision has been challenged by some very important revisionist scholarship, rap in the United States continues to be marked as mostly “black” by its artists, producers, consumers, and the general public, and the majority of rappers, both mainstream and underground, successful and trying to “make it,” are young black men.3 Perry (2004) critiques scholarship that emphasizes hip-hop as a transnational music form such as Gilroy’s (1993) discussions of it as a “Black Atlantic” formation. She argues instead that hip-hop’s cultural identity is first and foremost “black American music” (13). This identity is aesthetic, including African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and discursive strategies, such as call and response, and black American storytelling and musical traditions. (Perry does, however, recognize the significant impact of “the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular, in the early days of hip-hop formation and in the creation of DJ technique” [13]). Hip-hop is also black in its “political location,” which is twofold. It is understood as a black political project from outside the community, so that

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“what really makes hip-hop music Black American is America’s love-hate relationship with it” (27), including fascination and vilification; inside the black community, this project takes the form of a political consciousness that targets “white supremacy, classism, and racial exploitation” (28). While Perry’s text downplays the importance of hip-hop’s global spread to the reworking and reinvention of the culture, as well as its historical ties to the black diasporic mix of Caribbean and Latino cultures,4 it makes a strong case for the need to recognize that hip-hop remains closely tied to African American culture. This argument is necessary to understanding the politics of authenticity in hip-hop and politically important in light of the history of appropriation of black cultural forms into the mainstream, as in the case of rock music. The centrality of blackness to hip-hop authenticity is evident in the tricky dance of identity of white rappers in search of acceptance and credibility. MC Lou Piensa, a white rapper of French origins based in Montreal, described (in conversation) how the 1990s were a tricky period for emerging white rappers since much of hip-hop was shaped by black militancy and a growing Afrocentric consciousness with the rise of crews such as X-Clan and Brand Nubian. Its attendant separatist politics often envisioned whites as incapable of solidarity. Portrayals of white people on rap albums sometimes ridiculed them as square, corny, out of the loop, or as racist. This meant, on the one hand, that white people committed to hip-hop had to get, in Piensa’s words, “conscious, fast” about race history, politics, and oppression. On the other, it prompted some peculiar strategies of belonging, including trying to perform a “partial blackness” by styling hair in ways that made it seem less “white” (possibly creating a mixed-race look). Piensa gives as an example the rappers (three white, one Puerto Rican) who formed the Young Black Teen­agers crew—a playful name they claimed was a tribute to black culture (though some found it silly or offensive) but which speaks to an explicit strategy of impersonation at the same time undermining its potential for success. In their first music video, “Nobody Knows Kelli,” one crew member styles his hair into a modified version of the “flat top” while another sports dreadlocks (a style that in North America will always be foremost “black” given the importance of hair texture to creation of the lock). In a later hit, “Tap the Bottle (Twist the Cap),” some now have shaved heads while others have longer dreads. Rapper Everlast (later, of House of Pain fame) also uses the tactic of showing off ties to African Americans in his song “I Got the Knack” and the lines “I’m down with the syndicate, and they’re down with me” (here referencing gang-



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sta rapper Ice-T’s all black crew, who also appear in the video). White rappers regularly work hard to differentiate themselves from the “wrong kind of white people” by denouncing racism, as in white MC Serch from the multiracial crew 3rd Bass who raps the lines, “black cats are bad luck, bad guys wear black, must have been a white guy who started all that” in the 1989 track “The Gas Face.”5 The need for such strategies and negotiations, however, does not mitigate the greater access and opportunity generally available to white artists of all kinds, nicely signaled by the title of Greg Tate’s (2004) article on Eminem, “White Freedom.” The cracks and fissures in the performance of hip-hop authenticity are painfully clear in the figure of Vanilla Ice, a flash-in-the-pan white MC whose initial success stemmed from the purchase power of white fans new to rap music and whose name has become synonymous with the inauthentic “poser” or “fake.” Initially a breakdancer, Vanilla Ice released one big hit track, “Ice Ice Baby,” and styled himself very much along the lines of MC Hammer. In an infamous interview on the Arsenio Hall Show, Hall comments that some black rappers are not happy that white fans only seem willing to buy rap recorded by a white artist, to which Vanilla Ice responds, in a telling digression, “You’ve seen Flava Flav, me and him are homies.” Hall’s question in response, “Is that why you brought him out, just to show that you’ve got a black supporter?” exposed an embarrassing tactic for claiming hip-hop community membership and belonging, the black “friend.”6 Vanilla Ice’s failure contrasts in powerful ways with the accomplished authenticity performance of Eminem, a white rapper and one of the best-selling rap artists. Much of Eminem’s success lies in his having been embraced, endorsed, and produced by Dr. Dre, hip-hop royalty (and past member of N.W.A.). Indeed, Eminem is a careful creation of Dre’s image-making machine, designed for marketability to white audiences; this saleability first required his acceptance by black hip-hop artists and fans (Armstrong 2004). As an authenticity strategy, Eminem regularly proclaims that he is not racist and states that he does not and would never use the “N-word” (while he will say pretty much anything else). This meant that Ray Benzino, then of The Source magazine, could hope to seriously undermine Eminem’s credibility by airing an early tape of Eminem freestyling in which he describes his former girlfriend in very racist (and misogynist) terms. (Eminem quickly moved into damage control, explaining that his words were those of an angry, stupid teen who had just broken up with his [black] girlfriend.) Eminem was able

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to survive the attack because, arguably, he has perfected the most common technique of hip-hop realness for white U.S. rappers, which is to mobilize the discourses of “the street” and social marginality. For instance, he plays himself in the biopic film 8Mile (2002), which portrays his life as a teen living in a trailer park, brought up by a single, uneducated mother on welfare, and his fight for credibility as a white MC in Detroit’s “underground” freestyle battle scene. Another of Eminem’s strategies has been to tap into the powerful current of misogyny that runs through hip-hop (and through U.S. culture more generally). Eminem tries, Armstrong (2004) argues, to outdo other rappers with a “heightened misogyny . . . even more vicious than his predecessors” (336), so that on The Marshall Mathers (2000) LP, nine of the eleven songs depict killing women through choking, stabbing, and head splitting. (The acceptance of misogynist lyrics in hip-hop helps explains why Benzino attacked Eminem as racist rather than sexist.) Armstrong (2004) conducted a statistical summary of the rates of “violent misogyny” found in early gangsta rap and found out that while earlier gangsta lyrics scored 22 percent for “violent misogyny,” Eminem’s reached 63 percent (345).7 The “Streets”

As central to hip-hop authenticity as blackness is the concept-metaphor of the “streets” (Keyes 2002; Spady, Lee, and Alim 1999), hip-hop’s “social-locational” dimension (McLeod 1999). With its geographic and mythical origins—by which I mean where it actually began and the way that place becomes a symbol of certain beliefs and values—in the streets of the South Bronx (Toop 1991), hip-hop has been a conduit for the voices of the dispossessed. Implied in popular phrases like “keepin’ it real” and “representin’” is that the space of the real, of the represented and in need of representing, is the “street,” which as part of hip-hop’s “Ghetto-centricity” (Kelley 1994) stands as a metaphor for the black underclass. Take, for instance, the words of rapper JT the Bigga describing rap music: “It’s ghetto music. People talkin’ about they issues and crime. . . . The rap come from the voice of the ghetto. . . . Hip-hop and the streets damn near one, you might as well say that . . . straight from the streets” (qtd. in Alim 2004a). Perry (2004) posits that hip-hop is the first popular cultural space in which one’s origins in the “projects” get celebrated rather than rejected “as an embarrassment,” a move that signals street-smart toughness, resilience, and a class-based identification with poor black people (89). Busta Rhymes’s track (1998) “In the Ghetto,” which samples Rick James’s “Ghetto Life,” paints a por-



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trait of this space, both real and symbolic, in which one needs to become a hustler in order to survive and support a family. While the rapper points to the irony of the fact that “we romance the street” given the dangers there of attacks by police and gangs and the limited opportunities it offers, the ghetto is intrinsic to the narrator’s identity: “You can take me out the ghetto, but you can’t take it from me, gotta love it.” “Gotta love it” becomes the dominant message in this ode to the streets. The romance of origins also takes part in the “rags-toriches” narratives so central to the American dream, particularly when voiced by rappers who have “made it.” The street operates at many different levels in hip-hop culture, including language. Alim (2006) explores the linguistic workings of hip-hop authenticity by documenting the style-shifting strategies used by rappers to construct a “street-conscious identity,” in which the streets imply “both members of the black street culture and the sets of values, morals, and cultural aesthetics that govern life in the streets” (112). Central to Alim’s findings, derived from interviews with rappers Eve and Juvenile and his study of their lyrics, is that the more attention the rappers paid to their language (that is, in their written lyrics rather than in their spontaneous interview responses) the more they used grammatical features of AAVE (or what Alim calls Black Language). This is in direct contrast to Labov’s groundbreaking studies in the 1960s and 1970s on AAVE speakers, which found that people’s speech became more standard the more conscious they were of its use. Alim posits that this difference is due to hip-hop’s target audience (as opposed to buying audience) of members of the “Black American Street Culture” (122), who respond more positively to the language of vernacular street culture. The “cinematic ‘hood’ genre,” in hip-hop influenced films as Boyz in the Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993), and Clockers (1995), facilitates the mythologizing of the ghetto (Forman 2002). Like rap lyrics, its stories are of the dangers of gangs, drugs, and the city more generally for poor, mostly black youth and help to bring the late twentieth-century urban U.S. “ghetto” into the popular imaginary as both a space of social crisis and concern as well as fantasy. Ironically and sadly, these urban neighborhoods so central to the development and thematics of hip-hop culture are rapidly gentrifying and thus becoming inaccessible to the poor and working-class people of color who live in them. As with other artists, hip-hop cultural producers have helped make these areas “cool” as the mythology of the “streets” becomes a real estate commodity.

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“Hard” Heterosexual Masculinity

Closely linked to the “streets,” this dimension of authenticity stems in part from gangsta rap’s reworking of rap into street social realism. Ice Cube, of the seminal gangsta crew N.W.A., publically coined the name “gangsta rap” in an interview in the Los Angeles Times about the title of their single “Gangsta Gangsta” (Quinn 2005, 10). While gangsta rapper Ice-T had been recording since the early 1980s, N.W.A. brought the genre to prominence with their album Straight Outta Compton (1989). Gangsta rap is a subcategory of “reality rap” describing “gang life, or more generally, life in the ghetto from the perspective of a criminal (or liminal, transgressive) figure” (Krims 2000, 70). Classic gangsta rap developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the West Coast of the United States and documents gang-related experiences in different West Coast locations and originally in South Central Los Angeles. Ice Cube (2004) makes the case clearly for rap as realism, countering claims that songs such as “F—tha Police” instigate violence and social unrest: We were just writing about what we knew. To me, “F—tha Police” was a line that needed to be said—something that everybody always said privately, but no one ever put into a song. I never thought of us as shock rappers. I thought of us as reality rappers. . . . People outside the ghetto thought we were making things up just for the sake of controversy, but we were just trying to reflect the neighborhoods we came from.8

N.W.A.’s explicit stories of gang life and warfare in South Central burned a virtual template of what realness looks like into hip-hop consciousness. This template included an elaborated set of criterion for “hardness” by which an MC’s credibility continues to be measured by many, including a toughness developed “mostly because of poverty and surviving (or not) public schools. Something to be said of poor, urban American youth and essentially no one else. Marked by resourcefulness, pragmaticism, and coldness.”9 Krims (2000) explores the “musico-poetic” features or musical strategies that produce the aural experience of “hardness,” closely associated with the “hip-hop sublime” and produced through “dense combinations of musical layers” in a “sharply dissonant combination, even by the standards of jazz, or soul, harmony” (73). A crucial element of the dissonance, both of pitch and timbre combinations, is its defiance of “conventionally representable relationships” and “aural representability for Western musical listeners” (73). This layering serves to “defeat conceptual boundaries and unifying descrip-



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tions”  (74), which Krims suggests might be why “rap soundscapes sound menacing and aggressive, [even] apart from the lyrical content” (74). In the late 1980s, rap crew Public Enemy and its production team, the Bomb Squad, produced some of the most complex examples of this dense and menacing multilayered sound; Ice Cube later got the Bomb Squad to produce his first solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990) (71). While the reality rap genre was already “ghettocentric” and dedicated to the “epistemological/ontological project to map the realities of (usually black) inner-city life” (Krims 2000, 70), in gangsta rap real life became equated not only with the “streets” but also with a hyperaggressive and hypermacho, militant, antiauthoritative, even nihilistic stance toward social and economic marginalization. Crime, from the perspective of the criminal, is a pragmatic choice in a society offering few other viable ones. Some gangsta rap, such as the lyrics of Ice Cube, works in the vein of reality rap as explicit social protest found in early rap tracks like “The Message” (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and embodied in the works of crews such as New York’s Public Enemy.10 However, gangsta also marked a kind of break, rewriting the codes about what one could say and show. A comparison between the videos for “The Message” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five 1982) and “Straight Outta Compton” (N.W.A. 1989) reveals the shift. While “The Message” exploded onto the airways and television screens when released, it now reads as a relatively gentle critique of the trials of urban life. The streets of New York might be filled with traffic and populated by the occasional “crazy lady, livin’ in a bag,” but they are still relatively friendly, as Grandmaster Flash and members of the Furious Five rap together on a front stoop. An opening shot of two black men ambling down the block, one carrying a radio, has the word “Rage” on it, but the word is in bubble rainbow-colored letters. In the final scene, the Furious Five are hanging out on the street corner when the police drive up, pull them into the car, and take off. Despite the arrest, the tone remains light. Seven years later, N.W.A. also takes on police brutality and racial profiling in “Straight Outta Compton,” but is now fighting back. After Dr. Dre announces, “You are about to witness the strength of street knowledge,” members of N.W.A. are filmed, to a driving back beat, at war with the police, patrolling the streets together in a pack, carrying guns, violently struggling when arrested. And the streets are literally on fire. Critics have variously analyzed gangsta rap in its inception as a product and symptom of, and/or response to or “witnessing of ” (Perry 2004), the

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desperate social conditions of postindustrial Los Angeles for the black under­ class (Quinn 2005; Kelley 1994). Gangsta rap’s context is multivalent. It includes the rise of the military-prison industrial complex whose juvenile justice system shifted its central priority from rehabilitation to punishment (Watkins 2005) along with increasingly harsh sentencing practices. Rising unemployment among black youth, decreased funding for social programs such as recreation, job creation, and subsidized housing (Kelley 1994), and the advent of the crack cocaine economy (within which, tellingly, crack is sometimes called “hard”) also shape the conditions of the urban poor. Kelley (1994) offers a trenchant analysis of the importance of reading gangsta rap as a “window into, and critique of, the criminalization of black youth,” with ­lyrics that regularly attack “law enforcement agencies, their denial of unfettered access to public space, and the media’s complicity in equating black youth with criminals” (185). Gangsta rappers describe themselves as the products of the “living nightmare” (185) that is life in impoverished urban neighborhoods. In its first incarnations, gangsta rap confronted an unknowing or uncaring American public with the specter of a black threat that it had itself produced through the neglect and exploitation of the urban poor. Gangsta rappers usually describe their personas, often involved in illegal activity, as lacking agency in the face of a system that is flawed, including “how violence and gangs were there before they were born; how, in order not be victimized, one has to join the gangs for protection (thus, participation is not really optional); and how access to desired material things is unequally distributed, and one has to protect one’s own, with violence if necessary, etc.” (Haugen 2003, 431). Rapper Immortal Technique (2006) describes early gangsta rappers as social witnesses, analysts, and critics, the organic intellectuals of his youth, saying how their rap “was another form of Revolutionary music—it reached the unreachable, regardless of age, race, creed or gender. It taught the un-teachable. It made me (who at the time was hustlin’, robbin’ and stealing) truly listen because I felt like these people who were in the streets, who I could identify with, were talking about a world I could see but never had explained to me” (2). Unfortunately, lyrics that seem to perpetuate stereotypes of black criminality and are pervasively misogynist and violent complicate this “witness” reading of gangsta (Kelley 1994). Accounts of gangsta rap often describe the genre’s devolution over the decades: Kelley contends that while early gangsta rap “did not set out to glamorize crime,” by 1993 “nihilism for nihilism’s sake” predominated (224). It can be difficult to demarcate lyrics about the



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experience of everyday violence within cultures of poverty and criminality for purposes of social protest from those in which violence and crime are made sensational and glamorous; that said, later “gangsta rap” is often formulaic and seemingly void of the analysis of social context that shaped earlier incarnations. Many blame the corporatization of hip-hop in the production and promotion of a-political versions of gangsta rap, including Immortal Technique (2006) who argues, “if you look at Gangsta Rap now and back then, the Revolutionary element is for the most part completely sanitized by the corporate structure” (2). As music industry executives recognized the tremendous marketability of the ghetto fantasy, the “Gangsta Entertainment Complex” (Aaron 1999) was born and the gangsta became the predominant persona among mainstream rappers. In the words of Dr. Dre (1995), megaproducer and former member of N.W.A., “gangsta rap is entertainment” (reflected in the naming of his music production company Aftermath Entertainment). Just as gangsta sells, and sells big, so does the “real” more generally: the commitment to authenticity came hand in hand with its corporatization, emerging “with the most clarity following rap’s transitional phase from an underground or alternative musical form to a multi-platinum-selling facet of the popular music industry” (Forman 2002, xviii). Watkins (2005), in a critique of the commodification of hip-hop, calls this the great “Faustian bargain” made by the hip-hop entrepreneurial elite who sell a hyped, glamorized version of very real urban misery and crisis, even plunging themselves in a world of “urban villainy,” in return for super pop stardom. In what Watkins describes as “one of the cruellest ironies,” hip-hop’s “very survival as a pop culture juggernaut rested almost entirely on its ability to sell black death” (2). Here we see the myopic construct of the hip-hop authentic collide with the tremendous marketability of the ghetto fantasy, so that record labels can also demand that rap artists keep it real within particular, often stereotypical and degrading, iconographies and vocabularies. In a continuation of the long history of racist stereotyping in North America, the portrait of “rappers as violent black criminals” has been particularly appealing to the white audiences who remain a significant part of the buying audience for rap music (Armstrong 2004, 343). The working of stereotypes in gangsta rap is in itself multivalent and contradictory. On the one hand, the narratives spun by gangsta MCs operate within African American vernacular literary traditions, including the representational history of the “badman” (Kelley 1994), signifying, and toasting (Quinn 2005).

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While many archetypal tales were traditionally narrated in the third-person, the gangsta rapper adopted the persona as his own, so that “rather than narrating badman exploits, gangsta rappers actually assumed his role; rather than quoting the pimp’s golden-tongued rhyme they took it as their own” (Quinn 2005, 25). In one reading of gangsta stereotypes, Perry (2004) argues for a theory of “thug mimicry” that offers a “social critique and a disruption of white supremacist authority” by embodying stereotypes of black Americans and then explaining the actions of the outlaw as products of “hunger and lousy schools and tragic formative experience” rather than cultural defectiveness (109). Clear, though, is that while some listeners might read the performance of stereotypes as politically productive, many others conflate the performers with their actors and interpret gangsta as a “graphic, self-evident reflection of the deviant behaviour of black urban youth” (Quinn 2005, 29–30) or as glorifications of outlaw life. The dilemma of audience reception dogs social parody: one needs to know the conventions of the genres that are being exaggerated, mimicked, and ridiculed (Low and Smith 2007). A notion of parody can also sit uneasily with the mimetic theory of representation dominating the discourses of authenticity in hip-hop. This makes possible MC Eazy E’s attack that Dr. Dre (his former N.W.A. crew member) is just a “studio gangsta,” or Eminem’s charge that his adversary, Raymond “Benzino” Scott, then coowner and chief brand executive of The Source hip-hop magazine, is a “fake gangsta” (Watkins 2005, 85). This represents a problematic shift away from shedding the light on the lives of the marginalized, putting the experiences of the outlaw into language and imagery, to glorifying the criminal as the “real” heart of hip-hop. Evidence that not all have read gangsta rap as politically subversive “mimicry,” rap crew Black Sheep themselves parodied the hardness of the gangsta rapper in their first album, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (1991). It opens with an interlude entitled “U Mean I’m Not” in which MC Dres describes a hyperbolic crime, replete with machine guns blazing, in which he kills his sister, his parents, and the postal carrier. At the end, he wakes and says, puzzled, “I dreamed I was . . . hard.” The concept of “thug mimicry” can also disable the possibility of critical engagement and discernment if used as a blanket approval of all rap music, no matter how violent or misogynistic. Nor does it explain the powerful correlation between rapping about being involved in crime and getting charged with real crimes, given how many rap artists serve time or get charged for a range of offenses (often violent, as in assault, or related to drug possession).



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The “thug” MC gets taken to an extreme ten years later in the controversial figure of rapper 50 Cent, whose claim to fame is having survived ten bullets, still riddling his body, and whose difficult history includes dealing crack from the age of twelve. He is hypermacho, a paragon of hardness, with a body like a boxer’s, and he regularly performs this toughness by taking on other MCs in prolonged beefs. One of the most mediatized of these has been with Ja Rule, an MC who also hails from Queens, New York, in which each contests the other’s claims to represent the same streets. While some dispute the origins of their conflict, it has progressed through several albums as well as physical confrontations between the rappers and members of their crews, reaching such a height that Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, offered to mediate. At stake, along with territory wars and, clearly, marketing hype by the labels, is Ja Rule’s credibility as a rapper given the “pop” romantic duets he has recorded with Jennifer Lopez (including one titled, tellingly, “I’m Real”) and R&B singer Ashanti. Here, romance and pop are “soft,” and so therefore is the rapper.11 Hip-hop hardness relies on particularly narrow narratives of heterosexual masculinity. This is what McLeod (1999) terms the “gender sexual” dimension of hip-hop authenticity. A recent documentary by Byron Hurt (2006) explores the tight “box” of hip-hop masculinity that requires seeming strong and tough, dominating other people, and having many women.12 One speaker describes how rappers all have an inner sense of the thug they need to project in the studio, saying that “every black man that goes in the studio has always got two people in his head: him, in terms of who he really is, and the thug that he feels he has to project.” Clay (2003) claims that rap’s hypermasculinity is embodied in the figures of the “nigga” and the “playa.” She points out that the “nigga” adopts anger and rage in order to “withstand the toughest of times” (154), while the “playa” is “all about getting what he can, be it sex, money, or women” (154). The equation between hardness and aggressive, womendominating masculinity has posed particular difficulties for women rappers (as explored by Rose 1994; Pough et al. 2007) and hip-hop-identified women more generally who work to reconcile their feelings of love and hate for a culture in which they are frequently debased. Representing Place and Culture: Where You Are From

An extension of representing the street is that the particulars of location and place, rather than just their metaphoric associations with poverty, firmly ground hip-hop identities. As we saw played out in the feud between 50 Cent

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and Ja Rule, “reppin’” place matters; tensions are micropolitical, since the MCs hail from different sections of Queens. Soon after hip-hop’s birth in the Bronx, it spread to the West Coast and across the country, and every major, and arguably, minor, urban center in the United States now has some kind of hip-hop scene. Different regions of the United States tend to have their own sounds, styles, and histories, which can also become sources of rivalry, so that the deadly beef between Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. is read mostly as a conflict between West Coast and East Coast hip-hop (and, in turn, New York-based production houses Bad Boy Records and Los Angeles’s Death Row). Southern rap, with its distinctive upbeat dance sound, emerged in the late 1990s out of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami. Some Southern MCs, like Nappy Roots and Bubba Sparxx, explicitly represent rural country life by fusing country-andwestern rhythms and samples with rap music. There are also very specific strategies that make clear one’s ties to place, such as when rappers insert in their lyrics the names of their neighborhood, or their area code, or whether they are from the north, south, east or west side of their city. Videos are often set in a specific geographic location, as we saw with “Straight Outta Compton” and “The Message,” referenced by prominent neighborhood features and sites. The emphasis on place accompanies hip-hop on its journeys across the globe. Scholarship on the international spread of hip-hop is recent but burgeoning (Mitchell 2001, 2003; Pennycook 2004, 2007; Androutspoulos and Sholz 2002; Sarkar and Winer 2006; Low, Sarkar, and Winer 2009). Mitchell (2001) heralded the growing academic interest in hip-hop outside the United States and made clear that the form itself undergoes important transformation as artists reinterpret it in different contexts and languages. This is not to minimize the importance of African Americans to hip-hop’s past, present, and future. However, I think that it is possible, even necessary, following Krims (2000), to theorize rap music as both “embedded culture”—particularly located within African American culture—and as “mobile culture (which, then, re-embeds in new locations)” (6), which also means thinking of hip-hop as both “a vernacular culture and a mass culture” (6). A U.S.-centric perspective can also limit understandings of U.S. rap, such as the powerful influence of ­Jamaican dance-hall music and Jamaican-ness more generally on rap produced in the United States (for example, KRS-One’s [1993] Return of the Boom Bap, Busta Rhymes, and Das EFX) and the fact that the conspicuous worship of money remains mostly a characteristic of U.S. rap (Krims 2000, 152–55). Examinations of hip-hop outside the United States also shed light



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on the complex workings of authenticity. Local incarnations of hip-hop across the globe are in constant conversation and negotiation with the behemoth of the U.S. rap industry, sometimes building relations to and sometimes against, and all the while reworking hip-hop for their own localized purposes. In some cases, strategies of representing place simply get imported and imitated. For instance, Montreal rappers regularly describe the city according to its cardinal points (including inventing an uptown/downtown distinction that does not reflect popular topographies of the city) and call out area codes, as in Sans Pression’s (1999) 514–50 Dans Mon Reseau (In my network). Writing in relation to his research on the “transcultural flows” of “global englishes” through hip-hop culture, Pennycook (2007) points to tensions around the “global spread of authenticity.” These include “those who insist that to be authentic one needs to stick to one’s ‘own’ traditions, to be overtly local; [and] those who suggest that to be authentically local is a question of using a true local variety of a language, be that a local English, a creole, or any language of the streets” (103). An interesting case study of the politics of authenticity outside the United States is hip-hop in Holland. While municipal and regional ties are central to U.S. hip-hop identities, nation there plays a significant role in the authenticity debates. Krims (2000) describes the consumption of rap music in Holland in the late 1990s, loosely divided between “predominantly white-performed, Dutch-language Nederhop, and, on the other hand, predominantly black-performed, English-language American hip-hop” (164). To many in the Dutch hip-hop community, Nederhop is more like “skater music” and not authentic, due to its distance from the sound and look of U.S. rap music; at the same time, some say it mimics American rap by simply borrowing “hardcore” themes from the United States without revising them for their new context. Working outside this dichotomy was the group the Spookrijders, whose CD De Echte Shite (The real shit) signals that they are also seriously working the discourses of authenticity. Krims (2000) analyzes how they draw on an African American “musico-poetics” (by, for instance, rejecting Nederhop’s use of live guitar in favor of more traditional rap sampling) so that it sounds more like U.S. rap. They also rap in Dutch about specifically Dutch social conditions and themes (rejecting as irrelevant to their context U.S. “gangsta” stories and ideologies). At the same time, members of the Spookrijders also strongly identified the influence of U.S. hip-hop on their work, with one proclaiming he wanted their rap sound like “the old school” (cited in Krims 2000, 169).

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As seen in Holland, however ambivalently, tactics of localization can include distinguishing oneself from the U.S. hip-hop scene. In Toronto, known as “the T-dot” in hip-hop, the best example of this continues to be rapper Kardinall Offishall’s 2001 hit “Bakardi Slang” in which, through a series of lyrics such as, “We don’t say, ‘you know what I’m saying,’ T-dot says, ‘Ya dun know,’” Kardi maps out the linguistically driven identity of the local hip-hop community. He draws on the English Creoles spoken by the various Caribbean migrant populations in the city, rather than solely on hip-hop-nation language based in AAVE. The T-dot identity is not limited by the bounds of nation or even of national diaspora but instead is its own hybrid West Indian/ Canadian formation, which speaks of these other places and yet is “one of a kind.” While this one of a kind is not located within a specifically Canadian context, it is climactically northern, as Kardi notes that he is “comin’ from the cold-yo.” Strategies of place for Canadian rap artists regularly include references to and signifiers of northern-ness, as in Choclair’s album Ice Cold (1999) whose cover is graced with pictures of Choclair seated on a throne of ice, or Tara Chase’s (a Toronto-based MC) track “Northside.” Montreal-based MC Iamblackgirl (Nantali Indongo) described in conversation how the problematic of realness originally played itself out in Quebec in the 1990s among first- and second-generation immigrants, whose performance of black Canadian or Quebec authentic identity has depended heavily on African American, and particularly African American hip-hop, strategies of authenticity. (This resembles the studies by both Foreman [2001] and Ibrahim [1999)] on the processes of identity construction among Somali teens recently immigrated to North American.) Another interesting example of learning through hip-hop is Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan (McKinnon 2005), who tells of learning (hip-hop) English in Somalia before coming to Ontario through rap albums his father would mail from the United States, describing the way “I learned their rhythm, their diction, their mannerisms, their fierceness—all of it.” Being True to Yourself

The equation of authenticity in hip-hop with being “true to oneself,” what McLeod (1999) describes as “the social-psychological” dimension, bears most kinship to a wider Western preoccupation with authenticity. Truthfulness to self can inform the central image of the MC, with its commitment, at least in theory, to documenting real experiences, while being at odds with the ­image’s



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prescriptions and dictates.13 It is heavily promoted by central figures in what is considered “old school” as well as “conscious” hip-hop, for instance by “Teacha” KRS-One who explained at the 2006 Hip-Hop Congress that “hip-hop begins with the courage to be yourself. Being you has consequences” (qtd. in Zafar 2009, n.p.). Authenticity as being true to oneself in part makes possible the translation of hip-hop culture to so many different places in so many languages. Afrika Bambaataa tells of encouraging hip-hop culture’s global spread since the early 1980s, claiming, “It took a lot for me to get a lot of these rappers from other places to start rapping in their own language, ’cause when it first started, everybody was trying to rap American-style. Now a lot of people are stars in their own countries and speak on their own social issues or about having fun” (2007, 19). Hip-hop is a big place, and while the hip-hop identified work in part from the same touchstones—U.S. rap musical history and style, including ways of talking, dressing, dancing, moving—they also make hip-hop their own by using it to represent unique identities and experiences. This aspect of the culture helps foster the careers of rap artists such as JoJo Pellegrino, an Italian American whose track “Mambo Italiano” samples the song by the same name. Its video brings classic Italian American mobster imagery (including the “hit,” the dead body in the car, and the surreptitious burial in the woods) together with hip-hop video stalwarts such as a woman shaking her “booty” and shots of the MC on the streets of Brooklyn. It also makes room for artists such as Josh Durgin, aka So-called, who combines Montreal klezmer and rap music, moving between rapping, playing the accordion, sampling, and beat making. He has perfected nerd-cool, wearing heavy black-rimmed glasses, performs magic tricks during performances, recently collaborated with Killah Priest of the WuTang Clan, and has claimed that hip-hop allowed him musically to explore his Jewishness. Whether or not the final product of these explorations is “hip-hop” might be debatable, but what is clear is that hip-hop’s commitment to authenticity can offer a space within which to explore some of the unique complexities of identity and cultural work under conditions of globalization. Politically Conscious and Underground

This final dimension of keepin’ it real reacts against mainstream hip-hop, and in particular excessive “bling bling” materialism, violence, and formulaic, uncreative lyrics and videos about expensive cars, big “cribs,” and “video ho’s.” Just as the music industry has played a large part in producing certain narratives about

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realness, so have its critics in response to what they see as the misdirection of the culture. These critics work in the tradition of conscious hip-hop, which includes all those rappers who use their music as a platform for education, often working to return the culture to its more community-based grassroots and realizing its political potential. This tradition overlaps with what McLeod describes as the “cultural” dimension of the discourses of authenticity, which valorizes the “old school” over contemporary mainstream rap. This helps to explain the prominent voice here of early MCs and DJs, many of whom received relatively little money or fame for their contributions to the development of hip-hop. Some of the most adamant and public critics of mainstream commercial hip-hop (on-line, in interviews, and in print) started recording in the late 1980s, such as Afrika Bambaataa (www.zulunation.com), Chuck D, whose blog, the Terrordome, is found on the Public Enemy Web site (www.publicenemy .com), and KRS-One (www.krsone.org). They all regularly promote the need for a more politically aware and progressive hip-hop. This dimension sometimes draws on the image of the young, black MC, as its reacts to what Perry (2004) describes as “the removal of rap music from the organic relationship with the communities creating it” (87) and therefore insists that rappers “maintain or use symbols asserting their allegiance to black youth populations” (87). Other critics stem from the “jazz/bohemia rap” genre (Krims 2000), including crews such as De La Soul, the Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, and Black Sheep. The Roots’ track “What They Do” is an excellent example of the critique of the mainstreaming and dumbing down of hip-hop, with ­lyrics including “The principles of true hip-hop have been forsaken / It’s all contractual and about money makin’” and “Yo, I dedicate this to the one ­dimension-al / No imagination, excuse for perpetration.” The video adds a critical layer, parodying the “Big Willie” rap video genre. It opens with the printed words: “Rap video manual. Insert artist’s name here,” and then proceeds through a series of clichéd settings and scenarios, upon which phrases occasionally appear: the huge house (“the Goldstein estate [rented for the day]”); a close-up of a dancing bikinied woman’s crotch (“the money shot [automatic record sales]”); scenes of the crew knocking back champagne (“It’s really ginger ale”). The closing printed words of the video are “KEEP IT REAL?” MC Lupe Fiasco (2007) makes a different kind of critique of gangsta rap when he says, in an interview, that he stopped “spitting gangsta lyrics” when he realized that he was becoming a role model; “it was real, but it wasn’t helping ’cause the worst thing you can do in this world is lead people astray.”



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In Quebec, MC Mizery (in Sans Pression 2007) offers a direct critique of the romanticizing of criminal lifestyles, rapping, “Coz now we use storytelling backwards/ To glamorize slackness/ You’d die ten times/ Were you to practice what you preach.” The critique of mainstream hip-hop also draws on distinctions between underground and commercial hip-hop, or hip-hop that relies on an “independently owned network of distribution” versus that implicated in the U.S. music industry, controlled by five multinationals (McLeod 1999, 141). More recently, rapper Nas released Hip Hop Is Dead (2006), a requiem to hip-hop where he blasts the corporatization of gangsta rap (“where everybody sound the same, commercialize the game”) and mourns the death of a “real” hip-hop that was more politically conscious.14 Mitigating the impact of politically aware, “underground” hip-hop artists, including rappers such as Common, Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco, and groups such as The Coup and Dead Prez, is the fact that they are largely supported by middle-class multiracial audiences or “the college scene” (so that Krims [2000] also calls this genre “college rap”). Given the importance of social marginalization to hip-hop realness, a dedicated following of middle-class listeners drawn to hip-hop due to its political bent can dilute the “street credibility” of these artists and thus sales to urban centers and suburbs. A pedagogic tension often found in this critical vein is that hip-hop’s political message is often pro-violence. For instance, Latino MC Termanology, in “Watch How it Go Down,” raps: It’s hard but I speak the truth inspired to teach the youth ... The system it traps us in they tacklin’ rappers in These shackles that pack us in the back of the clack is in ... Before that I roll my blunt and load my gun Give a kiss to my daughter tell my mother I love her And blow the brains out a couple dirty cops undercover

In order to build a critique of the “system” that traps young people into a cycle of violence and criminality and incarceration, the artist takes on the persona of an outlaw, high and fighting violently back against a crooked system. While critiques of the growing police state, police violence, and the prison-industrial complex are central to rap’s political voice, this kind of response to injustice cannot be considered unproblematically “educative.” (See

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also the cover to the 2001 album of underground rapper Immortal Technique—an MC and political activist of Afro-Peruvian and indigenous Peruvian descent—featuring the shot bodies of police covered in uniforms and symbols that equate them with them with the Nazi SS.) Hip-hop realness is a complex, ambivalent, and messy space. Before I examine some implications of “keeping it real” for classroom pedagogies, I give more context for the emphasis on authenticity in hip-hop and discuss the mimetic theory of representation that undergirds it. The Dynamics of Representing A commitment to authenticity shapes a good deal of popular music, though arguably to a lesser extent and with fewer dimensions than it does in hip-hop culture. Perry includes among the factors that make it difficult for rap audiences to interpret “the realism in hip-hop as something crafted, ideological, and resulting from artistic choices” (Perry 2004, 90), hip-hop’s youthful and unsophisticated audiences as well as critics who are either generational or cultural outsiders to hip-hop and who scapegoat the music as the source of all social unrest. (The targeting of French rappers as cause of the tension in the Parisian banlieus is a good example of this response.) She argues that this challenge of interpretation stems from the complex place of autobiography in rap music, so that many of rap’s stories emerge from what an artist has either experienced or witnessed, however exaggerated for effect. And many of the narratives are of “being” rather than just “telling,” as artists regularly assume personas that are somehow familiar (for example, the hustler, the dealer, the crack head) and so are read as real, that is, autobiographical. Hip-hop culture also participates in what some have described as an African American cultural preoccupation with questions of authentic identity—Who is African American? What is blackness?—that equates authentic blackness with folk, vernacular traditions (Favor 1999). Lubiano (1996) describes the search for cultural authenticity as a response by black Americans to prevailing Eurocentric denials and distortions of their culture. The mainstreaming of hip-hop’s cultural presence also produces fears of assimilation and worries about the commodification of what has and continues to be, in some of its incarnations, a politically resistant art form deeply tied to the experiences of the underclass. As McLeod (1999) points out, “Hip-Hop can balance large sales and mainstream success with a carefully constructed authentic self”



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(146); while industry execs notice that “the real” sells, the “real” also becomes a strategy for rap creators to maintain a sense of integrity in the face of that corporatization. The commitment to authenticity also speaks to African American traditions of political struggle through art. In the introduction to a discussion of African American avant-garde poetics, Nielsen (1997) argues that anthologies of African American poetics have systematically excluded black poets working outside documentary realist conventions (as in the work of writers from the 1960s and 1970s such as William Melvin Kelley, Norman Pritchard, and Percy Johnstone working in the experimental traditions of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E and sound poetry.) This attempt to remain truthful to the “black experience,” including a notion of “black speech” based on “some preexisting encoded structure of agreements about what ‘black’ sounds like” (3), as well as to educate and effect social change by representing “experiences of social marginality” (8), reflects a belief that social realism is the only genre with politically transformative potential. This forgets that social realism is “a carefully constructed literary style. . . . A fictive orthography adopted for the purpose of conveying an entire literary ideology via style” (9). It reads the social realist poem or story as a mirror of African American life rather than as its representation. In an extension of this receptive and analytic tradition, much of the academic and journalistic critical discourse surrounding gangsta rap has drawn on “experiential” rather than “formal” (as in stylistic) frames for making sense of the genre (Quinn 2005). Positions both critical and supportive rely on a sense that gangsta’s tales of life on the edge are true events, though the ways these are valued or judged differ. For some, these true tales are worrying for what they reflect and exacerbate; for others they represent the emergence of an exciting and radical voice from the margins. They also are read as, alternately, powerful sociological evidence of the reality of the underclass, or an inaccurate reflection of black and hip-hop values (Quinn 2005). All of these readings, however, by academics, journalists, and fans seem to forget that rap music is art and a space of play, storytelling, fantasy, and hyperbole. One way of thinking about this dynamic in which art commits to the project of accurately reflecting real life and then is understood as identical to real life is in terms of a distinction Spivak (1988) puts forward between two senses of representation. She differentiates between political and aesthetic representation, collapsed into the one word in English but distinguished in German

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as vertreten and darstellen. Vertreten denotes “speaking” or “standing in” for, as in political representation, when the representative comes forward as the proxy of his or her constituents. Darstellen denotes “re-presentation” as used in aesthetics and philosophy and means the making visible to another mind or eye an idea or creative impulse that requires words, sound, physical matter, or bodies. The words are not coterminous, so that, for example, the political representative must advocate for as clearly as possible while a character in a novel might enact some of the messiness of human identities and desires. When collapsed, the proxy is the same as the performer, the narrator or persona is the rapper, and art is indistinguishable from the real. The tension between the aesthetic and the political in representation has played itself out in legal cases about contentious rap albums. In the early 1990s, an obscenity charge was laid against Florida rappers 2 Live Crew whose third album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, pushed the bounds of what could be said and sold through profane and extremely sexually explicit and aggressive lyrics. The Supreme Court dismissed the charge against them, due in part to the testimony of one expert witness for the defense, literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., who argued that the lyrics worked in the vernacular, folkloric traditions of African American games and literary culture. This defense drew controversy both outside and inside hip-hop and African American communities for “fetishizing rap’s black oral traditions, privileging form over content” (Quinn 2005, 21), with Houston Baker (1993) famously critiquing Gates’s use of literary culture to defend the “sexist mediocrity” of the rap crew. In an interesting flip, another scholar, David Toop, defended N.W.A. in court in the UK by arguing for the value of the album Niggaz4Life solely in terms of its experiential veracity and ignored its artistic worth entirely. In both instances, “questions of pleasure and aesthetics were divorced from social relations” (Quinn 2005, 21), which does not do justice to the complex ways in which rap music is experienced. Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Authenticity The concept of the hip-hop real was both an asset and a barrier in our classroom discussion: it was central to the students’ ability to connect with a curriculum in which they saw their lives and experiences featured, yet it also worked to limit the parameters of what some seemed to be able to imagine for themselves. For instance, the equation between authenticity and criminality



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and/or general toughness as well as the restrictions on what “realness” looks like more generally set some strict dictates on identity in contemporary urban America. Discourses of authenticity also played themselves out in Hill’s (2009) classroom as his students regularly invoked many dimensions of the typology. The “Heads” (or self-appointed hip-hop authorities) drew a strong distinction between real “hip-hop” music, underground and politicized, and mainstream, corporatized and so fake “rap.” Other students protested against this divide, arguing for the authenticity of artists and lyrics connected to the streets rather than to a less commercial underground. Also central to rap realness were notions of place, or “the extreme local” (40), as students identified strongly with artists such as Jay-Z who raps about his upbringing in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. Authenticity was also intrinsically tied to blackness in the minds of many students, and interestingly, some teachers in the school. A white teacher commended Hill on creating a class that speaks to the “black kids,” while an Afrocentric black teacher noted in writing that “‘it’s about time someone came to give us something real’” (italics in the original, 50). That “hip-hop lit” was seen as a black course (unlike all the other “de facto White spaces” [53] in school) by both black and white students fixed the “boundaries of their participation” (61), so that a few white students felt like outsiders and thus unable to participate. My data analysis concentrates on how the language of authenticity in creative writing pedagogy, such as “truthfulness in writing”, complicated discourses of hip-hop authenticity, which are tricky enough already. I will show how, at points, these discourses ended up colliding, and therefore confusing, our discussions and understandings. I draw on data from classroom transcripts and concentrate on the 2004 one class, the group Tim described to Rashidah and me I as the least academically successful of the three we had worked with; conversely, this same group was the most enthusiastic about writing poetry and produced some of the strongest poems and performances in the slam. These same students were often very impatient with anything they did not see directly informing their writing such as the series of classes offered by a professor on the history of black poetics, including jazz and blues ­poetry, as well as slave songs. Unlike our first groups where, as in Hill’s study, selfappointed hip-hop heads were committed to “underground” and “old school” rap, conversations tended to involve more mainstream artists such Puff Daddy and Jay-Z.

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On the third day of the course, one student, Clayton, volunteered to read a poem he had written. Afterward, his classmate Harold asked him, “When you write a poem, right, can you add more than what there really is? Like can you exaggerate?” to which he responded, “I would exaggerate but just for, like, effect.” The initial question suggests a mimetic theory of poetry, similar to the notion of the real found in rap music and in the students’ worry that one needs be bound to “what there really is.” This prompted the following interjection from the teacher: “That’s a very good question. There’s a writer named Patricia Hemphill who says, ‘I lie in order to tell the truth.’ You know what I mean? In other words, your intention is one thing, it may not be exactly what happened but the idea is to deliver the message. You can make things up, exaggerate, go right ahead, your audience doesn’t know.” Here, Tim introduced the concept of truthfulness as a quality of art not synonymous with the factual; a poem might offer insight into what it can mean to be human, for instance, rather than narrate the details of an individual’s experience. Writing thus emerges as a craft in which the author shapes language in order to deliver a message to an audience rather than to convey the facts of an experience. However, Tim’s attempt to work with the students’ terminology then seemingly undermined the message about truthfulness exceeding “what there really is.” He told the students to go ahead and “exaggerate,” the word that Harold introduced and Clayton repeated, which brings us back to “what there really is” as the foundation of what can be amplified or embellished. Tim also suggested fooling the audience, as if they should still be expecting “what there really is.” Aware, I think, of the lack of clarity in this discussion of the relation between fact and fiction in poetry, Tim then introduced three sources of information for writing poetry, which he said weren’t mutually exclusive: “memory, imagination, and the here and now.” He supported the question and questioner by explaining, “You don’t necessarily have to have lived something first-hand to put it in a poem, right, so that’s a real good question about the nature of ­poetry.” He then clarified the distinction between imaginative truth and “what there really is” by introducing the concept of “believability”: Clayton might ask us a specific question about a particular part of the poem, the overall meaning, the effect that it had on you, the emotional response you have, and the audience, you can say back to him something about believing or doubting. Do you believe this poem? Does it sound believable, does it ring true? How many of you believe this poem? It’s a real important thing. Because he wants to know, whether it comes from a memory, imagination, here and



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now, at least it rings true. Right? So you can say to him, I believe your poem because ____ . And one of the ways of believing it is saying I’ve been there. I’ve experienced that.

This passage speaks to the notion that something can ring true, be plausible, without being factually true, as well as to the difficulty of separating the concept of truthfulness from the idea of experience, given that “saying I’ve been there” is one of the criteria given for assessing a poem’s believability. The creative writing assignment Tim next introduced worked to free students’ sense of obligation to autobiography. Students wrote a “persona poem” in the voice of someone outside their sphere of reference whom they would not usually communicate with but might imaginatively impersonate. We introduced the task with “Skinhead,” a first-person poem by Patricia Smith (1992). This is a difficult piece, as the African American poet works to get inside the racist worldview of another, and it makes an impact. In all three slams, a number of students chose to perform their persona poems, taking on identities such as “just another baby dad who leaves his child without a man,” an American soldier in Iraq, and the planet Earth. Tim directed this particular group to draw on their own “observations and experience” as they wrote these pieces. He here offered a theory of experience as something that can help us to understand others, even those who might seem impossibly unknowable (as in Smith’s skinhead). One of the winners of the school slam the previous year came to present the poem that he had written in the voice of an Iraqi man under U.S. attack as an example of the genre for the class. Seeming inspired, many of the students in the class responded to the persona poem assignment enthusiastically. However, rather than clarify the distinction between art and real life where the former can draw on but not be bound by the latter, the students’ experiments in the persona genre complicated the conversation further. One black male student, Marcel, shared several persona poems with the class. In the first, he adopted the voice of a female addict prostituting herself for drugs. The second began in the vein of a violent fantasy: You motherfuckers want to talk? I’ve got this AK and I’m gonna talk shit out Fuck politiquing, it’s too late, I don’t want to work it out If you don’t pass the key to the safe, heh, bitch you move your hand again, everybody catch a case Keep pressing buttons on your cell phone

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I’m going to hit this button and send all you motherfuckers home If I can’t have it, nobody will, no money to buy my son a new heart, fuck a miracle, John Q did it, I guess I will.

After his performance, Marcel explained, “I was watching a movie last night, and that’s where I got that from, I’m saying like, he ain’t have the money.” This poem, inspired by the Denzel Washington film John Q. Public, takes the perspective of a man who decides to take a group of people hostage until he gets his son a heart transplant. (In the film, the central character’s HMO will not pay for a heart transplant for his son, so he takes a group hostage until the hospital puts his son’s name on the organ recipient list.) Marcel said that he had chosen to write another persona poem because “It’s excitement when you are like somebody else, when you are not yourself, you know what I mean, because you can say what you want to say.” In his poem, Marcel seems to blend the plot details from the original film with the language and imagery of gangsta rap. After his performance, we had the following discussion: Rashidah: Are you worried about people believing that poem, that that might be you talking, you speaking, it’s your persona, do you worry about that? Marcel: I ain’t no terrorist or anything like that, they know I ain’t got no AK. Tim: Is there a danger that if we write something somebody will confuse the poem with the poet, anybody? Jaron (another student): There’s a stereotype, you know what I mean, basically, there’s the stereotype, not even him being black, seeing that he’s just a man and then you always see a lady going in a bank, you know what I mean, and hold it up? Better yet he’s black, he’s going to steal it. [laughs]

Jaron explained how stereotypes might predispose people to equate Marcel with his violent poetic persona. He suggested first that his friend was a more likely suspect for holding up a bank because he is a man, but then added that his blackness would reinforce these suspicions. Tim tried to redirect the conversation back to the topic of poetry as a place of experimentation where truthfulness is not confined to the experiential by revisiting a statement Marcel had made about the pleasures of the persona poem: “You said it was fun because it’s not you. You see one of the ways poetry frees us is we can be anything we want to be, and the audience, don’t confuse the poem with the poet, you know, they don’t need to be the same thing, seldom are, sometimes are.”



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As in the earlier discussion, Rashidah turned the subject to hip-hop, which prompted an exchange between her, Tim, and a student, Akil: Rashidah: So if that’s the case, then why do they do it with hip-hop, everybody does, everybody believes every word that everybody says when they are rappin’, everybody does, the media does, the feds, they watchin’ rappers like they’re—. Tim: That’s where my ignorance, but— Rashidah: We’re talking about the masses— Akil: But most of the rappers be telling the truth because most of them, don’t, like if you really listen to a rap song, some of it be probably harming somebody else, but most of it be about streets, and selling drugs and stuff, they telling the truth about that. Tim: They’re telling the truth about the streets. Maurice’s poem is truthful, do you believe Maurice’s poem? Rashidah: That happens, but does that mean that the person who is actually saying those words, singing those words like Maurice is doing? If the person actually did the things that you hear them say, they have to be pretty stupid. Tim: Is it N.W.A. who did Cop Killer? Rashidah: No, Ice T did. No, N.W.A. did “Fuck da police.” Tim: That poem, the lyrics to that song brought a lot of controversy, did they do everything? Rashidah: [laughter] Yeh, they was gang banging, that’s not a great example right there. Akil: Beenie Seagle, he just got off court for shootin’ somebody. They be talkin’ about it, they be livin’ it.

In this conversation, the possibilities poetry offers the poet to become someone else, and thus to “say what you want to say” that Marcel had experienced, are countered by Akil’s invocation of hip-hop authenticity, in which “talkin’ about it” means “livin’ it.” This theory of rap as “standing in for” or reflecting the “real” means that the students are more likely to buy into whatever version of that real some rappers and producers and music labels might be selling. This is particularly limiting given the stereotypes casting African American and Latino youth, especially males, as threats to the social order, as Jaron’s comments about Marcel suggested. And indeed, one pedagogic response to Jaron’s mention of stereotypes might have been to ask the students whether they thought that rap music produced or upheld certain stereotypes of young black men.

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While Rashidah objected to the way rappers are policed and insisted that there should not be a double standard around artistic expression, she was trapped by the complicated way authenticity gets imposed from within hip-hop culture as well as from without. Her argument, and Tim’s, about the importance of separating the rap from the rapper, the persona from the person, and art from life, was derailed by Tim’s example of N.W.A., who were mapping a new space of representation committed to documenting the real lives of a criminal and criminalized underclass but whose members have also faced some criminal charges. (Further complicating the example of N.W.A as social realists, crew members described drawing on popular crime thriller films for inspiration [Kelley 2007, 39]). From Akil’s popular perspective, rappers are outlaws. Also restricting the narrative possibilities of rap music in this discussion is how gangsta rap seems to stand in for all of rap music, and how in turn, the real gets equated with what Akil calls, “the streets, and selling drugs and stuff,” as if there were only one kind of real. The masculinist aspect of hip-hop authenticity played itself out in an interview with both Marcel and Akil. Akil was describing the experience of writing poems for the first time, commenting that: Writing poems and writing rap lyrics, you can tell the difference, because writing poems is more laid back, even if what you writing about is a strong issue it seems like its more laid back than rap or writing rap lyrics. So I liked it, kinda, but it made me feel kinda weak, not weak, but I don’t know, not as strong as I would if I was performing a rap song . . . strong as in masculine, like a man—boom, boom—not to say you’re feminine reading a poem, it’s just, I don’t know, poetry.

When I asked him if this meant that he saw poetry as “weak, sissy, sensitive,” Akil denied this, clarifying that it’s “calm, more subtle,” to which his friend Marcel added “more serious, more emotional.” After rejecting the negative association, however, Akil then added if he performed his poem he’d worry that his peers would think “well, [Akil’s] gone all weak.” Although we integrated rap music into the performance poetry curriculum because hip-hop culture is so central to the youth identities and often dynamic, intensely creative, and socially critical, the rap “real” could also constrain students’ ability to engage with rap as poetry and with themselves and each other as poets. If the students do not see rap music as an aesthetic product, shaped by genre conventions, fantasy, and the imagination, rap



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music and hip-hop culture more generally, with its conventions of representation and “economy of stereotypes” (Morrison 1992), can circumscribe the sorts of identities and options made available to students. Critical Rap Pedagogies One pedagogical response to the stranglehold of authenticity in hip-hop is to study rap music as art, as fiction, as a product of the imagination shaped by, and sometimes transcending, certain conventions of representation. This allows students to gain the analytic detachment necessary to explore both the possibilities and limitations of rap’s representations of urban youth and life. We did this more during the first year of the project, with the group that was more open to class discussions not directly linked to the poems they were developing for the slam. I led a series of classes on hip-hop and language, based in large part on my dissertation research on spoken-word poetry. I explored rap music’s experimentation with sound, word, and technology in the context of African American poetic traditions such jazz poetry, blues poetry, and figures such as Gil Scot Heron and the Last Poets, but also of twentiethcentury avant-garde poetry that made language strange, including the work of Gertrude Stein and the sound poets. Despite rap music’s rhetorical emphasis on social realism, the genre radically experiments with language and technology through processes such as “sampling” (Rose 1994), electronic modifications of words and musical sounds (Low 2001), and (particularly in rap lyrics where the base language is not English) experimentation and play with languages (Sarkar and Winer 2006; Pennycook 2003). Such formal innovations repeatedly draw attention to the work as art, as creative construct, and to language as the raw material for innovation. I shared with the students the way sampling technologies and practices created densely layered soundscapes within which words get transported, reshaped, and made to signify in different ways (looking in particular at the early work of Public Enemy). In an unusual class that first year, prompted by the willingness of a university student I knew to perform sound poetry, the students sat through a forty-five-minute live performance of Dada poet Kurt Schwitter’s poem “Ursonata.” The piece explodes the German language and constructs a kind of verbal music, organized into four movements, out of its syllables and phonemes.15 We also talked about Hip Hop Nation Language, drawing attention to it as a careful construct that works to build community. In particular, we

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s­ tudied the lyrics from Kardinall Offishall’s “Bakardi Slang” on the language of the Toronto hip-hop community and compared them with those of Big L’s “Ebonics,” a similar lexicography of hip-hop vocabulary in the United States. This prompted a discussion of the importance of language to identity and of the way language operated in the students’ lives. A few students described the micro­linguistic climates they inhabited within which they could identity what block someone lived on by the terms they used. While this inquiry prompted a good deal of interest and participation from this group of students, the critical hip-hop language pedagogies of Alim (2007) could have extended it. In his “hiphopography” project, Alim arms students with socio­ linguistic and ethnographic knowledge of their own speech behavior and has them act as lexicographers of hip-hop language, compiling and defining expressions and terms. In the “language in my life” project, youth “analyze their own communicative behaviour in their everyday environments as it shifted across contexts and situations” (169), researching their own communities based on what they have learned about applied linguistics. Alim also instructs students about linguistic profiling. In retrospect, I wish we had tried some other strategies for intervening in discourses of the hip-hop real. One would be to teach and draw on Krims’s (2000) typology of rap music. Krims makes the point that albums usually exemplify more than one genre, and that genres sometimes morph into new ones, as in the case of “don” rap which takes vérité gangsta imagery and subjects, makes them a bit more fantastic, and combines them with the “wealth, individuality, and personal ‘smoothness’ of the older mack [or pimp] genre” (83). Krims includes within the don genre rapper Jay-Z, a favorite of many of the students in this group (as testified to by regularity with which he came up in discussion and the enthusiasm expressed when one student brought in his lyrics for study). Debating the relevance of Krims’s system of genres in relation to Jay-Z and others would make clear that there are many rap musics, and that artists make choices, to different effect and function, about bringing together sound and rhyme. This can prompt discussion about why artists make the choices they do, and the value and limits of these choices—thus denaturalizing the hip-hop “real.” In response to the students’ sense that if rappers “be talkin’ about it, they be livin’ it,” we also might have distinguished between what Perry (2004) describes as the sociological “real” and a “Real.” The latter “constitutes a political rather than purely sociological stance that gives testimony to the emotional



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state resulting from the experience of poverty, blackness, and the crises of urbanity” (87). The testifier can speak to a spectrum of experiences as witness rather than as either victim or perpetrator, using narratives of the “crises of urbanity” in order to advocate or “speak for.” This “Real” is then subject to discussion and debate, unlike the lowercase hip-hop “real,” which quickly became a “shared community ethos, and any debate over its meaning was minimal” (93). Perry argues that there needs to be critical engagement with the choices made in depictions of everyday realities and the contingent ideology that the artists promote with these choices. If violence or drug dealing constitutes signature features of life in black communities, expunging these things from the music will not provide an ideal solution to the problems people have with the Real. The question is: Why is the violence of the illegal underground economy, for example, more compelling than other features of community life? (93)

Perry’s question opens up a conversation about vertreten and darstellen, the processes and politics of representation and aesthetic engagement, and about their accompanying ideologies. Students should also study rap music in light of African American traditions of oral storytelling and competition, as well as Black Atlantic cultural forms such as dub poetry, or Jamaican sound-system history. They can examine lyrics in relation to Henry Louis Gates’s (1988) treatment of the trope of “Signifyin(g),” a cornerstone of African American cultural and literary theory that groups together a system of black vernacular rhetorical strategies, drawing on the arts of indirection, in order to trick or play, as in punning. Signifying celebrates the multiplicity and even chaos of meaning-making, and therefore complicates the notion of a static, knowable “real.” Emphasis can also be placed on the performative, playful, and even postmodern (especially through concepts of sampling that challenge origins and ownership) qualities of rap music. Like many black vernacular modes, rap works in the way of irony and satire, both inside and outside the object of critique, playing on the audience’s ability to recognize the difference (Potter 1995). Students should write “persona raps,” exploring believability and richness in character beyond the autobiographical. All of these strategies ask us to study rap lyrics and songs as texts—central to many of the students’ sense of themselves as young, urban, perhaps black, or gendered, but particular, historically situated versions of what these identity

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positions might mean. This vein of inquiry shifts the focus from rap as a source of the truth of experience to rap as a theater of popular desires and fantasies, which opens up certain possibilities for identification and imagining while closing down others. Paired with the central objective of the performance poetry curriculum to have the students write and perform their own pieces, an emphasis on the limits of the authenticity narrative offered by popular rap texts makes room for students to write their own stories, drawing on and perhaps challenging and reinventing those extant in popular culture.

3 T h e T a l e o f t h e T a l e n t Ni g h t R a p Black Popular Culture in S c h o o l s and the Challenge of Inter p r e t a t i o n

I t w a s t h e s c h o o l t a l e n t n i g h t . Gerard and another high school senior started rapping to the backbeat of an instrumental track entitled “Special Delivery.” After a few minutes, they asked the audience how many wanted to join them and dance the Harlem Shake on stage. The rappers had planned next to announce that they had a special delivery, and two male students would be wheeled out on a cart, dancing, up onto the stage. After this brief skit, the rappers would resume. However, Gerard and his friend never made it past the initial shout-out to the audience: when one of their microphones was accidentally unplugged, the principal stepped in and cut the act. He first explained, as paraphrased by Gerard, “that it was old people in the crowd and he didn’t want things to get out of hand and get chaotic,” but then he said, “I don’t want to hear any cursing or sexual obscenities in your raps. . . . I don’t want to hear it.” This event, extracurricular and therefore outside the official bounds of the spoken word project, managed to make its mark on the boy’s classroom in year one. Teachers know that there are multiple kinds of curricula, including what Eisner (1994) calls the “planned” or official curricula as well as the “enacted” curricula, or what actually happens in the classroom. No matter how tidy a teacher’s plan, real learners enact a lesson in ways that are often quite unpredictable. This chapter draws on an unexpected, and from a certain perspective, disruptive moment when an outside event was catapulted into the conversation; it became central to classroom dynamics and, I argue, learning.1

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Toward the beginning of the project, Tim and I decided to develop and negotiate with the students, rather than impose, a set of content guidelines for language use and subject matter for what we would listen to and watch as a group in class and for the performances in the poetry slam. We wanted to explore the subject of the potentially controversial nature of a course that invited rap and slam poetry into the classroom and school auditorium. In the ninety-minute class in question, we planned to play different CD tracks that would provoke conversation: the hyperbolic parody of the gangsta genre by rap group Black Sheep discussed in Chapter 2, and Cornel West’s (2001) “The N­‑word” from his spoken word CD. We were also going to play some rap music that the students brought in and work to develop together a content rating system or scale of appropriateness. This was an unsuccessful lesson in both classes, as the students refused to play the role of censor. What the planned curriculum did do was prompt the first account of the talent night event. To provide a context and justification for our rating exercise, Tim pointed out to the students that since the beginning of the spoken word project he had been closing the classroom door. He explained that while he thought we were having a good conversation about language and poetry, “some people dismiss the conversation before they even hear it out and there are some real risks.” He added, “There have been teachers in this country removed from their teaching positions because of issues like this.” The Tale of the Talent Night Rap—Unplugged Gerard, an African American male, interjected the following into Tim’s discussion about language controversy: Before a word even came out of my mind, my mouth, just from me hyping out the crowd, I saw white people getting up and leaving and everybody standing still, so I only really know it wasn’t ’cause they’re understanding me for what they didn’t interpret. I mean I just felt mad bad when I went home and I thought about the junk. . . . I had told them to turn the mic down low, but it seemed like it kept getting lower and higher, and I don’t know if it was that they couldn’t hear me or . . . but before something even came out of my mouth they just left, and I felt it was just mad disrespectful.

This statement establishes a disjunction between the rapper’s “hyping” and the stillness of the white people in the crowd. Gerard reads this stillness as



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a sign of “their” disapproval and the precursor to leaving. In his reference to “understanding,” Gerard frames the incident as a problem of interpretation, a take he reinvokes in later discussions about the event; here, he represents subjective meaning-making processes as inadequate and at fault. These are complicated by a double negative—“wasn’t ’cause they’re understanding me for what they didn’t interpret”—a syntactic confusion that conveys Gerard’s sense that he has been misread, and that audience reactions and readings are outside of his control. He then attempts to offer a more generous reading of the events, suggesting that audience members might have left because they could not hear him, but this new insight only confirms his initial feeling of wrongful prejudgment given that his subject and language (products of his mind and mouth) were yet unknown. This leads to his damning judgment that the audience response was “mad disrespectful” and, as he says later in class, “racist.” The principal’s explanations to Gerard (as filtered through Gerard’s memory of and perspective on the events) reproduce the distinction Gerard had originally drawn between “them” and “us”: “It was old people in the crowd, and he didn’t want things to get out of hand and get chaotic,” and then “I don’t want to hear any cursing or sexual obscenities in your raps.” The microphones seem to stand in metonymic relation to the rappers: their levels are unstable, and therefore unintelligible, and they are cut off. The second statement attributed to the principal is vague. Were the obscenities heard or anticipated? Taken together, Gerard’s version of the principal’s comments to him hints at the administrator’s anxiety that the rap posed both a physical and moral threat. After class, Tim went to speak to the principal about the incident and his decision to cut the act, and he relayed their conversation to me the next day. The principal explained that he was worried there would be a “riot” when Gerard invited the students onto the stage, and that the performers and audience had ignored his command at the opening of the show that they “remain seated” during the performances. He did not bring up with Tim the topic of obscenity. Tim had recently learned, through our course, the distinction between raps written in advance and freestyles, which are improvised on the spot: he asked the principal which form Gerard had performed. The principal replied that he thought it was a freestyle; in his account to me, Tim added that this might have been the problem, for in the moment of improvisation, the poet is less likely to edit himself. Tim also spoke with one of the teacherorganizers who clarified that, in fact, the poem had been written in advance

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because Gerard had given her a copy of the text, and some translations of terms; however, she told Tim that she wasn’t certain if Gerard had stuck to the text because she couldn’t understand what he was saying. The comments attributed to both the principal and the teacher reveal some of what is at stake in the tale of the talent night rap: African American (and other) students are often responded to by people in positions of authority who are outside of their culture, in this case generationally, racially, and in terms of hip-hop identification and interest. As Tim discussed with me in conversation after our class, his and the principal’s confusion over whether or not the piece was a freestyle “points to the fact that we as adults have to know the language” before making any judgments about it. Gerard’s biggest complaint was that the principal had not been at the rehearsals, so he did not know that the invitation onto the stage was not real but instead part of a skit. Nor did he seem aware that Gerard had had his lyrics preapproved by the teachers organizing the show, as his comments to Tim confirm. Gerard told Tim and me that the organizers had cautioned him (after the first rehearsal of the talent night) to follow the rules laid out in the school handbook. He wrote down his rap for them and underlined any words that he suspected “they thought would have a problem, [and] gave it my definition of what I was interpreting it being in the rap” in parentheses. The handbook states that “widely acceptable ‘Community Standards’” guide decisions about appropriateness, and that these standards are determined by the “3-M Policy. That is, the work would be viewed as widely acceptable visà-vis community standards by all three of these: 1. Mom 2. Minister 3. Me (the Principale) [sic].” Within the conceptual framework of the handbook, words are potential problems to be forestalled. Clear from the handbook is that students do not play a part in determining community standards, nor do the teachers. Nor, interestingly, do fathers, filled in for perhaps by the document’s author, a white (and Jewish) male principal who founded the school and recently left it. The reference to mothers and the church seem to racialize the policy, directing it specifically at black Christian students by acknowledging traditional sources of authority in African American communities. The handbook’s description of a set of community standards as “widely acceptable” to mothers, ministers, and the principal suggests a desire for an illusory consensus over matters of language and representation. Given the diversity of the group, it is hard to imagine any easy consensus about standards, and no measures are proposed to find out what these standards might be.



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Glossing the Rap: The Exigencies of Translation Gerard responds to the 3-M policy by glossing the text, defining the suspect words in terms of “what I was interpreting it being in the rap.” This suggests his awareness that, as Fairclough (1992) explains, producers have a choice “about how to use a word and how to word a meaning,” interpreters need to decide “how to interpret the choices producers have made,” and “the meanings of words and the wording of meanings are matters which are socially variable and socially contested” (185). Gerard also told me that he gave the organizers an additional sheet in which he describes why he wrote this piece, and that he had sat down with each organizer and told them, in his words, “where he was coming from” and “why he picked this topic.” Gerard elaborated that he was titling each of his raps “Street Life” because he was off to college, which was in a rural area, and “I kinda been in street life my whole life so it’s kinda like getting it out of me.” He also claimed that this sheet indicated he would be speaking about some of his friends who were drug dealers, but he “was going to say it in a way in which people won’t be offended.” Gerard’s rationale for his poetry evokes a number of creative writing discourses: writing as personal exploration, as ode and even elegy to a way of life, and as therapeutic, cleansing process, that is, “getting it out of me.” The idea of cleansing also emerges in his description of attempting to speak of his community without causing offense to its outsiders, the looming “them” represented by the authorial voice of the handbook, the principal and teachers, and the disapproving audience members. Tim and I both felt that it sounded like Gerard’s act had been unfairly cut, that it seemed the principal had made his decision based on negative preconceptions about rap and rappers—a particularly unwarranted choice given Gerard’s willingness to work with the organizers. Tim asked to see the text of the lyrics and definitions that Gerard had given the organizers. (See Figure 1.) Gerard offered the administrators a glossary, a genre emblematic of the precarious position of rap-in-school: the glossary attempts to translate between rap culture and school culture, but isn’t comfortable in either. And it is a strange glossary. In some of these parenthetical definitions, the student is explicitly translating for a nonblack audience: the “perm that burns,” David Ruffin of the Temptations; in others, the audience is assumed to be generationally different, outside of youth culture and in particular hip-hop culture, as in the references to Iceberg (“ice” as in diamonds) and fitteds (skull caps). Many of the definitions are absurd, blatantly misleading (“I’ll give ya man shells” as “pasta”), or clearly incommensurate (the equivalency drawn



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­ etween “eating food” and “saving money”). Is this student testing the orgab nizers’ intelligence? (A question which begs the reverse: Were the organizer’s testing this student’s intelligence by asking him to engage in such an antiintellectual practice as reducing his lyrics to dictionary denotation?) Other definitions are obviously unnecessary, as in “soft (meaning fragile) as the fur on a sheep,” or hood (inner city), which suggests Gerard hopes to first familiarize the audience, prompting feelings of recognition, before misdirecting them. The glossary might also be read as a symptom of the fact that youth are often poor judges of what adults know and don’t know. Glossing the Rap: Carlo’s Version Tim made copies of the lyrics and definitions for further discussion with the boys’ class the next week. Oddly for this opinionated group, the students were silent when Tim passed the sheet around. Tim’s attempts at generating discussion on the issue, so successful the previous class, failed, and we moved into a performance workshop led by a local spoken word poet. After class, Carlo (the Puerto Rican American student introduced in the Preface) stayed back to see Tim. He was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the spoken word project. When Tim first introduced the notion the previous term to the PE class, Carlo was so thrilled that he asked to be admitted to the Advanced Poetry class as well, even though this would mean sitting in on many of the same experiences twice. As he told his classmates in the AP group, although “people might look at me and say I’m not a poet” because “I’m a tech major, I play sports,” this doesn’t mean “I can’t write meaningful words.” He was in fact a committed poet and frequently shared his in-class writings with the PE group, though not the AP class because, as he told me after one class, the students are “too critical” and “jump on a word.” He was also devoted to Tim, looking up to him as a role model, and had decided to switch his goals from majoring in math to English in college so he could be an English teacher. Tim called him “the General” since he frequently kept order in the class, making sure that Tim and I and any student who chose to contribute had the group’s attention. Carlo told Tim that the guys had been quiet because they realized that the definitions given to the talent show organizers were intentionally misleading. Gerard had coded the rap, in what might be considered an “oppositional” (S. Hall 1997) reading of the assignment and of his own text, so that the students in the audience would respond to a different set of word meanings than those with which the organizers



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were working. Carlo offered a second set of definitions for some of these terms and phrases, adding another, conflicting layer of textual exegesis. (See Figure 2.) Fairclough (1992) stresses that the meaning potential of a text is “heterogeneous, a complex of diverse, overlapping and sometimes contradictory meanings,” creating a semantic ambivalence that interpreters usually attempt to “reduce” (75). To Fairclough’s interpreters I will add schools. Through the handbook, the administration forecloses the possibility of debate and disagreement over meaning and in this way attempts to exert control. The ­talent night organizers make a similar move by demanding a glossary, a defense against diverse, even contradictory meanings. Finally, if the principal’s decision to shut down Gerard’s rap was driven by worries of moving black male adolescent bodies and undecipherable lyrics, it also attempts to reduce the meaning and force of the heterogeneous text that is the talent night rap. In what follows, I attempt to tease out some of the strands of the performance and event by offering two different, even contradictory, interpretations and exploring the potential as well as the limitations of each. I am interested here in the educational significance of semantic ambivalence, both within the tale and at the level of its analysis. Take One: Hip-Hop as Social Problem In one reading of the tale of the talent night rap, which, following Koza (1999), I’ll call the “moral panic” interpretation, rap and rappers are incompatible with education. The suspicions of the teacher-organizers and the principal about this student and his rap were validated, for the performance glorified violence as a means of settling a dispute and “getting the girl.” The rap’s implicit link to gangs (mentions of the “bloods,” “stop signs,” and repeated references to guns), representations of which are prohibited by the city school district, must preclude it from a school event. Furthermore, the student attempted to deceive the organizers and Tim with his fake definitions. And yet: What was objectionable about this performance within a school context? The lyrics contained no profanities, nor explicit sexual references. While this is a story of revenge, violence, and sexual conquest, these themes are certainly not foreign to many of the art forms canonized in the curriculum. And it seems the principal couldn’t have been responding to this implicit content, or to the story of the rap, because the vocals were difficult to hear over the instrumental backbeat, especially given the inconsistent sound levels

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on the vocalists’ microphones and the roar of the hyped-up crowd. When Tim asked some colleagues if they had had concerns about the lyrics, they claimed they couldn’t make out what Gerard and his friend were saying. Perhaps, in Gerard’s words, the principal “was hearing what he wanted to hear,” or what he expected to hear, based on a notion of adolescents, and in particular of young black men, as inherently “out of control” and “chaotic” and therefore dangerous. (See, however, the account in Chapter 6 of the young black woman suspended in school for proclaiming “black power” in the cafeteria, which reminds us that black girls are also subject to racial profiling and zero-­tolerance policies.) The rhetoric of moral panic that scapegoats youth, and black youth in particular, as social problems shapes responses to youth both inside and outside of school. As Gerard describes in an interview, getting wrongfully stopped by the police is “an everyday thing for me”—this had happened the day before because he was wearing a windbreaker even though it was warm, so police assumed he was “holding drugs.” In response to such racial profiling he adds, “I kind of get devastated sometimes, the way I dress, where I live, I get labeled as one of the people on the corner.” Take Two: Hip-Hop as Resistance The moral panic reading of the tale of the talent night rap is countered by what I’ll call, as shorthand, the critical reading: this is a story of student resistance to the repressive culture of schools. Gerard was compelled to translate himself and his language, to make his culture transparent to teachers and administrators. The teachers are unfamiliar with his vernacular, so he has to provide them with a glossary. The principal’s decision to shut down the rap in the middle of the skit might indicate he was unaware of the convention of rap skits, like the “special delivery” piece, that interrupt and weave in between rap tracks on albums. Both groups seem unaware of the tradition of the hyperbolic rap “boast” and “dis,” wars of words between rappers in the vein of the African American art of verbal insult (Smitherman 2001, 276). By purposefully mistranslating some of the language in his piece, Gerard stages a protest against a culture within which he is always already positioned as unintelligible, as outsider, and as threat. And within which he is misinterpreted. As Gerard tells Tim and me in an interview, while he has been getting decent grades, and even A’s in English, teachers “label me as someone who’s not going to make it, not smart.” In response, he “flips the script,” in hip-hop terms, reversing the meaning or imposing different meanings



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on words (Smitherman 2001, 280). Gerard shifts the power balance, reinventing the rules, so that he and his fellow rap fans, rather than the teachers, are the ones who know, who hold onto privileged insider information. The student who is “not going to make it, not smart” outsmarts the organizers. Given how blatantly misleading some of the definitions are, one wonders how carefully the organizers read the text and therefore how seriously they took this student. Gerard here draws on the long African American tradition of coding meaning through the arts of indirection, including the whole system of black vernacular rhetorical strategies that Gates (1988) labels “Signifyin(g).” It works at the level of word association, and therefore on the level of the “playful puns on a word . . . which a speaker draws on for figurative substitutions” (49). Signifyin(g) is a homonym of the English word signifying; this repetition with a difference enacts what Gates, drawing on Bahktin, calls the double-voicedness of black discourse. But this homonym is particularly significant for in its choice of signifier it disrupts the notion of meaning itself. As Gates puts it, “To revise the received sign (quotient) literally accounted for in the relation represented by signifier/signified at its most apparently denotative level is to critique the nature of (white) meaning itself, to challenge through a literal critique of the sign the meaning of meaning” (47). While signification requires an order and coherence and therefore attempts to limit the proliferation of meaning, Signifyin(g) luxuriates in the chaos, and Gates calls it the “Other of discourse” (50). The poems of the Signifying Monkey, traced back to the Yoruba, are one source of this theory of language. In most versions of the tale, Monkey wants to triumph over the much stronger Lion, and so hints to Lion, through the indirection of figurative language, that Elephant has been bad-mouthing him. Lion confronts Elephant who, angered by the false accusations, beats Lion up. Lion has been Signified upon by the Monkey, verbally tricked, because he did not recognize that Monkey was “playing” him. The Lion could not distinguish in the Monkey’s taunts the literal from the figurative and metaphorical, “between surface and latent meaning” (82)—that it is troping. And tropes work by way of indirection (the word “trope” is etymologically derived from the Greek word turn), as a kind of linguistic subterfuge necessary for the less powerful, in this case Monkey, to trick the King of the Jungle. This use of indirection raises the question and the problem of interpretation and in the process creates a distinction between an audience hip to the game, and therefore inside the community of listeners, and one that is

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outside its codes. Signifyin(g) is also a theory of language that celebrates play and subterfuge. For instance, when Gerard raps that the shells he refers to in “Street Life” aren’t the ones on the beach, he makes a reference to bullets easily understood by an audience familiar with gangsta rap (or contemporary culture more generally, one would think); the teacher-organizers, however, are told shells are “pasta,” which means “eating food,” which means “saving money.” This strange series of equivalencies plays on the figurative and polysemic qualities of language and seems to suggest that one can make words mean however one wants. Yet, in light of the critical theory of student resistance, how unreasonable were the demands made by the organizers? As public institutions, schools necessarily have to contend with standards from the state, the district, and the community. The 3-M Policy had been instated at this school the previous year after one young woman performed a poem at an author’s night that contained explicit sexual references (she spoke from the first-person perspective of her vagina), which so offended some invited members of the community that they complained to the principal. As well, the principal at the time had been very supportive of the spoken word project and in a planning discussion with Tim and me on the topic of controversial language agreed that the politics of representation were important to talk about in the classroom. Furthermore, when Gerard handed Tim his misleading translation without explanation, he was not being upfront with a dedicated and caring teacher who had initiated this spoken word unit, encouraged the students to bring their music into the classroom, and opened up the topic of language and content restrictions as something we as a classroom community would negotiate. In so doing, Tim was putting himself at some risk of official reprimand. (Indeed, after the poetry slams in 2002 and 2003 Tim received “unofficial” feedback from a few colleagues voicing their concern over some of the content expressed and the language used. From the administration has come, as Tim puts it, a “deafening silence.”) As well, to read this tale solely as a story of resistance is to deny the ways in which Gerard is also looking for acceptance and affirmation. He performs here one of the central dilemmas of adolescence: he both wants to resist and to belong. He chooses to perform a piece in the tradition of gangsta rap, taking on the identity of “G” (an acronym for gangsta, and his own name), which is controversial even within hip-hop circles. But I also got the sense from our interviews and his definitions that he genuinely sought some understanding from the teacher-organizers, for not all of his definitions are mislead-



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ing. ­Despite the moments of dissimulation, there also seems to be a sincere attempt to put concepts and words the teachers “might not be accustomed to” into frames of reference he thinks they will understand. For example, for “hood” Gerard draws on the sociological language of the “inner city”; he glosses “blood” and puts the gang in the historical context of 1970s Los Angeles. Does Gerard think that a historical black “street life” might be more palatable to the organizers than a contemporary one? The glossary is a remarkably academic tool. Gerard fulfills the scholarly desire to turn lived experience into an object of study, and he resorts to a hypercorrect language in some of the definitions: he translates “hustling” as “swindling individuals to obtain certain objects,” and for “stay with my hands on your honey like Whinny [sic] the Pooh” he offers “I’m using the term to symbolize how often I am seen with ones companion.” One could read this sanitized gloss as reproduction or parody of official school or “white” uptight forms of language, or both. Gerard seems torn between a desire to explain the narrative and to edit out the bits he worries will be unacceptable, that is, all the references to gun violence, as in line 5 where he defines the self-evident “team” rather than “imf-beam,” the un-glossed “Simmy,” and the definition of “burner” as his fiery poetry. Gerard’s comments in the two interviews also suggest that he cares what the teacher-organizers think. In both he mentions that one of the teachers came up to him after the show and insisted that he and his friend should have won the talent show, and that the other seemed “ashamed like I embarrassed her.” One final point about the limits of resistance when it comes to Gerard’s rap: in “Street Life,” this student is performing the hypermasculinist hetero­ sexual gangsta persona that has been so central to a particularly myopic version of hip-hop authenticity. In this sense, the performance seems bound to a narrowly scripted identity, raising the question of why an academically successful and college-bound young black man would need to perform “thug life” in the context of his school. Take Three: Learning from Conflict and Ambivalence Each reading is somewhat helpful at making sense of the events: popular culture, and especially hip-hop, will always exist in some kind of tension with school culture, and schools are historically structured around white middleclass ideologies that can marginalize black and other minority youth, as well

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as youth from working-class families or living in poverty. However, neither reading does justice to the complexity of the event. And both ignore the potentially productive quality of the tensions between hip-hop culture and schools, between dominant majority teachers and racially marginalized youth, and between generations. Below, I discuss the class’ response to Gerard’s account of the talent night incident, the book’s first extended example of how this conflictridden “contact zone” (Pratt 1991) across differences can be pedagogically vital. After Gerard’s account, a white student named Michael claimed that at the talent show one of the teacher-organizers had said to him, “We’ll give them [Gerard and his partner] two minutes and then we’ll call you next,” and added, “She wasn’t even going to let you guys finish up your whole song.” ­Gerard responded, “That’s dead wrong—we was in there just like everybody else so why we had to get cut?” Tim then seized the chance to return the talk to the discussion of content standards, saying, “Let’s hold that—that’s a good question. I’m not going to dismiss the question. That’s the question we’re going to use to guide us in the conversation.” To explore it, Tim first offered the class some context for the principal’s decision. He explained how the principal, new this year, had been very encouraging of this project, and “said thumbs up, I think it’s a good thing—go with it,” thus providing support that would not have come, Tim felt, from the previous administration. Tim described himself, in relation to Gerard’s tale, as feeling like he was “in the middle, okay, because I understand how systems, how administrations work,” and he added that the principal is “answering to another caller.” Tim added that another question for the group must be: “How can we do our thing in such a way as to walk away with a fair degree of satisfaction, knowing that we have not tried to tear down the wall, but we’ve succeeded in moving it back in the direction in which we think it should go? The conversation about language is central because often times the message will get lost in the language. We’ve got to understand that to take things out of the classroom becomes a different matter.” Tim first validated Gerard’s question: Why is the school afraid of rap and rappers? He then added some others to the discussion: How can we effect changes in our school? How can we do this strategically? What is the best language we can use to get our message across? In so doing, he maps out the pedagogical problematic, making clear that the question raised about controversial content in the poetry slam mattered, for it was integral to larger debates around cultural politics and difference in education. Clear from the event and classroom conversations is that there are no easy answers to any of these questions.



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“Say It in a Way in Which People Won’t Be Offended” This is a tale about the politics of interpretation. In an act of clever appropriation, Gerard draws on and subverts for his purposes some of the scholarly apparatus of school: underlined words and parenthetical definitions. He introduces the artwork with some aesthetic praise, that is, “the rap . . . expresses creativity, originally, and reality to the existence of the words,” a sentence that announces the talent, uniqueness, and authenticity of his poetic voice. He describes the sociocultural and historical setting of the piece by saying that the writer is going away to college, that this is thus a farewell to a phase in his life. In conversations with Tim and me, Gerard draws on the language of poetics to rationalize his choice of definitions: Bronwen: But the definition you gave of burner is not the . . . Gerard: But I didn’t, yeah but . . . Bronwen: It’s not the definition your classmates would have heard when you said burner. Gerard: Yeah, I was like, I told her [one of the teacher-organizers] it was like three definitions and from when I say it or like when you interpret it, when I interpret it when one of my classmates interpret it, when someone else interpret it, each person is going to get a different meaning of the word, and she said, “okay, it’s fine.”

Gerard uses here some of the lessons of the English classroom: interpretations are subjective and multiple; linguistic meaning is mutable, open-ended. In response to Tim’s accusation that he “withheld information,” Gerard explains that he wanted the audience to have to “sit back” and reflect on his words. At another point in our conversation, however, Gerard is more pragmatic in his description of his actions. He explains that he “rewrote the poem, took words which could mean different things, gave them what they wanted”— which, as he described elsewhere, Gerard thought meant “say it in a way in which people won’t be offended.” However, what also emerges from the events at the talent show is that the ambiguity of verbal meaning and performance can work for but also against you; the semantic indeterminacy of texts and open-endedness of interpretation processes can allow both for insider coding as well as misunderstanding, as in the white audience members who left the auditorium: “I guess it was just the tempo, probably from seeing rap or seeing it on TV and just interpreting it that, given that their own interpretation that’s what they categorized me as what I was going to be performing on

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stage, which actually wasn’t that, ’cause everybody’s words is different.” Here Gerard worries that these critics are judging him based on the stereotypes they hold about rap music and hip-hop identities, rather than the lyrics and performance itself. “When I Talk, I Teach” Toward the end of his conversation with Gerard about the events, Tim remarked “misunderstandings are always shared,” and that the question left is “what would I do differently?” He also suggested Gerard write a poem about being labeled and misinterpreted, which Gerard seemed to take to heart in the poem he performed at the slam: Cry Misunderstood is the definition when a man cry. Stab my guilty conscience until my sins die. Ask why . . . our world is filled with hatred. Misconceived notions, That float across the oceans leave others hoping and praying That one day God will stop the killing and slaying Leave night alone and just bring day in. Let me talk to you. No more I’m just saying . . . As tears roll down the side of my cheeks Another innocent kid is left in the streets No man is in the hospital for weeks getting weak. No degree in philosophy but when I talk, I teach. Some men, talk with heat not there life is lost. I’ll build a bridge with words . . . just to get my point across. Food it cost, and some people have no money. They have to steal just to satisfy the urge in their tummy. Wishing the days were sunny, but they’re cold as ice. Filled with evil in there souls like the Poltergeist. You on cloud nine, he on cloud seven. A million lives went to heaven on September 11th. Would someone please stop these tears! I don’t know what to do! All I know is I did it for you. Admitted to you, that I was afraid to live . . . ’cause I know I would die. Raced against death, ended up in a first place tie.



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I want to leave this bitter place but my heart acting shy. Who on earth is to say that the limits the sky??? And you ask why? Why you think I’m crying you bastard? It’s ’cause I’m at your funeral putting flowers on your casket.

Gerard has switched from gangsta persona to a more introspective mode. As per Tim’s suggestion, the first line takes up the theme of misinterpretation, though in relation to a man’s tears rather than to generational and cultural stereotyping. While the rap was a playful ode to hip-hop “hardness,” “Cry” advocates for a more emotionally sensitive version of masculinity. While this piece could still be titled “Street Life,” in this incarnation the streets—its battles and its victims, and indeed violence and hatred more generally—prompt an anguished appeal for peace. Gerard is here the teacher, not the “player.” And this is a teacher who mobilizes the power of language (“when I talk, I teach”) to build bridges and foster understanding (“to get my point across”). The two versions of “Street Life” also suggest that Gerard has switched genres, moving from gangsta rap with its playful, hyberbolic conventions, to the slam poetry genre that is often politically provocative, critical, and self-reflexive (Low 2006). However, the poem also draws on some common themes in rap music, especially in its “conscious” renditions: poetry as pedagogy, as tool for healing, and as vehicle for street wisdom. Although it would be hard to prove that the controversies around the talent night rap prompted this new voice in “Cry,” I do think that the event and the conversations with Tim about it, as well as the spoken word/hip-hop course more generally, opened up an important discursive space in the school. The student was confronted with, and so explored, the complex politics of interpretation and representation that shape relations between schools and youth, and he was able to experiment with new modes of address for different audiences. This is also a story about the power of language. Central to Gerard’s new identity as teacher in his poem is his skill with language, for as he says when “I talk, I teach.” Gerard demonstrates an understanding of the strength and importance of language, of the need to “build a bridge of words” to get one’s point across. When this student asked for some fixed guidelines for the slam so that misunderstandings would not happen again and added that he might want to use cursing but didn’t want to offend anyone, Tim responded, “Give them your most thoughtful, meaningful poem.” Tim also insisted that “language is the most powerful tool you own, more powerful than a gun,” and he advised his students to use all “precious pieces of language” with thought and

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care and not to “cast pearls among swine” by overusing expletives to create sensation rather than meaning. He then advised Gerard “as a mindful person, [to] find a language to deal with controversy in a way no one has heard.” Another lesson from the events of the talent show rap is about the sometimes conflicted and evolving relationship between orality and writing. Tim told Gerard that people were responding to what had been committed to the page when they made decisions about him and his work, adding that this is why signed documents take on a weight. While Tim stressed to Gerard that written language acts in the manner of a contract, Gerard tells us at one point that “performance is a definition,” a comment that suggests he feels there might be less onus on the writer to determine in advance the significance of the rap. In his slam poem, he associates “talk,” not writing, with teaching. After Gerard’s initial outburst and account of the talent night, I asked Tim whether or not Gerard’s rap was a freestyle, improvised on the spot—like the ones he had performed for the class—or written in advance. Tim did not know and had not considered the significance of this distinction; the principal said he thought it was a freestyle. One of the organizers told Tim she was not certain if Gerard had stuck to the text as she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Not only do these uncertainties and misconceptions speak to the communication gaps between black students and white teachers, but they raise the question of where this rap’s meaning lies: in the written lyrics, in the conversations with the organizers, in the interaction between the live audience and rappers, or in the voices and bodies of the performers and dancers? Further, as Tim discussed with me in conversation after the class, the confusion over whether or not the piece was a freestyle “points to the fact that we as adults have to know the language” before making any judgments about it. “We Got to Be the Pioneers” Clear in the tale of the talent show rap is that decisions about language, style, and theme are inextricable from questions of audience and purpose—one of the fundamental lessons of the language arts curriculum. After Gerard’s account, Michael worried aloud, “If we actually do do the slam” and the principal is there and “he doesn’t like what he hears, he is going to make you shut it down.” Rather than outlaw any words or themes, taking control over the content of the slam, Tim stressed the responsibility of the writer to use language with care and thoughtfulness. When Tim suggested the students use the slam



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as an opportunity to move “the wall . . . back in the direction we think it should go,” he introduced the notion of strategy, figuring the students as besieged, confined by a wall of incomprehension that they needed to gradually work against. As befits a “General,” Carlo seized on this concept and elaborated his position on the uses of strategy in a series of elegant soliloquies about the opportunity the slam posed. He argued: I foresee myself as one of the biggest supporters of freedom of speech. . . . But I mean it’s like if we’re going to do this . . . whatever you’re going to say, show them we can say it in an intelligent way . . . you make your poetry thoughtful poetry. Girls and money and cars and all that stuff, we can do that, we good at that, but we also think on a higher level. . . . If we show them we can think on a higher level and maybe next year the class after us could do some more . . . but we got to be the first class, we got to be the pioneers.

He then explained how spoken word offered an ideal opportunity to show “them,” more specifically people “outside our hip-hop culture,” their generation’s thoughtfulness. Because these outsiders see rap as “noise,” they dismiss its message. With spoken word, you “have the beat in your head, but they’re not going to hear it . . . so they have to listen to your words.” Carlo contrasts rap lyrics spoken over an instrumental soundscape with the poetry without music performed at slams. Carlo continued: We write a lot of things that they don’t know we write about. . . . We care about issues they don’t know that we care about. If we show them what we can about these issues and we learn about these things and we can do it in this creative way of language . . . and do the things we do best, they can’t help listen to it then—if they don’t they just ignorant . . . they can’t say I didn’t listen ’cause it was a bunch of noise—hell no—it was dead silent. He was speaking, that’s all. . . . With our poetry what I want us to do—me personally—is to have them leave the theater thinking, like, damn those are some talented young men and women. . . . They got things to say—know something else . . . that’s the future of all of us . . . we’re the future and they got to know that . . . the things we have to say even though we may say it in a different way, that shit is important.

Carlo makes an eloquent plea to his classmates to use the slam as a pedagogic opportunity to teach those who dismiss African American and Latino students, hip-hop culture, and even youth as superficial, materialistic, and libido-driven “noise” they would rather not listen to. While “they” might

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miss or dismiss the messages in rap music, lost in its densely produced “wall of noise” technique of orchestration (Baker 1993, 44), they cannot ignore the force and clarity of the solitary voice, speaking over “dead silence.” “Head Versus Heart Language,” and Something In-between Our conversations throughout the term on the politics of language and audience were wide-ranging: topics included the historical and contemporary politics and dynamics of the use of the N-word, the cultural/racial intricacies of who can and cannot use this term, as well as the challenge and possibilities of parody. Toward the end of that first class, Carlo articulated a very different position on the issue of the slam and controversial language and content. Tim was making a case that “we can know what an audience is capable of handling,” and he reminded the students of a writing activity from the previous term in which they wrote and performed poems using one of their “many voices,” evidence that they knew that “different situations used a different voice.” One student, Jamal, protested that people were dictating “what is proper language for the slam” and objected on the grounds that “it’s not really spoken word if we got to hold back what we going to say.” He then suggested we put a disclaimer on the posters advertising the event: “Expect explicit language.” Carlo concurred “If we going to invite classes or invite teachers or what not, on the invitation just tell them to be open-minded. Very simple, you be open-minded. If you don’t want to be open-minded—don’t come—know what I’m saying—don’t come. . . . If you’re going to see somebody speak what’s on their mind you’ve got to expect some controversy.” Carlo has here moved from arch strategist (on how to get youth listened to) to his earlier position as “one of the biggest supporters of freedom of speech.” After class, Tim observed to me that Carlo’s comments acted “like bookends” to our class conversation and that he put a voice to his own contradiction, which is an “inner struggle” between “head language” and “heart language.” Like Gerard, Carlo is split between wanting to impress and wanting to reject, both understandable responses within a context where one is continually being judged. Tim also suggested there is a pedagogical value in expressions of ambivalence: “There’s something to be said for hearing oneself say that, and for the class hearing him say that.” This struggle recalls Ellsworth’s (1989) description of the classroom as the site of a “multiplicity of knowledges” that are “contradictory, partial, and irreducible,” though in this case it



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refers not only to the complex ways of knowing between students, but also within. In a study of civic intergroup dialog programs on race in midsized cities across the United States Walsh (2007) found that participants regularly expressed ambivalent (that is, conflicting or inconsistent) perspectives and opinions as they moved between desires for unity across race and awareness of the importance of differences. Although scholars of civic participation have tended to view ambivalence “as a function of lack of information or of a less-than-sophisticated ideology” (139) and thus as an impediment to democratic deliberative processes, Walsh instead explores the democratic potential of ambivalence in individuals’ perspectives on public issues. Here she draws on Hochschild’s “cautious optimism” (139) in response to similar findings on citizens’ persistent positional ambivalence and inconsistency on public issues, proposing that the “presence of ambivalence and disjunction in individuals signifies awareness of, rather than obliviousness to, the complexities of the political and social context” (140). Walsh found that the ambivalence of one participant could spread to others, as in instances in which “people who made unity claims were confronted with the fact that even some of those who wanted to see all people as equal also saw a value in paying attention to difference” (140). Even if conflicting opinions at the individual and collective level were not reconciled, they coexisted in the space of the discussion group, calling “into question common distinctions” and potentially helping members “think critically about contradictions in the political culture too” (14) while outlining the many dimensions of the issues at hand. As seen in Gerard’s account as well as Carlo’s response, the talent night rap seemed to breed ambivalence due in part to the students’ awareness of the competing claims on what can and should happen in school and their understanding of the multiple audiences for their performances. By sharing something he feels good about, his ability to rap and perform, Gerard wanted to entertain and impress his peers but also the adults in the building who oversee his education and who he thinks have made unfair judgments about him. If the adults weren’t also part of his intended audience, I don’t think he would have chosen the talent night as the venue to showcase his work. He already had a reputation among the students as a gifted freestyler, and he could have continued to keep this part of his identity separate from official school events. Carlo’s “bookends” show that he is passionate about wanting to speak his mind and having his friends do the same and about his teachers being able

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to really hear them and respect them. Part of the work of learning to make informed choices is in understanding, and working to balance between, competing needs and desires of one’s own and society’s. Poetry is a genre more conducive than most to expressions of ambivalence, less bound than, say, the expository or argumentative essay to conventions of coherence and clarity. Speaking as a teacher of poetry, Tucker (2003) claims that ambivalence is ambiguity’s affective and ethical counterpart: Always to some degree a matter of tact, it gropes beyond the rules toward the unknown, putting a poem’s relation to theses and doctrines not out of reach, exactly, but on a new footing. This new footing must be felt for, yet when felt for, it will nearly always be found by students whom the language of poetry has enfranchised to make fresh unbidden inventory of their rich but dis­organized store of experience. Life, unbidden, provides more than enough ambivalence to go around; poetry, examined, provides the words with which this open secret may be known about life and may thus, as knowledge, be wielded in living. (445)

Just as Gerard confronted some of the implications of the ambiguity of language and metaphor through his rap, its glossary, and the related reflections and conversations, so too did Carlo and the rest of the class have to grapple with the “open secret” of life’s ambiguity: the slipperiness of meaning, the complexity of experience, tensions between desire and interest, and the need to make choices without guarantees or certainty. Tim helped turn this classroom into a space for exploring the ambiguity of both text and life. First, he intervened into the class conversation on controversial content in the slam by suggesting that there exists a position somewhere between resistance and capitulation: a place of negotiation and strategy where the students make informed choices and work through their implications. Tim also chose to confront the talent night controversy headon, interested in the pedagogical significance of Gerard’s lyrics and glossary, which he considered worthy of the class’ attention. Finally, given the strong disconnect between black youth culture and mainstream schooling, Tim’s decision to build a curriculum around rap and spoken word culture meant that this disconnect, and some of its dynamics and implications, became part of the lesson at hand. School habits of language, style, theme, and behavior get exposed as specific conventions, as do those of popular culture; placed in juxtaposition, both sets of practices become objects of inquiry.



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The students who performed in the slam seemed to come to at least a temporary resolution between the head and the heart, between their desire to be taken seriously as poets and social critics by an outside audience and their need to “not hold back” and speak in a language that resonated with them. They investigated issues at the individual, local, and international level: selfknowledge, stereotypes, heartbreak, racism, gang violence, the school budget crisis and proposals to cut arts funding, terrorism, and the war on Iraq. They very judiciously used the occasional curse word to such effect as impact, juxtaposition, humor, and accent. The tale of the talent night rap illustrates the argument that the place where meaning breaks down can be a site of potential learning and new knowledge. All of these lessons about communication—the politics of interpretation, the elusiveness of meaning, the power of language, the responsibilities of the writer in relation to audience and purpose, the dynamic relationship between the oral and written—are some of the most valuable ones that schools can convey to students in this hyperinformation era. Here, people are addressed, invited, enticed, and coerced in a historically unsurpassed diversity and volume of forms. This noisy communicative terrain is by nature a battlefield of competing, sometimes contradictory, voices and interests that students need ways of thinking and being to negotiate. Another important implication of the talent night rap is that the task for adults of listening to youth is complicated by generational and multicultural (racial, gender, class, and other) differences, many of which are embedded within and shaped by popular culture. Such complications, however, are not excuses for disengagement. We cannot ignore youth culture, hoping it will go away. In the terms of sociocultural learning theory, culture doesn’t just provide a context for individual learning; instead, the individual is embedded within culture, actively producing and being produced by it (Rogoff 2003). This means popular youth culture is always already present in classrooms and other spaces in which adults and youth come together. Knowing the “language” of youth also means knowing the conventions of emergent genres (for example, in hip-hop culture, the “freestyle,” the “skit”) as well as popular idiom. This theme of knowing and not knowing the language will emerge at several points throughout this book, first in the next chapter in relation to a story Tim tells the class about his early days as a teacher. This curriculum on rap and spoken word culture can be read as an attempt to start learning the language and also to invite into the classroom conversa-

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tions about the tensions between the languages of formal schooling and of popular culture. P o s t s c r ip t : “Gerard” has

gone on to some celebrity: he reigned as freestyle champion for seven weeks on Black Entertainment Television’s nationally televised freestyle battle show, 106 and Park, and as a rapper currently opens for other rappers at local shows, has toured campuses, and produced his own album, which is available for download on the Internet.

4 “Making Sense Out of Worlds t h a t A r e Di f f e r e n t ” Race and H ip-Hop Peda g o g i e s

All:

Me

Alisha:

Too black:



My brown skin and brown eyes



I am black.



And after all the trials



There have been to bear



I am still cut by the whips



Of rage and insecurities



Shattering my soul into pieces,



And penetrating those around me

Alisha, Angel:

I can’t just be me.



I am in a place that does not accept me



For what I am and can only be.

Alisha:

They only see my mistakes as defeat,



If I stand up for myself



I am considered defensive



And when I make it to the top,



It is considered rare.



They see my silence as ignorance,



And my confidence as arrogance,



Why?



Because whenever I stand up for my race



I am considered

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Alisha, Angel:

Too black

Angel, Shannon:

Too white

Shannon:

You see my pale skin and think I’m innocent



My blonde hair, you think I’m naïve,



My blue eyes and you think I’m blind.



How many times have I been called “white bitch”



Because I won’t look into a stranger’s eyes?



This generation still weeps over generations lost



And you tell me that I did this,



I enslaved your ancestors.



Do I look like I wave a confederate flag? ...

Angel, Shannon:

I see past your skin



See past mine.

All:

Intertwined

Angel:

Roots, roots which run so deep,



Deep into my soul



Buried and kept secret.



Roots of what essence?



Past, present or future.



Being black or white,



Neither the answer to my race,



Or the key to who I am.



What exactly am I?



Two things combined, intertwined.



Through society’s eyes blinded by color



Do I have to be one or the other? ...



Why do I have to specify?



To make it easier for society to criticize?

T h r e e y o u n g w o m e n i n t h e 2 0 0 2 A P c l a ss — Alisha,

who is black, Shannon, who is white, and Angel, who self-identifies as mixed race— performed this poem. In a small group interview, they described the writing process in which Alisha wrote her part, and then Shannon, and then Angel, who said that reading the other parts made her feel “a lot better about myself



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because I didn’t know other people felt the same way and got stereotyped, ’cause all my life I’ve been like questioned, what race are you, it’s like why do I have to pick one, I’m my own race.” Shannon also discussed the importance of interweaving the three poetic voices, so that rather than seeming like they were each targeting a particular group, black or white, as the problem, the sections “balanced each other out and it became all of the problems are because of racism of all kinds.” This poem suggests a number of things relevant to the discussion that follows. First, some students felt burdened by the demands and narrow expectations of racial identification and looked to the poetry slam as a place to share their frustrations. Second, in the poem, these three young women sensed some commonality of experience in the limits of the racialized identities imposed on them by others. Third, despite this commonality, their skin colors bring with them very different stereotypes and the experiences they share are in many ways incommensurate. Shannon’s frustrations with the way she is positioned as “innocent,” “naive,” or a “white bitch” by men she passes on the street speak to a different, and less disabling, set of challenges than do Alisha’s combination of rage and insecurity and sense of the double binds she faces as a black woman. Indeed, Shannon’s refusal to acknowledge her own inevitable complicity in systems that privilege white people in North America, despite the fact that she didn’t “wave a confederate flag,” is a common response to discussions of race and racism by white people, and an impediment to antiracist pedagogies (McIntosh 2002). Angel’s sections serve to remind of the rigidity of concepts of race and their attendant politics, and the costs of binary black/white notions of identity for those who do not see themselves represented. White Kids and Hip-Hop In Chapter 2’s typology of hip-hop realness, blackness emerged as one its most important dimensions. The force of blackness as authentication in hip-hop is illustrated, in part, by its relationship to whiteness, including the ways blackness gets negotiated by white rappers in the United States and elsewhere.1 Much has been written about whiteness and hip-hop, sparked in part by the release of Nielsen SoundScan surveys and sales figures that have been interpreted, since the early 1990s, as indicators that as much as 70 percent of the audience for rap music is white.2 While this figure has been widely distributed, it has been challenged for wrongly equating buyers with listeners, ignoring the widespread

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unofficial distribution circuits of music through handmade mixed-tapes and, more recently, illegal downloading, and for ignoring the limits of SoundScan’s data sources (which don’t include small “mom and pop” stores, or even major sellers such as Starbucks and Burlington Coat factory that don’t participate in SoundScan). The figure also ignores a flaw in SoundScan’s demographic data, which specifies whether buying locations are in high-income or low-income neighborhoods and not the race of the purchasers (Kitwana 2005b) and so seems to assume that there is no black suburban middle class. Regardless of the accuracy of the sales figures, hip-hop culture has profoundly shaped contemporary adolescence, and youth across cultural backgrounds take inspiration from their black peers, real and imagined. This is nothing new: throughout the twentieth century African Americans have consistently defined what cool looks, feels, and sounds like. It might be, however, that previous incarnations of black cool haven’t been imagined as quite so ­socially dangerous by the dominant majority as they are in a media-saturated society in which popular culture so profoundly shapes identity. The public outcry against rap music and hip-hop emerged most loudly when white youth became increasingly hip-hop-identified, a shift that has to do with the mainstreaming of rap music and also with the rise of white rappers, including, for instance, the much maligned Vanilla Ice as well as the Beastie Boys and Eminem, thought to have played a significant part in attracting white youth to hip-hop. Accompanying widespread worrying about the fate of white middle-class youth have been concerns about the appropriation of hip-hop by white culture in the colonizing mode of rock n’ roll in which “blacks create and whites luxuriate,” embodied in the (paradigmatic) figure of Elvis Presley, as well as the Rolling Stones and others (Aaron 1999, 4). Critics of the relationship between hip-hop culture and whiteness also invoke the commodification of “a black death” by white music industry execs to white audiences (Watkins 2005, 2) and the more general marketing and packaging of blackness as fetish to white suburban youth in the manner of minstrelsy. (See, for instance, one of hip-hop’s most persistent critics, journalist Stanley Crouch, who excoriates rappers who are “interested in peddling their minstrel act to the white boys that they say buy four out of five of their videos.”3) Though as Aaron (1999) points out, even minstrelsy, in which both black and white performers donned cork “black face,” was a complex and ambivalent cocktail of “prejudice, self-hatred, forbidden lust, and genuine respect; it threw out feelings onstage that couldn’t be expressed anywhere else” (4).



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The phenomenon of the “wigger,” a term that gets used to describe white kids into hip-hop, white kids too into hip-hop, or white kids just seen as “acting black” by their peers is also a complex one. As Kitwana (2005a) has explored at length, it is not just an instance of cultural appropriation but instead an indication that rap music’s oppositional and critical voice speaks more widely to youth of a generation that feels disregarded by adults, and who are inheriting less secure economic futures than many of their parents. And who inhabit a pop culture landscape whose racial dynamics are changing rapidly (Aaron 1999). Kitwana (2005b) examines these changes, arguing that “old racial politics and new racial politics collide with regional differences, personal experience, family history, pop culture and individual experience” (78), and that hip-hop is an important tool for navigating this new landscape. As what Giroux has called the “only popular culture that takes seriously the relationship between race and democracy in America,” hip-hop culture offers a space for youth “trying to figure themselves out” (qtd. in Aaron 1999, 5). This can lead to an ironic situation in which not only does “black death” resonate with white audiences but also “black consciousness.” There has been a noticeable whitening of the concert-going audience for socially and politically conscious underground hip-hop, a phenomenon accompanying a decreased mainstream appetite for politicized rap music (Kitwana 2005b): Whereas a decade ago artists consistently banged out social commentary with mass appeal, today the closest equivalents are Kanye West, Common, and the Roots, whose stance on wax focuses more on aesthetics than resistance—closer to A Tribe Called Quest, say, than to Public Enemy. PE’s more direct lyrical descendants have been ghettoized in the underground, with high-end sales in the 25,000-to-50,000 range—over months or years, rather than weeks. (2)

While these underground artists continue to attract sizeable audiences live in concert (playing, for instance up to two hundred concerts a year in midsized venues), these audiences are, in many parts of the United States, predominantly and increasingly white (Kitwana 2005b). This can lead to an ironic situation in which hip-hop’s counterculture, including radical black consciousness groups such as Dead Prez, is largely supported, at least financially, by white fans. The premise that hip-hop culture can provide positive spaces of exchange and learning for youth across differences certainly bears true in the research I have been conducting, with colleagues, on multilingual rap music in Montreal.

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A number of rappers we’ve interviewed describe trying to capture the linguistic dynamism of their multilingual and multicultural neighborhoods, and some talk about working to learn other languages, and other sets of cultural references, through the rap that they listen to. However, like all cultural exchanges, this learning through hip-hop brings with it the possibility of misunderstanding, particularly in light of the paucity of popular information about the lives of black people in North America; Aaron (1999) warns of the danger that white hip-hop kids’ familiarity with black pop culture tends to give them a false sense of familiarity with, and knowledge about, black people. Neither black nor white rock fans assume that most white people are like, say, Dave Matthews or Sarah McLachlan. But most white hip-hop fans tend to think DMX or Method Man represents some essential quality about black people. (7)

This problem extends to black youth. Purportedly the subject of so many of the lyrics, they are also victims of a regime of representation that offers a paucity of images to think and dream with about who they are and might be. This nuanced problematic helps explain why in both years of the performance poetry classroom project race was a recurring subject in class discussion and in individual and group interviews with the students. These discussions delved into the politics of race, culture, language, and ownership, and at points they were very heated. In the rest of this chapter, I examine some of these moments for what they reveal about popular conceptions of rap music among young people and about the tricky work of sharing the self and culture in contemporary classrooms across the continued fault lines of race in the United States. For also central to the discursive dynamics of the classrooms under study is that groups of predominantly black students (the Advanced Poetry class was the exception) were exploring hip-hop and “spoken word” with a white teacher, a black poet, and a white university professor. I’m interested in how questions of race and difference emerged and got taken up, how race shaped conversations about hip-hop, and in students’ poetry and engagements more generally with the course—about race as a site of discursive tension and of learning. First, I concentrate on the students’ perspectives on the issues as revealed in classroom conversation as well as in the end-of-year interviews. I explore one of the more conflict-ridden conversations on the subject, and then do a grammatical discourse analysis of some of the interviews with students on the subject of race. The second half of the paper zooms in on the teacher. I discuss the subject of white teachers of racial minority students, and African American students in



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particular, in relation to the literature on culturally relevant pedagogy. Then I narrate and unpack one story Tim told the class that both works to reinscribe and to disrupt dominant narratives around race and which therefore performs some of the dilemmas and opportunities of teaching across cultures. Flippin’ School Scripts Before I go on to discuss the significant race-related tensions that arose during the project, I want to share one of the strengths of hip-hop pedagogies in urban schools in relation to the business as usual of racial politics in schools. In order to make the case, I’ll briefly review the demographics of the 2002 classrooms in the project, a study in contrast. One was mostly black and all male, and composed of students taking the Pacesetter English rather than the advancedplacement option. The other class, more than 50 percent white and co-ed, was the Advanced Poetry course that housed many of the school’s creative writing majors (most of whom were taking Advanced Placement English as well), and some of the very top students in the graduating class. The boy’s class was a less academically successful group, with only two creative writing majors—many of the others were majoring in theater tech. Some were in music. The school, like all of the schools in the city school district, is mostly black, then Latino and then white, though because of the school’s relatively strong academic reputation and arts magnet status, there are more white students here than at most of the other city schools. The other city public school that attracts a number of white students is a science magnet school with an International Baccalaureate program. Many of the white students who go to the school come from one of the two solidly middle-class neighborhoods in the city school district, though of course, not all do. The white students are also highly overrepresented in the school’s group of academic honors students. While the white students in the school tended to receive the school’s literary awards, Jaz, the student awarded the top score by a mixed panel of judges, is black. Most of the poets who performed at the slam were black, and most of them wowed the audience with their work. In the two subsequent slams that I attended, the winning poet was also black. In 2002, Laura, a white student in the Advanced Poetry class and one of the strongest students in the school, spoke about how much she learned from and about some of her fellow students. She explained that while she had not “made an effort to get to know the students in the boy’s class” (for she hadn’t been in their classes, in part because she mostly

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took advanced placement classes, and also because she had few friends who were boys), the way they “expressed emotions and social ideas” impressed her. I asked her if she noted any distinctive patterns in the poems from the different classes, and she responded that she felt that the black students “tend to have a better cultural awareness from being on the other side of the whole dominant culture” and gave Gerard’s poem “Crying” as an example: His poem, the one about the tears, crying, and he addressed a whole slough of issues on racism on different counts, racism against Arabs, and racism against black people, and gender issues and all sorts of things. That’s just the way he talked about this, what he knew and his experience of those things. To some degree all of us have known some of that because we’re all in this school together, but I think that the black students understand better.

Laura also speculated that an experience of marginalization shared by the black students meant that many spoke “straight from the heart,” pointing to the power of their poetry in “the type of language, the slang, the kind of the grittiness of the language or the bam bam bam.” While this poses a danger that the black students get read as the “voice” of the ghetto, Laura also seems to recognize some of the epistemological privilege that comes with experiences of oppression. Another white student remarked on the different voices publically during the slam performance when on stage he introduced his love poem by saying: “I’m sorry if I’m not angry.” This comment can be read as an attempt at minimizing the impact of the black poets’ words, or alternately, as a recognition, like Laura’s, of the different worldviews of those who grow up “marginalized” by white privilege. In that interview, Laura described feeling as though she had gained a great deal from the experience of being a racial minority in her school. She explained that she “would never go anywhere but a city school and I would never send my kids anywhere but a city school. . . . There’s just something here that’s not at a wealthy suburban school. . . . I think it’s because we get people from all walks of life here.” Her sentiments were echoed by another white student in the class, Bill, whose slam poem made a strong case for the value of integrated city schools and which was addressed to an imagined audience of smug and judgmental suburbanites: And to you who sit on the outside and throw stones, condone the throne, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. You look at your districts and grin at your funds, you claim lack of drugs and guns. Your schools are about learning and fun. You’re kidding son.



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If all you see is white you go blind. If all you see is white you go blind. If all you see is white you go blind. You must be out of your mind. Meanwhile I go to school with black, Asian, Caucasian And I’ve met my better half And I am proud to learn in a nation, with people of different color and sexual orientation. ... Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from those around me, those sounding a call to me, telling me to see the world in a different way. If I wasn’t brought up in the city I’d have nothing intelligent to say.

Bill’s poem is a powerful ode to the value of cross-cultural learning environments, mini models of the nation, and an indictment of predominantly white suburbs in which students are “blind” from their lack of exposure to difference. The value of the performance poetry course, in the final term of high school for the students in both years of the project, was that it gave the mic and center stage to whoever was willing to take it. They had an opportunity to share what they’d learned and what they knew, helping them to see the world “in a different way.” “The Hood Is a Black Thing” I turn now to classroom conversations about race from the second year of the project. Race came up more regularly in 2004 than in 2002, due in part to precedent set by the course the male students had taken with Tim in the fall term. The course had explored representations of sport in literature and film, and given the racialized dynamics of sport in North America, race had been an explicit theme of the course. I will examine in some detail a discussion about race, held during two class sessions, which was one of the most intense and difficult conversations we had all term. The conversation recalls Chapter 3’s exploration of ambivalence and learning, offering another example of the conflicted space of classroom discourse. About half way through the term, we were discussing rap as poetry, when Tim asked the class why they thought schools didn’t usually embrace rap. Two black students, Marcel and Jaron, responded passionately “they think it’s dangerous” and “they are worried it will rub off.” When Tim asked who

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“they” was, a few students responded “Caucasian kids,” “suburban kids,” and “administrators.” Tim then contrasted the critical scrutiny directed at rap with the more generous societal attitude toward rock music, noting that even ­Marilyn Manson’s person is distinguished from his art in public debates about him; to this, one black student responded “people are racist to rap,” and that “rap is more black. The hood is a black thing.” The bell then rang, closing the class, but Andy, one of the white students in the class, came to talk to Tim afterward, for he’d had his hand up and hadn’t had a chance to talk. He felt frustrated by the boundaries he saw some students erecting around hiphop and claimed that “people have to get over the race issue.” Andy described the situation as one in which “people need to establish a hierarchy where someone can’t go, a sanctuary, to hold onto something you can’t have,” which Tim speculated goes back to slavery and the survival strategies developed by ­Africans to hold on to their language and culture after their bodies had been bought and sold. Andy’s concerns were echoed by the two other white male students in the class who came to talk to Tim before class the next day. They had felt uncomfortable and had wanted to leave during the discussion of hip-hop. In response, Tim opened class with the question, “Who owns or can understand black culture?” John, one of the students who’d come to see Tim before class, added, “Is it because I can’t understand, or because you won’t let me understand?” Akil responded, “You’re not out there chilling on Greene St.,” to which Jaron added, “When I see a white boy, I assume you have money.” John individualized Tim’s more general discussion question, prompting personalized responses in kind from two of his classmates, who set him outside their culture on three, interrelated, grounds—he was white, which meant he had money, and he was not a part of the street culture of young mostly black teens in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. These comments speak to the racial segregation of everyday life for young people in urban centers across the United States, where blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor and concentrated in the inner city, and where school districts are regularly more segregated than they were in the early school desegregation period (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002).4 After Jaron’s statement about white boys and money, Marcel interjected, “I don’t think we should have used the word “they,” which Tim remarked was a “profound statement.” Rashidah, responding perhaps to Marcel’s point about the limits of generalization, next said that she didn’t like the way they con-



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tinued to talk “about black culture as if it’s a whole,” with Tim wondering in response why “we don’t often hear that black isn’t one thing.” This prompted the following exchange: Rashidah: We shouldn’t forget that this is a very segregated country. Within the black community there is an understanding of differences, but when you’re a minority— Melanie [white]: No race is a “they.” Rashidah:—the comfort of an “us” when you’re a minority.

On a number of other occasions, Rashidah worked to move the conversation from the level of individual experience to larger theoretical frames of understanding, speculating, for instance, that “when you are the dominant culture, you don’t have to adapt,” and that the problem with statements like “let’s all get along” is that they often mean “let’s do it my way.” After these comments, one black student, Wilson, interjected that the discussion was “not about race, but about groups, neighborhoods,” and that he in fact chose not to hang out on the street corner, rendering more complex the portrait of local street life. His intervention was ignored, however, and the conversation remained on the subject of race: Andy: We need to come together as a group and find an identity. I’ve been harassed in the past and don’t find walking up to a group of black people very welcoming. Laticia: Walking up on the corner would be a big step. Have you ever sat with us black people in the cafeteria? You could talk to me! Tim: Topics like this often push our buttons. Try to put our emotional self aside. No personal attacks. Andy: I don’t feel attacked. Every time I didn’t sit with you, you didn’t sit with me, either.

This confrontation prompted a number of other contributions. Rashidah reminded the class that “we forget this is a very segregated county.” Marcel commented, “Outside of schools, white people don’t feel comfortable hanging out with me.” Laticia asked, “What are we going to do about this?” To which Marcel responded, “I like where I sit in the cafeteria.” One young woman, Dominica, shared a recent experience as a way, it seemed, to show some limitations of the assumptions we make based on race: she described her recent visit to a state college and the introductory meeting in which she didn’t know anyone. She looked around the room and saw two other black girls and thought

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she’d spend time with them throughout the day. Instead, she ended up talking with one white girl and “one Spanish girl from New Jersey” who were really nice. Another student, Jesus, pointed out that his table in the cafeteria is “mixed.” Some students responded to Marcel’s comment about where they do and don’t feel comfortable, with Jesus saying he felt that discrimination was less about color than about “attitude and personality,” giving as example the way he “feels dissed” driving up to a high-end supermarket in a wealthy, mostly white suburb. To this, Tim added, “Have you seen the piece of junk I’m driving?” Melanie, a white girl, added that she feels “separate” from friends with money. And Jorge added, “Everything is a stereotype. I’ve been working at [local supermarket] for three years, and I don’t understand why they are afraid of me.” This prompted Desrata to say, “I don’t want to talk about this no more,” a proposal Marcel seconded by asking, “Are we going to talk about poetry tomorrow?” Tim closed the class by saying that we all needed to look for opportunities to make a difference. Walsh’s (2007) study of civic intergroup dialog programs on race suggested that expressions of ambivalence at both the individual and group levels were important parts of democratic deliberative process since they mapped out the complexities of the issues at hand. Ambivalent statements make clear that humans often feel divided between competing claims or perspectives, and between their desires and what they think might be in their or others’ best interest. We certainly see ambivalence here in, for instance, Rashidah’s movement from an insistence on respect for and understanding of the differences within black culture, to her statement about the importance and comforts of a unified black “we” in a discriminatory culture. To make the latter point, she reworded Marcel’s point about the limits of an essentialized “they” into an essential, though perhaps now strategic, “us.” Marcel recognized that white people outside of school don’t feel comfortable with him as a friend, but he also wasn’t interested in moving from his all-black table in the cafeteria. Taken together, the perspectives voiced in the conversation enact a dynamic similar to the one Walsh documented within the community dialogs on race. The positions moved between one pole desiring unity across race and culture (we are all the same in the ways that really matter) and the other committed to the irreducible nature of difference (we are so different that you could never understand). Not surprisingly, the white students, who haven’t experienced institutionalized and systemic racism and, perhaps, the slippage between “let’s all get along/let’s do it my way,” were proponents of unity. Andy



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commented that they “needed to get over the race thing” and that the group needed to “come together and find an identity,” and Melanie said she also felt separate from friends with money, an indirect reply to Jaron’s comment that he assumed all white people had money. However, Dominica’s and Jesus’s contributions also worked in support of that goal. Another important finding of Walsh’s (2007) was the role of conflict, debate, and “combative speech” in the dialog groups’ “constant struggle with a desire to find common ground and yet respect difference” (13). This conflicts with the literature in political science on the importance of respectful dialog to processes of civic deliberation, and with the wants of the facilitators of the groups studied (chosen it seemed, for their ability to diffuse conflict and to “maintain decorum” [156]). Instead, Walsh argues it is “participants’ use of debate as well as dialogue, despite facilitator’s injunctions, that allows them to demonstrate greater respect for each other” (13). Making a case for rethinking the place of struggle in “deliberative democracy, Walsh describes how it was the use of debate within the context of dialog that enabled participants to convey sincerity. If the participants had simply listened and not engaged in the often combative task of reasoning through topics together, they would not have had a chance to demonstrate that their desire to understand was genuine. Because these participants asked each other difficult questions when it might have been easier to avoid conflict, they conveyed that they were taking each other seriously. Without challenging each other, they might not have created connections amongst themselves. (156)

Walsh’s statement raises the question of what differences this discussion, difficult and emotionally charged as it was, might have made? Did it help to forge connections between students? Did it foster mutual understanding? These are crucial questions for teachers who tend to avoid the topic of race in classrooms for fear of conflict and anger (Bolgatz 2005). These are also complicated questions to answer. First, a number of students felt very strongly that they did not want to keep talking about race, including Desrata and Marcel, as the conclusion to the conversation made clear. In fact, when the topic came up a few weeks later, Desrata interjected that she doesn’t like talking about race, a sentiment echoed by Wilson who came with her to talk to Tim after class. They both described a frustration with discussions that they didn’t see as productive; as Desrata put it, “If you start debating about it, you’re not going to finish because it’s a cycle that goes nowhere, you’re not going

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to find anywhere to fight back. I really don’t like talking unless you have a deep opinion or a good observation about it, ’cause you never get anywhere.” When I pointed out that the students that day had been arguing about the ­racial politics in the school, something potentially within their power to change, she told of the difficulty of trying to affect the opinions of people “brought up” differently in their homes and with dissimilar perspectives. Desrata added that this might be “why it never gets anywhere, they want to see it from their point of view, I think that’s why people do this tug-of-war, like ‘I want you on my side.’” Wilson distinguished between words and action, describing how it seems “pointless” to talk about racial conflict, since “all people been doing for so many years is talking about it, and there’s very little action behind the talk,” and that “if I was able to change, just me personally, if I could change everything, then I would. But since it’s got to be a collective thing, everybody’s got to be on the same page, and that tends to be the major problem.” During the year-end interviews, Jaron, Akil, and Marcel echoed these sentiments when I asked them about this moment in the course. Marcel noted, “You talk about stuff, and you talk about it for a day and get all rowdy rowdy, so you gonna want a change, but then there ain’t gonna be no change, so there’s really no point dwelling on it, talking bout it for weeks.” Akil described a frustration that “everyone’s got their own opinion on the subject, I mean, just from us having this conversation there’s gonna be arguments, and you know their opinions are probably not gonna to change, so basically you just get more frustrated with the situation.” The students’ comments speak to their sense of general powerlessness when it comes to changing the minds of others, or in effecting social change. This recalls Carlo’s frustration in Chapter 1 with student poets talking the talk but not walking the walk of social critique and change. Studies of collective deliberative processes have shown that unless groups “settle on a shared narrative or consensus, the participants will experience a sense of frustration” (Walsh 2007, 163). However, Walsh rarely witnessed this frustration in the civic discussion groups on race she studied and speculated that “when participants know the purpose of public talk is partly to listen to others, hearing different stories is less likely to lead to frustration” (164). It might be that the students in this 2004 class experienced frustration with these class discussions because they did not seem relevant to a course in which they were to be “talking about poetry.” And their lack of interest in the classes led by the university literature professor about African American



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literary history might mean that to them, talking about poetry meant talking about their poetry. However, the black students in the class might also not want to talk about race in a mixed context. Critical whiteness theory makes clear that white people rarely examine or talk about the workings of race, particularly in relation to themselves (McIntosh 2002, 2004). White people generally do not think of themselves as “raced” (in the same way that men often have the privilege not to consider their gender, not to think of themselves as men but instead as “persons” [Kimmel 2004]). They also often hold “colorblind” perspectives that deny the very real ways race operates at the systemic and individual levels to marginalize and oppress people of color (McIntyre 1997; Sleeter 1993). This can mean that the burden of explanation and education falls on the people of color in the group. While a conversation about racial politics might have seemed quite novel and productive to Tim and me, it could easily have seemed less so to the black students in the class. Rashidah recounts how in poetry workshops she has led, white participants regularly describe conversations about race as refreshing and interesting; in the same groups, black participants express frustration with the discussions, but only when they include white people. Another possible reading is that some of the black and Latino students in the class have also internalized widespread “color-blind” and meritocratic discourses, making them reluctant to speak about issues of race and privilege. Also complicating the task of determining whether the conversations improved the “racial climate” in the class was that discourse analysis of my data clearly shows that conversations about race continued to be very difficult to have at the end of the project in 2004. Discursive tension manifested itself in three ways in the transcripts: (1) implied/missing link, in which the interviewee (and/or interviewer) speaks over an idea or word necessary to complete the thought, or imply their meaning by trailing off, or using “you know”; (2) pause/rethought, where the interviewee will literally stop midsentence and either pause or audibly rethink their point; and, (3) some kind of confusion, contradiction, or grammatical ambiguity including moments when a statement seems to wander, the grammatical subject becomes ambiguous, or the points made within the statement seem to contradict each other. These tensions in language surfaced most often in the interviews in discussion of race, though they also emerged on the subject of Tim’s teaching (versus that of other English teachers), hip-hop, and student writing. For instance, in Desrata’s interview, race surfaced as the most ambiguous section of

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the interview. There are five indicators of tension (including uncertain subjects, incorrect subject-verb agreements, pauses and rethoughts in speech, and a couple of ellipses) in the two statements in which she discussed race, and six other tensions in the rest of the interview. These various tensions are suggestive of what Desrata described above as the “tug-of-war” of ideas in which people tried to pull each other onside in conversations about race. Here, the tug-of-war seems to be happening as interviewees voice their memories and thoughts aloud, and revise, rethink, and imply their understandings of race and its workings. It might also be that the class discussions influenced us all to be more tentative, and potentially more thoughtful and sensitive, on the topic of race. There are very few emphatic statements made in these discussions, possibly a sign that the interviewees were reconstructing some of their thinking, audibly working out their opinions as they spoke them—the tension surrounding this process suggests that they are trying to find language and discourse that can capture the formation of these thoughts. Of course, the tensions might result in part from the dynamics of the ­interviewee/interviewer relationship, and in particular the situation in which the students are being asked to share their opinions with a white, adult, foreign woman with an uncertain status in the school—neither teacher, nor administrator, nor parent. That said, the transcripts and recordings of the interviews don’t seem to reveal any particular patterns of contestation. And the features of discursive tension also emerge in my own talk on race in the interviews, regardless of who I’m speaking with, and in Tim’s language in interviews with me, indicating that conversations about race can pose all sorts of difficulties across relationships (Bolgatz 2005), particularly in a context in which race is such a charged topic. Finally, in response to the question of whether our conversations in 2004 had an impact, they did seem to be productive in some important ways—­ despite the resistance from some of the students to continue them, as well as to their difficult nature. Somewhat surprisingly given her previous comments, Desrata described the class at the end as having “formed a bond” in which the students “saw themselves talking to people we wouldn’t normally talk to, and then once you get to know those people, they have more to offer than what you see in the hallway.” Desrata singled out the race conversation as one moment that contributed to this bonding. Wilson, who had also objected in class to continuing conversations about race, shared in an interview that he had gained new perspectives on a number of his classmates, including Andy, and



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“how he loves hip-hop too . . . and that’s where I kind of learned that hip-hop is not strictly black, even though I knew that, I didn’t understand how it influenced a lot of people, so I mean it may be predominantly black culture, it’s not strictly, only, for us. They can understand some things too. It was kinda interesting.” This new perspective on hip-hop was reflected in the following lines in Wilson’s slam poem: “Hip-hop isn’t just black/Some of my home boys have taught me that.” After he performed it, he gave a nod to a white student known as the best DJ in the school and who was on stage deejaying for the slam. The student gave an audio “scratch” in response (moving the record he was playing back and forth, with his hand, on the turntable). And Andy, who Wilson had connected with over music, performed his hip-hop identification at the slam in another reversal of the usual order of things in the school. He cohosted the event with Akil and during his intro did some freestyling and then dropped to the floor to show off a breakdance move, prompting loud cries of approval from the audience. Teaching and Learning Across Differences: White (and Other) Teachers of Black and Latino Students In a well-established trend in U.S. classrooms, as the student population grows increasingly diverse, the teaching population remains resiliently, and increasingly, white. According to the 2006 American Census Survey, 37.5 percent of the school population (native and foreign born) across the United States in grades 1 to 12 is either black, Hispanic (both white and other), or Asian. This is highly variable by region so that, for instance, in much of the west, native nonHispanic white students in grades 1 to 12 are in the minority.5 In contrast, data gathered by the National Educational Association indicates that as of 2001, approximately 90 percent of the teaching population was white, with the percentage of black teachers having declined from 8 to 6 percent since 1991.6 Much of the seminal work on best practices for teaching African American children has come from Ladson-Billings (1994, 1995, 2000) and Gay (1994, 2000), who argue for the importance of “culturally relevant teaching” and “culturally responsive teaching.” The components of these pedagogic ­models are in many ways the cornerstones of good teaching in any context. The effective teacher must be able to promote academic achievement by creating dynamic well-ordered classrooms with high standards and expectations for all

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students, in which “students [are] regularly reminded that they [are] expected to learn and that learning would be rigorous and challenging” (­Ladson-Billings 2000, 210). This is especially important for African Americans and other minority groups consistently underserved by the North American school systems and whose perception is profoundly shaped by insidious deficit models; teachers regularly have and act on lowered expectations of them, which they might sometimes see as a form of “kindness” in which they aren’t too hard on black students, and give them “breaks,” which mean in practice that they do less work and learning. This is why a “foundational pillar” (65) of Gay’s (2000) theory of effective teaching and learning is an expanded notion of “caring” that moves beyond feel-good notions of improving relationships between teachers and students and fostering student self-esteem. Caring must encompass a set of teaching beliefs and practices that ensure student academic success and do not tolerate failure. That said, teacher-student relationships are still central to culturally relevant pedagogies and need to be fluid, equitable, and extend beyond the classroom. Teachers must work to build a classroom community of learners in which students learn collaboratively and from each other (Ladson-Billings 1994, 55). Teachers should effectively scaffold student learning by assessing and drawing on previous knowledge. This requires “cultural competence,” for instance, a rich and accurate knowledge of African American history, language, and literature. Teachers will then be able to design curriculum that draws on “the full range of humanity extant in students’ cultures” (LadsonBillings 2000, 210), and which builds bridges between home cultures and more traditionally academic ones (for instance, by legitimizing and using African American Vernacular English [AAVE] to teach standard American En­g lish). This means that students are not forced to choose between “academic excellence” and “African and African American culture” (Ladson-Billings 1994, 17). The curriculum must also contain a sociopolitical critique “that helps students understand the ways that social structures and practices help reproduce in­ equities” (Ladson-Billings 2000, 210) so that they can be imagined otherwise. Both Ladson-Billings (1994) and Gay (2000) make clear that culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies for African American students are not the sole domain of African American teachers; that said, cultural outsiders often need to do a good deal of self-educating given the limits of their own schooling. (This outsider group can include African American and other racialized minority teachers who also feel removed from a younger generation’s cultural



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referents.) For instance, Alim (2007) found that white teachers he interviewed about AAVE regularly had erroneous notions of what it was, assuming in one case that AAVE had a “random system of negation” and mistakenly identifying “he was” and “she was” as features of AAVE (166). It can also be challenging for white teachers who have benefited from Eurocentric school structures and pedagogies to see how these systematically privilege white and middleclass students to the detriment of others. And deficit models of African American culture, families, children, and youth are so pervasive that they can be difficult to see and think outside of. It is therefore crucial that these teachers engage in critical self-reflection on their own prejudice and its effects, in light of histories of interaction with people of other cultural groups, in order to understand “how their positionality influences their students in either positive or negative ways” (Howard 2003, 197). In interactions with students, this can mean being honest about one’s own history and limitations. Koger (1995) found, for instance, when teaching a college-level course on black theater to African American students that it was really important to share her own life story, warts and all; when she stopped being afraid of displaying her ignorance, she gained her students’ trust and willingness to communicate openly. This echoes one of the teachers in Reed’s (1998) study of effective white teachers of African American youth who advised, “Be yourself. Be open and honest. Relate personal incidents from your own life when you teach” (227). This aspect of culturally relevant pedagogy is particularly important to the discussion about Tim as a teacher, for he is known as a storyteller, which is something his students tell me they really like, though the class joke is about how he sometimes “goes on.” Tim’s natural propensity for storytelling seems to be part of what makes his pedagogy “culturally relevant.” Gay (2000) describes some of the features of African American communicative structures, including “topic chaining” discourse patterns that have a strong storytelling aspect. That storytelling is a culturally responsive practice does not mean, however, that it eludes the politics of difference that shape classroom interactions between white teachers and black students. Within the context of her study, Walsh (2007) found that though participants’ individual stories were key parts of the conversations about race, they prompted “not necessarily greater unity but instead greater attention to difference” (13). Indeed, the sharing of the self is particularly ripe for misunderstanding, since people usually have powerful affective connections to their own stories. Stories can up the stakes of the exchange or debate, since the personal is now at issue. However, teacher’s personal

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testimonies can be an important part of the reciprocal exchanges Gay (2000) describes as vital to effective teaching and learning, in that they recognize the knowledge, experience, and cultural capital of both teacher and students. Storytelling as the Sharing of Worlds I think there is a fear factor in teaching—certainly as the kids get older we fear that we’re going to lose control. And so, I guess, we restrict ourselves in an attempt to restrict them, to maintain some type of order. So it’s restrictive, and we can’t be entirely ourselves, we edit pretty much who we are in the classroom, so they only see a small portion of who we are as people, and subsequently we only allow them to be a small portion of who they are . . . and of course then our greatest fear is realized, because any group of people that’s suppressed will find a way to rise up and do that very thing we fear the most. Tim

We had been discussing Tupac Shakur and his complex relationship to a culture of violence.7 Tim interjected into the conversation: Tim: You know I got mugged, right? [Students laugh.] I got mugged over by Mitchell, the old Mitchell High school. My first teaching job, it was twenty-some years ago. They closed the building a few years after I left, they knocked the building down. Anyway, I was coaching indoor track, and I’d stay after school and we’d run in the halls. I had maybe fifteen guys in the track team, and they’re all blacks. I could name them, maybe you know these guys [he names two, including a “boxer, heavyweight from Rochester who was on the team”]. Anyways, so here’s what happened: I lived down the street, I lived off of Green St. by the firehouse, what’s the name of that, Brown Street. I rented an apartment there. I didn’t have a car. So what I’d do is I’d close up the building, send the guys home, close up the gym, go round the back, get on the back street that parallels Green—I’m getting nervous talking about this. I’d keep my clothes in my locker. Come in every day and shower. So I came out one day, and there was a house across the street. And there were five black dudes up on the second-floor porch. And they had snowballs. Wintertime. I thought they were fooling around. So I made a snowball, threw it back. It hit the house. [Students all laugh.] I thought ok, you know, I’ll just jog away now. Five dudes come down out the side door, and now they’re sort of trotting after me. Common­ sense would have said, what?



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Students: Don’t throw a snowball/Run!/Flee! Tim: Run fast, run. I stopped and turned to face ’em. Then they got around me, bam, I got hit so hard in the face it knocked me off my feet. And then I got the shit kicked out of me. Who said black people can’t dance? [Slightly confusedsounding language from the students.] They dancing on me. [Some mumblings about this.] I finally got to my feet, and I ran and [inaudible] because I got away. Akil: What they took? Marcel: His dignity. [Students all start talking.] Rashidah: Wait a minute. They didn’t take anything? Tim: No, they just beat the crap out of me. Rashidah: Oh, you didn’t get mugged. You just got jumped. [Laugh.] It was probably that snow ball, they didn’t like that. [A student agrees.] Tim: And I said to [names some of the track athletes] and all those guys, I don’t like what happened to me last, when I left here. They said, what’s up? I told them the story. They said, oh, it won’t happen again. I said, I don’t think so, I think it’s going to happen again. They said, well look. Here’s what you do tonight. You close up the building, we’ll stay behind. You go out the way you did the night before, and we’ll watch out for you. So I walk out the building, the same dudes are up on the porch. Now they start calling me crazy this, white dude that, because I’m walking the same way, and they come down off the porch again. Ah, man, I can see the repeat of this program, right? I stood there. They come up to me. Then the dudes from the track team come out of the building, came over to these guys. They start to talk, and I can’t understand anything they’re saying. Now I’m thinking, I got my ass kicked by five dudes yesterday, [inaudible] today? And I stood there, the guy who punched me in the face the day before came over, put out his hand, and said, sorry man, it won’t happen again. That was that. They ended up coming to our track meets, these same guys. Conrad: You got saved. [Lots of laughter, talking.] Tim: But they sorted it out. Rashidah: [Laughing] What was the moral of the story, Tim? Tim: But to get back to what you were saying, it sticks with you. You get shot, you get, you get, I got jumped, not mugged, right? They didn’t take anything? You remember that, and then you find yourself in another situation, and it starts to feel familiar, or similar, and you’ve got to fight with your reactions. That’s why we have this conversation. I’m on the street, I’m walking down the street,

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and there are five black dudes coming up, I’ve got to wrestle with my, you know, I’ve got a memory, but you jump to those conclusions, and you wrestle with that. What can I tell ya? So anyway. I was at Mitchell until they closed the building. The first day in I was terrified. I just got out of college. After a while I felt comfortable. But it took me awhile, you know, because I come from, I went to Cook High School, when it was a high school, and there was one black student in my graduating class, in the city, it was before bussing and all that stuff. I went to a predominantly white, at the time, white college, and so I got my first teaching job at Mitchell, and the first day I walked into class and everybody was black, except me. ‘Cept me. I can remember that. It was very strange. Jaron: Was it strange, or was you scared? Desrata: How did you adapt to that? Tim: Probably both. Not scared threatened physically, but scared I didn’t know what to say. How to speak. That I didn’t know the language. And here I am an English teacher. And the kids could talk circles around me. They could. So it brought a whole bunch of issues to the forefront very quickly. Anton: How did the day go? Tim: It went very well. But I got lots of stories, but [inaudible] it went well. But you know what it did? It brought all of those things that we’re taught. All those values, all those things that our parents model for us, all the secret prejudices we have, or don’t think we have. When you’re put in a situation that’s dramatically different from what you’re used to, all that comes to the front, real quickly.

This struck me as an important moment in the course, which reverberated throughout the term and shed some light on this teacher’s relationships to his students. I want to unpack the story a bit here. In my interviews with students at the end of the term, we discussed what made Tim such an effective teacher, and the same things kept coming up. The students felt that Tim was himself with them, that he shared of himself. One student mentioned this story in particular and said, “He wasn’t ashamed to tell us, like, about being beat up and stuff like that, and that’s what made us know that we could talk about anything we wanted to in that class, ’cause he did it also.” This story shows Tim’s willingness to make himself vulnerable to his students, to show his weakness and lack of “common sense.” He needs to be “saved” by his students. Student comments about Tim as a teacher shared two other themes: his interest in his students’ lives and culture, including his great willingness to



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learn from them, ask them questions, and thus relinquish the role of the expert or authority, and in turn, his rejection of traditional school power dynamics. The students felt that, unlike many of their teachers, he was not on a “power trip,” and that he did not judge them. In keeping with the students’ perspectives on him, Tim’s story is the kind one could imagine him telling a close friend. He shared personal information about having to confront his own processes of racial formation as a white man in a racist culture. He copped up to having had to wrestle with his own prejudices. The story is, in part, about growing up white and having to learn the limits of vision and understanding this poses, including, importantly, the limits of his ability to understand the students’ language. And in a telling slip, this linguistic shortfall, in which the students “could talk circles around the English teacher,” continues: Tim mistakes getting jumped for getting mugged, which Rashidah points out to him. Tim’s discussion of the story suggests in part that Tim had an early awareness of the problems of “not knowing the language” and enough respect for the humanity of his students that he was able to see the deficit as his and not theirs. On another note, Tim’s story is also about the role that sport can play in bonding between men, in building rich, cooperative relations between black youth and school (see James 2005; Mahiri 1998): the track team comes to their coach’s rescue, and the former thugs start cheering on the team at track meets (the Disney ending). Here is another reading of the story. Just as the confusion between jumped and mugged points to some of the ways Tim is still grappling with the language, the story also participates at points in the kind of racist discourses that Tim struggled with in relation to his students early in his career. It is yet another story that poses black men as a threat. The innocent, well-intentioned white teacher, volunteering his time after school to help the black students, is attacked unprovoked by a gang of black men. Only his loyalty from the black students he works with can save him from further attack. Now one of the reasons I share this reading of the story is that it points to my own limitations as a white researcher. Rashidah and I are friends and we would have long conversations outside the class about what we saw there. One day we were talking about what a great teacher Tim is when Rashidah said that the one time in class she saw black students getting uncomfortable with him was when he first started telling this story about getting “jumped” by a group of black guys. In that moment, many feelings went through her head, including, “Oh yeah. Here we go again.” And, “Do you know what you people did to my

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people?” Rashidah said she saw students turn their heads, shift in their seats. Testament to the situatedness of perception, I never noticed this. What saves this story, I think, from simply perpetuating racist narratives of black aggressors and white victims is Tim’s honesty about the challenge of grappling with racist stereotypes, and his awareness that his lack of understanding of his students was his problem to combat. In one interview, a student seemed to speak to the importance of Tim’s awareness of his limitations. He described Tim’s willingness to take on difficult subjects such as slavery, and said that Tim was “open to it and realized his stance on it, he realized he was a white teacher talking to a predominantly minority crowd, and the way he went about just being himself and not too much trying to be someone else.” One aspect of the story that reverberated for one black male in the class was Tim’s discussion of not knowing the language. A month after the storytelling, the student, Jamir, brought in to the class Jay-Z’s The Blueprint. He had printed out some lyrics for the class and wanted to play two of its tracks. Before the first, he said to Tim, “Are you ready? This is for you. I don’t care what the class thinks. This is for you. I want to accomplish something this year. ‘Bootlegers, bombin’ Bin Laden I’m still crackin’, I WILL NOT LOSE . . .’” At the end, Jamir said, “That was for you. I got some more for you too.” Tim responded, “Why for me?” to which Jamir replied: Jamir: Because I remember when you was talking, telling us that story about how you used to work at Mitchell, about how you ran home, after they beat you up, and the next day your students came out there with you, and they was talkin’, they was talkin’ so that you couldn’t understand what they were saying. And like sometimes when I talk to you, you can’t understand what I’m sayin’. And I mean, it’s sort of a code, but it’s not really a code, this is the way I talk. Scratch. Like that. [Students laugh.] And I got lyrics for you. Just so you know, sort of, inside of the urban area. Tim: I’m honored. I really am. I mean, I’m going to get philosophical, that’s probably the greatest gift we can give one another is the opportunity to access, get in, and make some sense out of worlds that are different. Jamir: Yeah. Tim: And we do that through language. That’s cool.

Jamir seemed to have heard in Tim’s story a genuine commitment to better understand the language and culture of his students, and he decided that



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helping his teacher in this quest would be to have accomplished something this year. He chose hip-hop as the vehicle for doing this. Tim’s response to Jamir’s generosity gets to the heart of the possibilities of multicultural education, and indeed of education more generally: “making some sense out of worlds that are different.” Which in turn, I would say, helps us to make some sense of our own worlds. In an interview at the end of the course, Laticia told me as we discussed what I was hoping to learn from my time with the students that “I think we should have class where it goes both ways, like black people learn about white people, white people learn about black people, and gain an understanding of each other’s background.” I feel that the spoken word curriculum was at points the class of reciprocal exchange that both Laticia and Gay (2000) describe, so crucial not only to teaching and learning but also to moving beyond tired and restrictive narratives about race and knowing and belonging. And I stress the importance of those exchanges, often conflictive, to learning. However, I also want to keep in mind Laticia’s next comment: “Even though I’m black, I probably don’t know that much about my background because, it’s like I said, English class was boring, I didn’t pay attention, and I probably didn’t pay attention in cultural studies either, so it’s probably like I learned more about white background than my own background, ’cause I can say that they test more on that.” The good news is that Laticia’s English classes seemed to have had some African American content, which is no longer surprising or exceptional given current guidelines from the National Council of Teachers of English and the prevalence of African American and “multicultural” curricula available. However, Laticia claims she found this boring, in the same way, I imagine, she and the other students found dull the jazz and blues poetry brought in by a university professor. This worries me, since it suggests she and other students might have a difficult time engaging in college-level classes in which professors might work less hard at bringing the curriculum to life than did the one who guest lectured in the performance poetry project (and who had won teaching awards). At the same time, her comment also helps make the case for a curriculum that is immediately of interest to the students, in this instance grounded in the music that provided a sound track for so many of their lives. Also important to remember is Laticia’s astute last line about how schools test more on white culture. She reminds us here about the need for more extensive challenges to Eurocentric curricula, not just in English class (or cultural studies—I’m not certain what she refers to here). Which

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means that culturally responsive pedagogies require that all teachers expand what they know and revisit their own “mis-educations”; for white teachers, this should include opening up spaces and developing aptitudes and dispositions in which they are learning from racially marginalized students. Hiphop culture, in which students will regularly know more than the teacher, certainly offers that kind of space.

5 Chapter Five

Ni g g a z , B i t c h e s , a n d H o e s H ip- H op Nation Language as Limit- Ca s e f o r E d u c a t i on

Here’s my dilemma. I’m the minority here by virtue of my age and because of my culture, and to have this conversation, yeah, it’s a difficult thing. Some of the stuff is hard to hear and worse than that, some of it’s hard to understand. I’m trying to get it, and I think that’s what you’re pointing at. How often out there are the roles reversed. Tim

has pervaded hip-hop culture since the advent of gangsta rap, as in West Coast rappers N.W.A. (“Niggaz With Attitude”) and their album Efil4zaggin (1991) (“Niggaz 4 Life” read backward), Ol Dirty Bastard’s Nigga Please (1998), and tracks such as Ice Cube’s “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate” (1990).1 Rappers and the hip-hop-identified regularly refer to each other as “nigga.” Yet, the N-word is one that nonblack and many black teachers will not (do not?/ should not?) utter, bringing already tense relations between black popular culture and schools into crisis. Also controversial both outside and within the hip-hop community is the widespread use of the epithets “bitch” and “ho.” Tim made the comment, above, about his dilemma of incomprehension and difficulty during a class conversation about the N­‑word, “the most divisive word in American history” (Turrentine 2002). The N-word takes the tensions between teachers and teens, schools and hiphop to an extreme and thus acts as a “limit-case” for education’s ability to meaningfully engage hip-hop generation youth. This chapter explores what The word “nigga”

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we might learn from this and other linguistic limit-cases about language and difference and about both the limits of understanding and the necessities of trying. I mean the concept of “limit-case” to conjure up a cutoff point where relations of communication, intelligibility, and sociability begin to break down. The notion, however, is shaped by the paradox of Paolo Freire’s limitsituations; these, he insists, following Vieira Pinto, are not “‘the impassable boundaries where possibilities end but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin’” (Pinto qtd. in Freire 1970, chap. 3, n. 15). This discussion of the pedagogy of the linguistic limit-case concludes this book’s exploration of the understandings that emerged when a teacher decided to work the “contact zone” (Pratt 1991) between generations and cultures. I draw on data from both classrooms in 2002. Hip-Hop Nation Language The uses of “nigga,” “bitch,” and “ho” in hip-hop need to be understood within the context of Hip-hop Nation Language (HHNL), what Alim (2004a) has described as “a vehicle driven by the culture creators of hip-hop, themselves organic members of the broader African American community” (393). Language refers “not only to the syntactic constructions of the language but also to the many discursive and communicative practices,” including facial expressions and gestures, as well as attitudes toward and understandings of language (393). The concept of “nation language” borrows in part from the work of Caribbean poet Kamau Braithwaite, who chooses this term over the often low-status term “dialect” to describe the dynamic blend of languages and traditions that make up Creoles, a blend which, like HHNL, is “new in one sense and ancient in another” (Alim 2004a, 392). HHNL shapes the idiom of contemporary youth culture and, by extension, culture more generally. Hip-hop Nation Language is a vital component of hip-hop identification for rap fans as well as rappers and for the hip-hop-identified across lines of culture and nation. For instance, Cutler (2003) documents its importance in a study of “white hip-hoppers” who speak HHNL, a struggle for cultural authenticity since their “ties to young urban African Americans who create hip-hop culture are often tenuous or non existent” (213). In order to mitigate their “race and class origins [which] are thrown into stark relief by the normative blackness of hip-hop” (212), they draw on features of what she calls hip-hop speech style, derived from African American Vernacular English

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(AAVE). The use of HHNL—inconsistent and inventive—has also accompanied the spread of hip-hop around the globe, as those documenting its local incarnations have made clear (Pennycook 2007; Sarkar 2009; Omoniyi 2009). The adoption of the form and content of such a speech style might be easier, or more organic, for the rappers Alim (2002) interviewed than for the middle-class white youth in Cutler’s study or the Nigerian rap artists in Omoniyi (2009) who mix “multiple indigenous languages including those that are not necessarily their mother tongues” with Yoruba, Igbo, and AAVE. However, all of the cases support a performative theory of language (Pennycook 2004, 2007). Here, identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested as they are performed through language. This concept is a challenge to traditional sociolinguistic theories in which the language you speak is determined by the “pregiven construct” (Pennycook 2007, 70) of identity; instead, language is a productive force, and identities get performed through language choices and uses, which means taking seriously the possibility that “we are as we are because of how we speak” (71). However, this does not mean that the choice of identity is wide open; rather, “the performative is always along lines that have already been laid down, and yet performativity can also be about refashioning futures” (77). The performance of hip-hop identification through language is particularly creative, for HHNL is a hotbed of linguistic innovation with a distinct and ever-evolving lexicon, syntax, and phonology. It has its roots in African American speech communities and, in particular, in AAVE, the “­cutting-edge” of sociolinguistic innovation in the United States (Alim 2004a, 396). There are many theories explaining AAVE’s linguistic inventiveness in the past and present. These include the high value placed on the “man-ofwords” in Afro-diasporic traditions (Abrahams 1983); strategies of subterfuge and resistance, including linguistic indirection and coding (Gates 1988; M. Morgan 1998); and multivalent moves in which English is at points claimed, confronted, resisted, and reinterpreted in order to convey African American rather than Euro­centric values (Smitherman 1998). Some examples of HHNL’s grounding in AAVE syntax and narrative structures are the use of “habitual be” (“you be looking fine”) and zero-copula patterns (“this my ride”), and AAVE discourse features such as narrative sequencing, tonal semantics, call and response, and signifying (Smitherman 2001). One feature of AAVE found in HHNL that is particularly significant for this chapter is “semantic inversion” (Smitherman 2001) in which the meaning of certain

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words is flipped (so that being “down” is being “up for something”) (280) or transformed (“dope”) (281). Semantic inversion offers a framework for understanding what happens to the “N-word” and “bitch” in the minds and mouths of hip-hop generation youth. Hip-hop Nation Language amplifies the powerful combination of play and resistance found in AAVE as the “cutting edge of the cutting edge” (Alim 2004a, 396) of linguistic creation and change. It might be that rap speeds up the processes of linguistic renewal. The accelerated pace of change of rap idiom mirrors the fast-forward evolution of hip-hop culture more generally, in part the result of the music industry’s promotion of the new, the hot, and the latest to its mostly young consumers. But the pace also reflects the multimedia accessibility of this culture, whose high-speed circuits of production, distribution, and influence include hip-hop magazines, music videos, numerous films featuring rap artists and hip-hop culture, Internet Web sites and chat rooms, and the volume of arguably unprecedented media attention that, even when negative, brings the latest rap language into homes across the world. George (1999) makes this point in relation to the dynamism of hip-hop style and fashion. He argues that the many rap music videos aired on MTV, BET, and smaller Web sites facilitate an interplay between consumers and producers: local trends quickly go national or international if worn by the latest artist, and the underground can readily influence the mainstream. Another framework for making sense of HHNL is that of adolescent literacy practices. While adults and adolescents both act on language and create terms and expressions in order to distinguish between self and other, the inbetween period of adolescence and the cramped, artificial, and competitive space of the high school can make the work of self-construction and social distinction through language particularly intense (Eckert 2004). This reinvention and self-definition is often oppositional, a rejection of the values and standards (perceived and real) of an older generation, or of mainstream culture. This helps explain the resistance of students in 2002 to the assignment in which they were asked to play the role of censor, given that their youthful commitments to popular culture are in some ways organized against the judgments of adults. Two students were particularly forceful on this: one claimed that “we don’t care what adults think,” while the other parodied “the book group phenomenon, where old ladies with blue hair get offended at things in the newspapers that nobody else was offended about because they think other people are offended about them.”

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Despite the fact that this attitude toward language can be a characteristic of youth language practices, there is also something very particular to the language work of those who do not speak the dominant language or dialect of that language, and to the language of poetry. The following section explores some of the dynamic relations among subjectivity, language, loss, and poetry in order to set the stage for a discussion of the attitudes toward language evidenced in HHNL. Loving Language by Setting It on Fire The human subject is both constructed and alienated in language. It is through language acquisition that humans become social subjects, named and positioned in society in relation to others. Although it is via language that the subject comes into being and makes attachments to the world, this language is, at a number of levels, inadequate as a means of expression and connection. Vygotsky (1986) argues that language is an intrinsic site of disappointment and longing because of the incongruence between original thought and its eventual expression in words. Vygotsky’s thesis presents us with language as a flawed instrument for expressing and communicating one’s thoughts and feelings. This notion of language and lack goes back to modern linguistics’ first chronicle, Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the arbitrariness of linguistic signification in which language detaches rather than connects the subject to the world of things. Saussure argues that there is no natural bond or essential relationship between the sound-image (or signifier), the concept it expresses (the signified), and the referent (or “real” object that their combination designates). Instead, the relationship is “arbitrary,” which is why the same concept has different names in different languages. As well, language is a system of differences, for words mean in relation to what they do not. In Saussure’s terms, “Any word succeeds in expressing something to mind because it is immediately compared with everything which could mean something slightly different” (­Komatsu and Harris 1993, 65a). To come into language, then, is to enter the realm of what Derrida (1976) has called “absence-in-presence,” as one departs the world of real objects for a symbolic order based on differences. And as Saussure makes clear, the order of words, while arbitrary, is also normative, for the sign is “‘fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other’” (qtd. in Gates 1988, 51).

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Is there no way out of the tyranny of normative arbitrariness? In his development of a vernacular theory of African American culture, Henry Louis Gates (1988) takes odds with Saussure’s absolutism and argues instead that there is a chink in the armor of linguistic normativity offered by the linguist’s own principle of linguistic arbitrariness. This arbitrariness allows people, especially in a “multiethnic society,” to “disrupt the signifier by displacing its signified in an intentional act of will” (51). To Gates’s “multiethnic society” qualifier I would add “multilingual,” for it is in cultures where people speak many languages, language dialects, and varieties that the relativism or arbitrary nature of language is most obvious—and therefore challengeable. Derrida’s (1998) semiautobiographical work suggests that this space of linguistic disruption and displacement can be poetry, particularly for those who feel dispossessed by language. Derrida claims that he did not reject the French literature and philosophy that “harpooned” him as a young FrancoAlgerian Jew, but instead recalls wanting to act on French, to “appropriate, domesticate, coax . . . love by setting on fire, burn . . . perhaps destroy, in all events, mark, transform, prune, cut, forge, graft at the fire, let come in another way, to itself in itself” (51). The relationship between language and the subject in this schema is no longer passive and unidirectional. In an important move, Derrida insists that his fantasy is not to “maltreat” the structures of French, including an oppressive vocabulary and syntax, but more subtly to affect them from the inside. He strives to “make something happen to this language . . . something so intimate that it comes to take pleasure in it as itself” (51). That this intimate and pleasurable acting of language on language is the space of poetry is clear in Derrida’s example of the poet, literary critic, and fellow Franco-Algerian Jew Hélène Cixous, a figure who can “summon up writing inside the given language.” Derrida proposes that she “is reinventing, among others, the language of her father, her French language, an unheard-of French language” (93, n. 9) and calls this reinvention a “poetics of language.”2 The concept of reinventing language through poetics reminds us that the poetry of rap lyrics is part of what drives the creativity of HHNL. While all musical lyrics can be read as poetry, language plays a different role in rap than in a good deal of pop music. In pop music, lyrics are often secondary to melody; in rap, melody all but disappears so that lyrics and beats take center stage. Rap’s rhymes are foregrounded over what Costello and Foster Wallace (1997) call the underlying musical “sound carpet,” with rappers reg-

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ularly proclaiming themselves “poets” and “word warriors.” This poetry is quite strict formally, which Costello and Foster Wallace claim is a productive constraint on rap’s language: “The metric, rhythmic possibilities the rapper’s monologue explores are often what makes a particular cut driving and creative, in spite of—and see because of—the severe limitations of theme and near-cognate rhyme the genre imposes” (96). They rest their statement that the rhyme requirements of rap “can force the extra linguistic creativity,” the “stretches” and “improbable vocab” that “make a good rap a great rap” (96), on the belief that aesthetic innovation requires formal confines against which to define itself: “All ‘fresh’ speech” requires ‘a formal Other’” (97). This idea of an enabling constraint helps explain why rap’s freedom of content—its tradition of explicit lyrics, proud political protest, and purposeful opposition to mainstream morality (there doesn’t seem to be much you cannot say in rap)—is accompanied by relatively rigid and traditional poetic principles of rhyme and meter. As with Derrida and Cixous, some rappers’ rejections of Standard English forms are also deliberate attempts at “setting language on fire.” Smitherman (2001) argues that many rap artists could easily be writing in Standard En­ glish and in fact choose to use what she calls the “anti-language” (274) of the black speech community, a move that marks them as “members of the dis­ possessed” (274). In order to do this, rappers subvert and exploit “all leaks in grammar” (M. Morgan 2001, 190). Just as HHNL is used strategically by rappers in order “to demonstrate in-group solidarity and to construct a streetconscious identity” (Alim 2002, 300), so too is their linguistic play “encoded within the rhetoric of racial resistance” (Smitherman 2001, 281) and a fascination with language. In light of Derrida, we might think of this fascination as a kind of love: rappers are “street linguists and lexicographers” (Alim 2004a, 397) as they write glossaries to their work, rap about language, and make explicit phonemic and spelling choices that “reflect the culturally specific meanings with a new meaning (nigger becomes ‘nigga’)” (399). “Listen Real Closely How I Break This Slang Shit Down” Rappers’ fascination with language has been in evidence in interviews with multilingual Montreal rappers (Low, Sarkar, and Winer 2009) and in Alim (2004b). There is also a tradition of rap tracks explicitly about language, including Big L’s “Ebonics” (2000) and its Toronto (T-dot in HHNL) counterpart,

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“Bakardi Slang.” Both tracks offer an introduction to their local hip-hop community’s idiom for a wider audience. “Ebonics” starts like this: Yo, pay attention, and listen real closely how I break this slang shit down Check it My weed smoke is my lye, a ki of coke is a pie When I’m lifted I’m high, wit new clothes on I’m fly Cars is whips and, sneakers is kicks, money is chips, movies is flicks

Although the rapper is “breaking down” the latest “slang,” the audience is assumed to be somewhat knowledgeable about the language of the street, as in the phrases “weed smoke” and “ki of coke” which represent the nonslang standard. By naming his itemization of this “slang shit” Ebonics, Big L seems to be calling up the fullness of a language rather than a limited set of terms used by a particular group. “Ebonics” also points to the arbitrary relation between sign and signified, and some aspects of lexical change, including the addition of new words (“jakes”), changes in the lexical category in which a word may function (the verb “kick” becomes a synonym for the noun “sneaker”), and semantic change (so that “whips” and “bones” take on entirely new referents). “Bakardi Slang” from Toronto rapper Kardinall Offishall’s (2001) album Quest for Fire: Firestarter Volume 1 has taken on the status of a T-dot, and by extension, Canadian rap anthem. In this track, Kardi carves out a distinct linguistic space for the T-dot hip-hop scene, with an idiom grounded in the Creoles of Toronto’s Caribbean populations: We don’t say, “You know what I’m saying,” T-dot says, “Ya dun know.” We don’t say, “hey that’s the breaks,” we say, “Yo, a so it go.” We don’t say, “you get one chance,” we say, “you better rip the show.”

Throughout “Bakardi Slang,” language is used to a define a “we” in relation to “them.” This “you” is never identified, but through its association with expressions such as “you know what I’m saying,” seems to designate the American hip-hop community to which Canadian rappers are both commercially and aesthetically bound—and excluded. However, while the Jamaican origins of Kardi’s parents play an important part in this different context, they do

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not confine him, for his new speech community is larger than that of any one island. This T-dot identity is not limited by the borders of nation or even of national diaspora (these get collapsed when Kardi raps about people’s perceptions of his community as “Jamaican” rather than Canadian-Jamaican) but instead is its own creolized West Indian/Canadian formation which references these other places, and yet is also “one of a kind.” While this “one of a kind” is not marked as specifically Canadian, it seems to be climactically northern, for Kardi notes that he is “comin’ from the cold-yo.” To add to the linguistic complexity of Kardinall Offishall’s creative world, a number of central expressions of American hip-hop are integrated into ­Kardi’s language, despite the distinctness of the T-dot community, which suggests that there is no easy inside or outside of any speech community: for example, good things are “ill,” and lyrics get “thrown.” Moreover, “Bakardi Slang” is rapped both in the “slang” of its title and in a more standard English. The album’s liner notes, which contain a transcription of “Bakardi Slang,” distinguish T-dot and the American hip-hop idioms from the more standard language forms via the use of quotation marks. Other songs on the album are entirely in a Caribbean Creole. All songs include playful wordsmithing, as in the pun on Kardi in “Bakardi” and in the rapper’s name, a “creolized” version of two titles of importance. In these and other ways, “Bakardi Slang” enacts a theory of language in which all available tongues are the artist’s raw material for creative expression and are the stuff of active invention. This song celebrates the power of what Toni Morrison calls “word-work” (1995) to forge new worlds and meanings.3 Rap’s attitude includes irreverence toward linguistic authority, hierarchies, and divisions, for it values creativity and pleasure over standards and correctness. This is not to say that language does not matter in rap, or that rap artists take language lightly. Quite the opposite: language in rap is both a means and an end of inquiry. Language is the ground of expression for individual rap artists and crews, as well as communities. The T-dot is in powerful ways forged in language. Both “Ebonics” and “Bakardi Slang” see language as something curious, something to explore and investigate. The rapper plays in part the role of socio­linguist as he explores the nuances and particularities of his T-dot speech community. Rappers are also street lexicographers (Alim 2004a) as they regularly write down lyrics in liner notes; supplementing “official” linernote transcriptions are the unofficial compilations and orthographies of rap ­lyrics by rap fans posted liberally on Internet sites (such as www.ohhla.com).

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In these practices, the written and spoken word exist in a mutually informing relationship, so that rap might best be thought in terms of Ong’s (1982) secondary orality “in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print” (11). Secondary orality carries with it many of the traits of primary orality, such as an emphasis on immediacy, a concentration on the present, and the use of formulas. The style is often spontaneous and casual; however, this is a self-conscious, cultivated spontaneity and informality. One of HHNL’s characteristics that spotlights the importance of orality is an emphasis on the meaning of the sounds of words, a “tonal semantics” (Smitherman 2001, 258) in which words are chosen for sound effects sometimes in excess of or indifferent to dictionary denotation. This is another trait HHNL shares with AAVE, relevant to the discussion of the N-word. Within this multilayered framework, Hip-hop Nation Language is a site of both linguistic preservation and lexical renewal, extending African American language practices and inventing new ones. It resists standard language forms yet pays homage to language in its many forms. It is steeped in poetics. It is central to hip-hop culture and to the identities of those who claim membership in it, so its lexicon is constantly being modified to bear what Stuart Hall (1996b), speaking of Rastafarians, called a “meaning which fit their experiences” (143). I draw on the framework in order to start making sense of some of the conversations we had about language in 2002, including students’ attachment to and theories about the uses of three words: “nigga,” “bitch,” and “ho.” Grappling with the N-word I examine data from several class discussions held in 2002 in both the Pace­setter English (PE) and the Advanced Poetry (AP) classes and look at what transpired when we returned to the intended curriculum after the discussions of the talent night rap in the PE group and the AP classes when we talked about ratings and language. In both classes, we played Cornel West’s (2001) track “The N‑word” from his spoken word CD. In it, West bemoans the use of the word by African Americans as a term of affection and argues that it should be discarded altogether in favor of words such as brother, sister, or comrade. We thought the piece offered a useful critical perspective, in poetry, by a prominent black intellectual on a word that is prevalent in hip-hop. We also played the students the over-the-top parody of gangsta rap by Black Sheep. And we distributed

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a ratings sheet that I had developed, which had a series of blank underlined spaces for the name of a rap track next to a ratings scale borrowed from films (from G to R) that students were to fill in. We had asked students to bring in albums that they thought would be useful for our deliberations, or as Tim put it, to “help us discover where that ground of acceptability lies.” In both classes, students resisted the position of “censor” (and of the blue-haired, too easily offended “old ladies,” as the comments cited earlier made clear). One concept we put forward to help us in our deliberation was that of “gratuitousness” in relation to the use of profanity, or depictions of sexuality and violence. While this prompted a few normative judgments from students about the ­lyrics, their comments regularly evaded the task and slipped instead into evaluations of how much or little they liked the song. For instance, a segment from a song by Eminem prompted one student to say, “I can’t be unbiased, I hate that song passionately, so I can’t rate it,” and three others to respond, “I think he’s really a baby,” and “yeah, he’s like, ‘I’m so bad ass, like I’m not Mr N-Sync’,” and “I’m so cool!’” One student just noted, “I’m going to give everything an R,” resisting the task of differentiation altogether. The Cornel West track did prompt some very interesting conversation in both classes, however. Every student who spoke on the topic disagreed to some extent with Cornel West’s perspective on the N-word, although for a range of reasons. In this case, their disagreement led to rich conversations about language and history. (That said, I do not know the opinions of those who did not join the class discussions.) At the time of our conversation, the N-word was a hot topic in the media due to the publication of the book Nigger (2002) by legal theorist Randall Kennedy (the book generated controversy due in part to a title some found opportunistic). Kennedy traces the complex social and legal history of the word as used by both black and white Americans and demonstrates that the word has multiple, situated, and changing meanings to users and interpreters. Kennedy argues that “eradicationist” positions like West’s are impossible, given the widening contexts of use that include people “taming, civilizing, and transmuting” (175) (see Derrida’s [1998] “appropriate, domesticate, coax”) the N-word into a positive appellation. Smitherman (1998) also discusses “nigga’s” polysemic qualities, able to be “used positively, generically, or negatively (and all three nuances are possible)” (218), and the language awareness of an African American speech community able to distinguish the difference. Spears’s (1998) data on the “uncensored speech” of African Americans reveals that the term gets used to describe people of all

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ethnicities (in the manner of “guy”), its target very occasionally can include women (if part of a group of men), and while it is still not regularly used by white people without causing offense, there are exceptions. These include situations with features of “African American cultural dominance (and perhaps numerical dominance) and interpersonal relationships involving whites who are able to function in a culturally African American way and who have established solid, trusting relationships with African Americans” (239). Spears speculates that the use of “nigga” has become so widespread due to the “near hegemony of African American popular culture among youth” (242). A more recent inquiry into the history and politics of the N-word is Asim’s (2007), which resembles that of Cornel West and builds a powerful counter­ argument to the “taming of language theory.” Asim links the language of “­racial insult” to the perpetuation of myths of black depravity and inferiority and argues that even in its “contemporary ‘friendlier’ usage” the word is principally a “linguistic extension of white supremacy, the most potent part of a language of oppression that has changed over time from overt to coded” (4). Asim does allow for the value and necessity of “tragicomic” uses of the term, which approach “the N word and its attendant baggage with an appropriate consideration of context and history” (219), as in the work of Faith Ringgold and even in some instances N.W.A. That said, he argues that to use it in public in an unconscious way is to “shackle ourselves to those corrupt white delusions—and their attendant false story of our struggle in the United States” (233). Asim also notes that there is unlikely to be any consensus among African Americans on the N-word, a position supported by Todd Larkin’s (2004) documentary film by the same name that demonstrates how divided and sometimes ambivalent African Americans (and others) are about contemporary uses of the term. Although not academically versed in the N-word’s history (which doesn’t surprise, given how historically unaware so many of us are, especially about popular history), the students shared some of Kennedy’s sense that their generation had reworked the term. The students who spoke in both classes felt that West had, as one put it, a “different connotation of the word” than they had. Morris responded that in instances when he might use the word “nigger” when talking to another black student in the class, “we taking it away from whoever use it to oppress us and applying it in a way that it’s almost saying brother or sister.” George agreed, though he brought up the “difference between the word nigga and nigger,” a recent topic on Dateline,

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in which the different pronunciation of the suffix (which Smitherman [2001] attributes to AAVE’s “postvocalic -r rule”) negates the N-word’s pejorative associations. This distinction was supported by the students in both classes (see also Mahiri 1998; Spears 1998), and it raises the question of whether these are actually two different words. It is also an example of the importance of tonal semantics to HHNL, where the sound of the suffix determines the word’s significance. The N-word Declawed and “Devaluated” A key concept in AAVE for understanding hip-hop’s N-word is “semantic inversion,” in which the meaning of a word is flipped. Smitherman (2001) discusses “script flippin’” in relation to “nigger”/ “nigga,” noting that it has a variety of positive meanings, and when used negatively refers to social behavior, not race (so that whites can be also “niggers”) (281). What are some of the culturally specific meanings of hip-hop’s N-word? In a powerful example of semantic inversion, in interview in the documentary film Tupac: Resurrection, rapper Tupac Shakur (2003) explains that “nigga” shifts its referent from victim (in this case, of lynching) to “player”: “Niggers was the ones on the rope, hanging off the thing; Niggas is the ones with gold ropes, hanging out at clubs.” Elsewhere, Tupac (2004) interprets “nigga” as an acronym standing for “Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished.” A number of hip-hop theorists have read the term as an important signifier of political dissent and oppositional consciousness that foregrounds its users’ social and economic marginalization (Perry 2004; Quinn 2005; Rivera 2003). Boyd (1997) makes the case that “the defining characteristic of the modern-day nigga is class, as opposed to what used to be exclusively race” (31). The “nigga” is “a product of the ghetto” and the “hood” and invokes the “politics of Ghettocentricity” (Kelley 1994, 210) built on the collective identity of the black underclass. “Nigga” is a direct affront to the black middle class, often describes a sociocultural “condition,” and in N.W.A.’s “Niggaz4Life” is used “almost as a synonym for oppressed” (210). This is like “nigger,” which has long been used as a marker of “class and race oppression” among rural and working-class blacks (210). A number of the students spoke about reinventing words in the terms of semantic inversion. Jeremy, a white student in the AP class, argued that the contemporary use of the N-word is an attempt “to declaw it—it’s like you’re taking away its edge. ’Cause if you use it, it’s like it loses some of its meat, you know,

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you kind of devaluate it a little bit.” Carlo put their use within the context of adolescent language practices more generally and described an article in the local paper on the way students take terms from tragic events and turn them into “slang,” such as my parents “are going to get Bin Laden on me.” He surmised that these uses of language are attempts at making the terribleness go away. We’re trying to play on it so we will forget the pain that it caused. Maybe that’s what people can do with the word. I use it, everybody, I call Bob [white classmate] my nigga and he don’t say—I don’t see nigga as a black person or somebody from the hood. I mean if I was talking to Marcel and I was talking about Mr. R. [Tim], I’m saying that’s my nigga, that’s my dawg.

Carlo’s “nigga” is an instance of the word at its most generalized, synonymous with friend, or in the case of Tim, someone liked and respected, and used by and toward someone who isn’t black. However, Carlo is Puerto Rican (which in most U.S. contexts, given the history of colonization of Puerto Rico and its attendant racial politics, is not the same as “white”), and very hip-hop and street, explaining his comfort with the term. He saw the word as solely positive, a perspective taken by some but not all of the students. He then reiterated his sense that this attitude toward language is generational, complaining that “members of the older generation come down so hard on us when they hear us use the word because of how it was used in the past and because of our ability to take things that happened in the past and change it to, like, we’ve adapted it to our way of speaking.” Their arguments and metaphoric language recall rapper Ice Cube (of N.W.A. fame), who says of his prolific use of the N-word that “the more you use a word, the more it takes the sting out of what the word really means to the rest of the world. It defuses it” (Hilburn 2004, E1). The Hip-Hop Generation As Kelley’s (1994) concept of Ghettocentricity suggests, Hip-hop Nation Language is a product of its sociohistorical context. Kitwana (2002) describes the “hip-hop generation” as the first generation of African Americans that has grown up in postsegregation America, but whose experiences are shaped by high unemployment rates, the proliferation of low-paying jobs in the service sector (the McJobs phenomenon), the increasing criminalization of black

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youth and disproportionately high incarceration rates, and the deterioration of public schools. This generation is different from the civil rights generation (Boyd 2002), less influenced by the traditional purveyors of black culture, family, church, and school, and more by entertainment culture. Members of the hip-hop generation often rely on themselves, their peers, and massmediated commodity culture for direction (Kitwana 2002). This might mean that members of the hip-hop generation disregard censure by the more traditional centers of authority or capitalize on it in order to reject and distinguish themselves from them. While the adolescents in Tim’s classrooms are technically post hip-hop generation (who were born sometime from 1965 to 1984), their social conditions remain largely unchanged from those born a few years prior. As seen in Carlo’s comment about “members of the older generation,” students (in both classes) had a keen sense of generational difference. Al noted that his elders had “been more subject to the nigger calling,” that “racial abuse which had been cast on to you.” Jamal suggested that West is “a professor teaching on how history was back then and so maybe he is still back then on how them words was used.” Jaz, in the AP class, describes the civil rights movement as a historical and generational divide by proposing that West feels differently about the N-word because he had lived through it. Bob, a white student, agreed, adding, “We’ve all been born since the civil rights movement where—not that it’s not a huge problem, it’s absolutely as big a problem because it’s now more underground. But since then the younger African Americans have adopted it by themselves, whereas when he was coming around it wasn’t nearly as much adopted by—their own people.” Bob’s indeterminate pronouns seem to refer in his first sentence to racism, discrimination, and inequity and in the second to the N-word, suggesting that he sees them as linked, though not inevitably as in the case of the younger African Americans who choose to adopt it. Contrary to Bob’s understanding, Kennedy (2002) makes clear that African Americans have long used the N-word for multiple purposes, including social critique, humor, compliment, and insult. According to Kelley (1994) “‘nigger’ was/is uttered and interpreted among black folk within a specific, clearly defined context, tone, and set of ‘codes’ rooted in black vernacular language” (209). As one student reminded the Pace­setter class, in August Wilson’s play Fences set in the 1940s “they was using the word nigga just as much as a young person of our age or our generation might use it, like as a term of endearment.” However, hip-hop pumps up the volume on the African American community’s more private appropriations of

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the term, broadcasting it across hip-hop’s mass-mediated and transnational circuits of production and distribution. HHNL’s “nigga” becomes ubiquitous and, as Perry (2004) notes, is now “constantly uttered in the presence of white people” (143). But the students’ responses to Cornel West suggest they feel their use of “nigga” is also qualitatively different from the N-word of their parents and grandparents. A Spectrum of Perspectives While all of the students who spoke agreed that their generation had reinvented the N-word, there was no consensus on who could now use the term, when, and why. Instead, the range of opinions formed a spectrum or continuum of responses. At one end is Carlo with his “color-blind” perspective, expressed above, that “I don’t see nigga as a black person or somebody from the hood”; he might use it to refer to a white student in the class, or to his white teacher, as he would a popular slang term “dawg.” “Nigga” here connotes kin or friendship, but seems to bear no relation to the historical N-word; reworked, the term is free of its “terribleness.” While deeply identified with hip-hop culture as a whole way of life, including speech, dress, and HHNL, Carlo is not black; this might help explain his sense of complete freedom to redefine a word not historically used to dehumanize him. For George, class position shapes rights of use, and these do not exclude white people. He explained, “If I have a white friend that come from the hood and he said it to me, it would be exactly like he was my brother because he went through the same struggle I went through . . . so I can relate to him more, not just because of his race, because what he been through with me.” However, George adds that he would not use the N word with Jon, a white student from a more affluent section of the city, or with me, the white university researcher, because “then it would be something inappropriate because you’re not of my race or descent and I know that you probably would feel uncomfortable saying it to me.” The notions of relation and shared struggle are central to George’s version of the N-word’s conditions of use, as he says, “Nigga could, to some, could mean brother and that’s coming out of respect from what either your ancestors went through or just the terminology that you was with growing up, know what I mean, from hearing it from your peers or the people that came before you.” Here, the N-word is framed as an act of historical remembering or witnessing.

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Race played a more complicating role in Tyrell’s account. He said that he might initially be “thrown off” if one of his white classmates said “whassup, my nigga?” to him, unlike his response to the same from a black student, but at the same time, he feels so comfortable with the white students in the class that “it almost means the same thing. The only thing that makes me jump back for a second is because of what society thinks of Alex and them calling me a nigga.” Tyrell’s description of being both “thrown off” and comfortable with white classmates who use the expression “whassup, my nigga?” is framed by his worry about the larger context of interpretation and judgment within which a white person’s use of the word is overdetermined by the history of abuse it conjures. At the furthest end of the student spectrum from Carlo is Morris, who comes closest to echoing Cornel West’s perspective, and that of many African Americans, when he reminds the Pacesetter class “a lot of people still do see it as a hateful word, an oppressive word.” Morris continued to use the “er” ­variety of the N-word, suggesting that he does not see the “er” and “a” versions as meaningfully different, and while he had originally argued that the word could, in certain circumstances, be synonymous with brother, he later emphasized the word’s oppressiveness. He gives as example, “If Jon were to say the word nigger or if he were to be talking to me and be like, ‘Okay what’s up nigger,’ I’d be pissed. You know, I probably wouldn’t even say nothing to him, I might just hit him in the face. It shouldn’t come out of people’s mouths.” To Morris, Jon’s hypothetical use of the N-word is an attack requiring a physical response. Morris added, “It’s completely different” if he and another black student were to use the N-word together. Whiteness and the N-word Despite openings in the conversation offered by George and others, no white student in either class claimed the right to use the N-word. A number of them, however, described themselves as somehow “inside” black urban culture. For instance, when Mark’s mother raised concerns about the language and themes of a rap he had downloaded, he felt bothered; Mark explained that although not black he can “still understand where [the rapper’s] coming from just because I have friends who would have been there, but my mom, . . . she doesn’t know what she’s saying about stuff like that.” Several of the white students, a minority in this urban school district and high school, felt that they benefited

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from this experience of diversity unlike their suburban counterparts. In the AP class, Bob worried about white students in one of the city’s wealthiest white suburbs who use the word with each other but have no idea of what they’re saying “‘cause they’re not exposed to that” and who therefore might get mugged when they go to New York City (unlike, presumably, the city-wise urban white kids). “That,” seemingly, signifies the authentic range of uses and contexts for the term “nigga.” He added, “I wouldn’t say that to Jaz, you know, at all.” Jon (also white) echoed Bob’s concerns about hypothetical misuses of the N-word and spoke of students in an “all-white school” who are “so far removed they have no idea. So at times you got to be careful if you’re going to use the word in schools, you’re going to risk kids picking it up and using it.” The white students in both classes also generally avoided saying the N‑word in our discussion, as in Bob’s use of indeterminate pronouns and Jon’s references to “the word.” These vague referents hint at some discomfort with the conversation. Tyrell, speaking to the boys’ class, raised the possibility of the white students’ unease. As with his earlier comment, he seemed to be thinking through and negotiating a number of the classroom’s interactional dynamics. He said: I know it must be hard for Alex and Jon and Ewen to sit in a class, and Mr. R, and you three are white [the teacher, me, and my research assistant] and being here, we all talking about black issues and stuff like that, nigga this, nigga that, and I know . . . they have to feel somewhat uncomfortable with that because them being white and they can’t help what their ancestors and stuff like that did about being slave owners. . . . I know they feel bad about that.

Tyrell here shows a remarkable amount of sensitivity and empathy, typical for the student Tim sometimes referred to as “the Diplomat.” However, his statement is complex, perhaps even ambivalent, because while he draws attention to the feelings of the white students, he also claims the conversation as a “black issue” and frames the whites in the class as outsiders, and as implicated in a history of white exploitation and power. Similar to the claiming of hiphop as a solely “black thing,” this move serves to keep out the white teachers and students who are the primary symbols of the black students’ own continued social marginalization. It is not clear to me whether the white students or teacher had been thinking about their own race-based privilege (or had even considered the possibility of ancestral ties to slave owners); no one, however, contradicted Tyrell.

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Teaching the Teacher Tyrell’s comment prompted Tim’s statement at the start of this chapter in which he shared his discomfort at being outside the conversation due to his age and culture, and about the difficulty of hearing and understanding some of it. Nevertheless, this struggle for meaning is important, for “how often out there are the roles reversed?” The usual balance of power, in which adults, teachers, and whites are in positions of authority, is disrupted; Tim appreciated the benefits of sharing expertise, of learning from his students. One of the big surprises for Tim in the conversation was the N-word’s spelling shift, and at one point he exclaimed, “Now wait a minute—so you’re telling me the way I enunciate the final “r” is going to have everything to do with the meaning?” Tim’s surprise about the implications of the phonetic and spelling shift was echoed by some of the African American teachers in Mahiri (1998), confirming that this lack of understanding isn’t just a race/culture thing; instead, there are powerful generational differences when it comes to understanding youth culture. (Though given how quickly youth culture moves to the mainstream, I would imagine that many if not most teachers working in urban contexts, especially in predominantly African American ones, now have some sense of this distinction ten years after Mahiri’s study.) Gender and “Uncensored Speech” Similar moments of surprise emerged in the discussion held in the Advanced Poetry class of the words “bitch” and “ho.” As part of our rap ratings exercise, one student had brought in a song by Eminem that contained the line “Yeah, fuck the ho and the bitch.” After I asked, “How do people feel about those in terms of a rating?” Shannon (the white student who performed in the group poem) replied, “I’m not offended because I’m not a ho.” The bell rang, so this comment closed the class; Tim and I then decided to start class the next week with a freewrite exercise to the following prompt: “When I hear the word ho and/or bitch, what comes to mind is . . .” As with “nigga,” an exploration of some of etymologies of “bitch” and “ho” enriches a discussion of the students’ freewrites on the words and the conversation these prompted. With rare exceptions “nigga” is a term used in relation to men. Its counterparts in terms of frequency of use with reference to women in contemporary HHNL, might be “bitch” and “ho,” though the semantic partner to “bitch” would be “dawg,” a term of affection (as we saw

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in Carlo’s comment) similar to HHNL’s “home-boy.” The contrast between “dawg” and “bitch” works in the tradition of sexist semantic dyads, such as master/mistress, in which the female equivalent usually has a negative and/or sexual connotation (L. Sutton 1995). The ubiquitous use of both “bitch” and “ho” in rap lyrics prompted self-designated “hip-hop feminist” Joan Morgan (1999) to wonder, “How did we go from fly-girls to bitches and hoes in our brother’s eyes?” (152) Morgan poses the question as part of her black feminist project, which “places the welfare of black women and the black community on its list of priorities” (155). This “functional feminism” recognizes “hip-hop’s ability to articulate the pain our community is in and then use that knowledge to create a redemptive healing space” (15). It points a critical finger at the sexism and machismo of men in rap music, and the collusion of women in their own exploitation, while also seeking to understand the roots of these in the “depression masquerading as machismo” (153) of African American men, the “failing self-esteem” of African American women, and the “lack of self-love” (154) of both. This feminist project also strives to keep in productive tension Morgan’s love of hip-hop, integral to the formation of her identity and desire as an adolescent, and her hatred of its sexism and misogyny. Morgan takes “bitch” and “ho” as symptoms of the systemic sexism in hip-hop, African American culture, and U.S. society more generally. Writing from a sociolinguistic perspective, Spears (1998) points out that “bitch” is sometimes used generically (like “nigga”) by both females and males to refer to a woman. Spears cites as an example an anecdote, from Smitherman, of a black gangsta rapper who shared a cab with a prominent black female economist and is said to have exclaimed, admiringly: “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met a bitch economist before” (qtd. in Spears 1998, 227). Despite its generic possibilities, the word “bitch” as used in rap lyrics often brings with it a repertoire of images and associations that are part of wider misogynistic discourses circulating in hip-hop and culture more generally. A review of the history of “ugly names” for women shows that they overwhelmingly define women in terms of their sexual relationship to men—as sex objects, as sex possessions, and as prostitutes, a category encompassing “ho” (L. Sutton 1995). “Bitch” is an example of a “subclass of women as sexobject terms” (281) in which woman is figured as animal, already domesticated or in need of being tamed. The “bitch” can signify the “domesticated animal that has gone wrong, that bites the hand that feeds it. A female dog

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in heat or protecting her young will growl, threaten, or even bite her owner; she has reverted to her wild state; she is a bitch, uncontrollable” (281). These associations with an animal in need of domination help explain why “bitch” as applied to men is emasculating. “Bitch” and “ho” also operate within a particular history of representing black people in slave economies. Richardson (2007) describes how the “bad black girl/video vixen” draws on the image of the “wench,” interchangeable with the “bitch,” and the Jezebel. While both the wench and the Jezebel (usually referring to enslaved women) were imagined as sexually immoral, and therefore justly exploitable, the Jezebel is also “manipulative and uses her sexual alluring nature to exploit men” (790). Their male counterpart is the hypersexual “brute black buck” who was “good for breeding and impregnating the wenches who reproduced the slave labor force” (790). These historic figures clearly draw on the imagery of degradation for women as animal, property, and sex object, inflected within the racial economy of slavery to include men. “Bitch” and “Ho” in Rap Lyrics Too $hort, who works in the mack/pimp rap vein, gets “credited” for having turned the word “bitch” into popular slang in hip-hop, which he pronounces (and sometimes spells) as “beotch” and “biatch.” His lyrics are among the most hate-filled examples of “bitch” usage in rap, in songs such as “2 Bitches” (2000) (in which the speaker has sex with two women) and “Call Her a Bitch” (2006). The latter song uses the word eighty-nine times, by my count, and has lines such as: “What’s up bitch, you the cut up bitch / Fuck somethin’ bitch, suck somethin’ bitch / Look out bitch, watch out bitch / Yeah, I fucked you bitch, then got out, bitch.” Testament to the ubiquity of the term one also sees it used in less “hard-core” rap, as in the song “Down Ass Bitch” (2001) by more mainstream rap artist Ja Rule, with the lines: “If you’d lie for me, like you lovin’ me / Baby say yeah / If you’d die for me, like you cry for me / Baby say yeah / If you’d kill for me, like you comfort me / Baby say yeah /Girl, I’m convinced, you’re my down ass bitch.” Here “down ass bitch” is a term of endearment, operating within a gender framework in which a woman gains value if she is willing to do anything, including dying or killing, for her man. In both cases, the “bitch” is subservient and the expendable property of the male rapper. Such language and meanings have not gone unchallenged within the hip-hop community, tackled head-on most famously by Queen Latifah in her 1993 rap anthem “U.N.I.T.Y.”

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Its repeat refrain is “Who you callin’ a bitch?” and its chorus includes the lines: “U.N.I.T.Y., Love a black woman from (You got to let him know) / infinity to infinity (You ain’t a bitch or a ho).” In the song, she calls on men to respect women and women to respect themselves, which includes leaving abusive men. She is one of the women rappers claiming a space for themselves and “bringing wreck” (Pough 2004) to dominant masculinist discourses, negotiating the limited subject positions available to women in hip-hop. However, some female rappers, particularly those working in the “woman gangsta” (Haugen 2003) mode, have worked to “flip the script” on the word “bitch.” Here, they explicitly reappropriate the word, in the manner of “nigga” and “queer.”4 This is like the female members of punk band “7 year Bitch” and the founders of Bitch magazine, a self-titled “feminist response to popular culture,” who seized on the word’s association with the aggressive woman in order to reclaim this as an identity. Haugen describes female gangsta rappers who take “bitch” and “ho” from other “circulating discourses and inflect them into their own discourses with the meanings that they accept for themselves,” including Lil’ Kim’s self-title “Queen Bitch,” and Mia X who, for instance, calls herself “the better bitch, the clever bitch” in the track “I’ll take ya man ‘97” (434). Eve also flips the scrip on “bitch” in her song “My Bitches.” The track recasts the “bitch” into a capital B “Bitch” who will no longer take abuse from men (“My Bitches that’ll change the locks”), who has been mistreated (“My Bitches that you don’t respect / My Bitches / My Bitches that you always neglect”), and who will prevail (“My Bitches that’ll stay in school / My Bitches / My Bitches that can keep a job / My Bitches / My Bitches that can raise they kids / My Bitches are strong / My Bitches’ll live!”) (qtd. in Perry 2004, 173). “Gangsta” female rappers such as Lil’ Kim, Mia X, Lady of Rage, and Foxy Brown complicate the issue of the objectification of women in hip-hop through this strategy of reclaiming and reworking derogatory terms, but also by performing their own “thug” toughness. Perry argues that “badman mimicry,” as seen for instance in the performances of Lil’ Kim, tends to substitute “aggressive self celebration and empowerment” for feminism, yet at the same time it “affords a space for rage and frustration in the black female experience, realities often imagined as male in the black community” (164). Particularly significant in countering assumptions about female passivity and male owner­ship are aggressively sexual lyrics and performances that work to reclaim women as sexual agents, including their sexual domination of men. However, these

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performances are structured by the male gaze in which the power of the female MC rests in her sexual desirability for men (155) and sexuality is defined in terms of the erotics of male desire. The possibilities of feminist and prowoman content in rap lyrics are also highly circumscribed by a mainstream image repertoire of beauty and sexiness for women (see, for instance, Perry’s [2004] discussion of Lauryn Hill’s transformation from baggy-clothed rapper to supermodel-type). This image repertoire includes the lighter skin and straightened hair characteristic of the mixed-race look of the typical music video dancer. The repertoire also draws heavily on representations from stripclub culture and pornography, in part the product of hip-hop’s powerful and growing alliance with the adult entertainment industry (Sharpley-­W hiting 2007) that is often featured in rap lyrics and videos (and most infamously in Nelly’s “Tip Drill”). Within this image repertoire, representations of the sexually confident woman collide with imagery in which women’s beauty and sexuality is always a commodity to be bought and sold, by men. “When I Hear the Word Ho and/or Bitch, What Comes to Mind Is . . .” The students’ responses to Tim’s prompt represented a range of perspectives and drew on some of the complexities of the term as mapped out above. Only one of the students who spoke, a white male called Kurt, described bitch as a generic term for a woman: “When I hear the word bitch it is not derogatory at all, unless it is directed at a guy. I don’t use bitch when talking to girls because they find it offensive—well I do if I’m pissed at them. But to me the word bitch is just another word for a woman that has no negative meaning.” While he claims he does not use the word when talking to girls, this seems a recent policy, given the question another student, Patricia, directed at him later. She asked, “How you gonna say a bitch is another word for a woman, first of all?” and then added, “He called me a bitch before, and that’s why we’re not friends anymore.” Kurt’s comment was taken up by Angel as well when she commented that “bitch” “affects me the same way if I was to be called a nigger, because being strong is seen in a derogatory way and trying to put me down, and I don’t think of it as just another name for a girl.” To this, Kurt responded, “That’s fine—I’ve been desensitized,” and when another commented, “It’s your own personal feeling,” he reiterated, “I have been desensitized.” There are a number of noteworthy aspects to this exchange. First, Kurt is not one of the hip-­hop-

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identified youth in the class, which means that he is somewhat outside the immediate speech community in which “bitch” can be a generic term for woman. This might be an attempt to gain some “street cred” by associating with an aspect of hip-hop culture, or it might mean that “bitch” is becoming a more generic term in adolescent slang more widely. Second, Kurt seems torn between awareness that the recipient of “bitch” will be offended and his commitment to the idea that “bitch” is a neutral term, as if a word’s value can exist outside of its contexts of use and reception. He also does not feel the need to explain why a term that has “no negative meaning” becomes so when directed at a man or why he might then use it if “pissed at them [women].” It could also be that the ending of his friendship with Patricia means he needs to maintain his position that “bitch” is “not derogatory.” I also find it interesting that he staves off responsibility for his language use and perhaps for the end of his friendship with Patricia, by using a passive verb construction in which “I have been desensitized,” placing blame, perhaps, on an abstract “society” rather than on him. What I appreciated about Kurt’s contribution, and Patricia’s response, was that it performed for the class in an affectively powerful way language as a source of conflict, open to interpretation, and words as having a real effect. Kurt’s comments also set some of the terms for the discussion that followed. Jaz took up Kurt’s comment about desensitization differently and told of the way “bitch” means “so many different things depending on where I’m at. I could be around a group of kids and they’ll be using the term loosely, and my mother would tell me ‘don’t you use any word like that.’” Jaz also described his brother who makes “bitch” almost meaningless through overuse: “He uses that [bitch] like ‘the’. . . . He’ll call the principal a bitch. It doesn’t make sense how he uses it, he be like ‘open these bitch windows,’ he’ll call his girl a bitch—he don’t care—his book a bitch, his car a bitch, school a bitch.” Tim responded to this that Jaz had the start of a parody poem using the word “bitch.” Some other responses took up the idea of desensitization to the impact of the “ugly word” (L. Sutton 1995). For instance, one wrote of “bitch,” “What comes to mind is the looseness of the word today. I wonder, has it lost its meaning or has the meaning changed? Is it not so degrading to women? Has the collective consciousness just sanctioned the word? Because it is still an offensive utterance.” Another student coined a useful phrase to describe the phenomenon, “profanity inflation,” and wrote, “Sometimes you could call somebody a bitch or a ho or whatever and they could be, you know, just like nothing because it’s been used so much it’s almost been devalued, you

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know—profanity inflation.” Carlo gave an example of this, noting how “I used to always say, shut up bitch, like whoa, whoa, whoa, it’s not that deep you know” because the delivery was “so fast.” Despite the sense of some that the term means very little, a number of the students shared freewrites very critical of “bitches and hoes,” including Ben who wrote: Darting for who is in control, rolling on the floor laughing at a girl’s expense. Our sexist propensity to degrade and make women fade into the background, afraid of what they might say or do that would show us who’s who. Through ages men have tried to hold down the better half laughing at degrading comments behind their back. It’s tacky you know because they can’t come back, there’s no comparable word in English to offend men, so then it’s all about the power we derive from dissing them.

The “spectrum of perspectives” seen in this conversation as well led one student to posit that “You can’t know what it means because obviously we’ve seen around the room that it means different things to different people,” while another commented, “It’s just all how you said it.” To these comments, Carlo responded sarcastically “so the best way to deal with is to ask them beforehand, ‘Do you mind if I swear at you?’” indicating a frustration with the slippery fact of word meaning and interpretation. Most of the students associated both “bitch” and “ho” with females, though Alisha thought, “ho is a person who sleeps around and tells everyone. I think it can go for either a boy or a girl.” Jaz added that his mother would tell you his brother is “the biggest ho in Rochester.” Kurt disassociated “ho” from actual sex, claiming it invoked for him “video girls, the girls into rap and rap videos that dance in the showers. I think ho is a word to describe a scantily dressed drop dead gorgeous girl who likes to party. No way is sex involved.” The girls in the class who spoke all felt that “bitch” was acceptable from female friends, but not from males. Kathy, a white student, gave an example of how she might use “bitch” in a playful way, saying, “You call your friends your bitches, you can be like, that bitch, I can’t believe what she did, and it’s just all how you said it.” Yet in the same utterance, she also said that she would feel offended if “a guy called me a bitch and said it in front of my friends,” maybe implying that the offense would be worse if public. Angel confirmed Katie’s sense that “bitch” can be used without giving offense sometimes between female friends, saying, “If Patricia calls me a bitch, we’re joking, it’s

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okay. I mean it’s fine. But if a guy in my class who I might be friends with called me a bitch I will get offended,” describing this as like being “smacked.” A third young woman suggested, though, that “bitch” might be “too powerful a word to use for the situation when you get frustrated and you want to cuss at someone” so that if you say “stupid bitch, when you’re frustrated, maybe to that person it means something more than it means to you.” Given that none of the female students in this class (one black, one self-identified as “mixed race,” one Latina, and four white) was strongly hip-hop-identified, their accounts of the use of “bitch” with their friends suggest, as did Kurt’s use, that it is part of the wider adolescent language culture in the school. After Angel’s comment about the difference between being called a bitch by Patricia and by a guy, one male student said, “That’s an unfair double standard,” a term Tim picked up to introduce some of the wider politics of language into the conversation. Revisiting an earlier point made by Alisha, Tim pointed out that “you can call a guy ho too, but (a) it’s not used nearly as much, and (b) it doesn’t really like have the same meaning.” He built on this, saying that while there are many words for sexually promiscuous women (and the students put forward “ho,” “slut,” “tramp,” and “trollop” as examples), “for guys we can’t even come up with like one really good one that people actually use” (to which one male responded, “I’d call him lucky!”). Given the girls’ comments about “bitch,” and their general distance from hip-hop culture, it would be difficult to claim that they were reappropriating the term in the manner of Lil’ Kim or Eve. However, they do seem to use it to perform a kind of playful toughness with their friends. In her freewrite, Shannon describes thinking of times “when I act like a bitch,” suggesting that she is willing to associate with some of the term’s denotations. Later in the conversation, she drew parallels between “nigga,” “dyke,” and “bitch,” directly invoking the concept of owning or reclaiming language: [of nigga] black people can use it with black people because they own their blackness and lesbians can use the word dyke because they own their homo­ sexuality and bitches can use the word bitch because they own their own bitchiness. But if somebody else is to come in and say that, you just can’t say that to those people—they have no reference to what it means or to what it is.

Shannon’s contribution acted as an important indirect response to the earlier comment about the unfair double standard, and though she never specified what “owning one’s bitchiness might mean,” it is plausible that she was begin-

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ning to rethink the possibilities of the term in the manner of the editors of Bitch magazine. The aspect of the conversation that Tim and I both seemed to find the most surprising and unsettling were the comments from a number of the young women in the class that they did not feel offended by the word “bitch” unless it was directed at them. Shannon’s statement to this effect had prompted the writing exercise in the first place. She expanded on it in her response: “I think of rap songs, and I also think of other things like who I consider to be bitches or hoes, and when I act like a bitch—but I never act like a ho so it doesn’t apply.” Shannon was the only student who associated herself with “bitch,” though Angel echoed her friend’s reflection on who and what a bitch is: I just picture them and what they look and act like and it doesn’t really offend me though. I mean I think it ought to honestly—if you consider what bitch is—it is like really offensive, but I’ve always believed that if you aren’t a bitch or ho then you shouldn’t be offended by the term. Ironically though it’s when you aren’t a ho and you’re called a bitch or ho that it’s most offensive. ’Cause there’s a big difference being called a bitch or ho and just hearing it used no reference to anyone specifically.

Angel seems to have a clear sense of the term as descriptive of specific and knowable sets of behaviors that she does not feel connected to. Her comment, and similar ones such as “if it’s not me then I don’t care, but if it’s directed to me I can’t get into it because it’s a word to put women down not build us up” led Tim to ask, “So if another woman is called a bitch you don’t personalize it?” He then rephrased this question, saying, “My question is can you be offended through association? If I hear somebody say ‘all men are dogs,’ they’re not calling me personally but at some level there’s an offense.” In response, two of the girls said, “There’s a bit of a difference between hearing it said to somebody else where it doesn’t offend you and hearing it said ‘all women are bitches’” and “Yeah I would be offended by that, because if somebody says ‘all women are bitches’ that does include you.” The individualistic nature of their responses stuck with me, and I saw these as evidence of a lack of solidarity or sense of collectivity with other women. I asked the students how familiar they were with the history of use of “bitch” and “ho,” and how often they thought these historic meanings “play out in the present.” I gave as an example, from our conversation, “that there’s a sense [in our discussion] that sexual women are to be feared, they are women to

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be dismissed, they’re women be ostracized from the community. And often the word bitch has been used to describe women who are strong. Women who are aggressive, who are very confident, often get called bitches.” None of the students who spoke in response seemed to feel that words were particularly burdened by their history, in the same way that they generally had not with “nigga.” Instead, what seemed to matter most were the word’s context, intonation, speaker, and audience in the present. While this attitude struck me as liberating, it also seemed to undervalue the weight of history on how language is lived. I felt more convinced by the students’ argument about the reinvention of “nigga” in their daily lives than “bitch.” Perhaps this was because the girls who spoke about “bitch” seemed to have given less thought to why and how they used it than, for instance, George and his comments about how “nigga” can mean brother in relation to history and upbringing. The new spelling of the N-word also seems to signal more explicitly its renewal, unless “bitch” is being used in ways that are obviously ironic, as with the explicitly feminist magazine. (Though here too, I find compelling the logic of Asim’s [2007] discussion of the extraordinary weight of the baggage loaded onto the N-word and of the insidiousness of myths of white supremacy and black inferiority.) However, I respected that the students had strong opinions about language and felt that our exchange had been productive. From my side, I told them that I had learned more of “where they were coming from” in terms of their perspectives on language: that it is “situational, that it depends on the context of use. I hear that words can either mean a tremendous amount or else they can mean nothing.” “I’m Trying to Get It and I Think That’s What You’re Pointing At” The idea of learning from the students brings us back to Tim’s comment that opens this chapter, which in my mind is a remarkable thing for a teacher to say to his students. The spoken word curriculum unit, which Tim initiated, regularly put him in a position of not knowing and thus the model of the allknowing teacher into crisis. In a critical examination of the N-word, for instance, Tim, like the white students in the class (as well as some of the black and other students, given the widespread lack of historical understanding), will always be somewhat at a loss due to history and experience. Even if some whites now have permission to use the N-word, these uses will long remain contentious, the stuff of anger and miscommunication and even legal action

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(Kennedy 2002). And in this instance the conversation is not happening in the hallways of the school, but it is at the heart of a course lesson. So too then is the dynamic of the students teaching the teacher. In Chapter 3, I proposed that tensions between black popular culture and school offered important lessons for the students about communication and the politics of interpretation. Here I am particularly interested in what these tensions can teach those in positions of authority and power, such as teachers and researchers. Our class conversations about individual words and language politics in the class and school more generally point to the profound importance of listening: for the older generation to the younger, white people to black people, men to women, and teachers to students, especially given “how often the roles are reversed.” Clearly, the students had a lot to say that might surprise, disrupt, and even educate. In response to Morris’s comment that his use of the N-word with another black student would be “completely different” from its use by the white students, Tim raised the concern with the boys’ class about uses of language in the poetry slam that “perhaps the vast majority of the people in the audience are not going to know.” Tim asked the students to consider who the audience is, what they know, and therefore “what words fit and what don’t.” Speaking as both a writing teacher and a published haiku poet, Tim makes a strong case for the responsibility of the writer to assess the audience’s capabilities. He pointed to the “many selves, many voices” monologues they wrote in another unit in which they explored their various social personas as evidence that they “were very attuned to the fact that different situations used a different voice.” Tim worried aloud that the students’ important messages might “get lost in the language.” The students, however, repeatedly argued that the audience needed to take the context of their poems and language into account, to note how, where, and why words are used. They called for a quality of attention, consideration, and respect that brackets judgment in the search for understanding. One suggested that the audience needed to understand that “words are ambiguous”; another noted that sometimes things that are really offensive can be “super effective for that reason,” if there’s a purpose behind it and you’re not just saying things to say things.” At one point Tim interjected “but people aren’t that rational . . . they’re not going to hear the word and look at it historically” or note the “hugs or slaps” that accompany it. To which Carlo responded vehemently, “But you can’t just hear one word and draw a conclusion, I mean you

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hear ‘the’ and draw a conclusion? You got to hear it in its context and the way it’s used, especially in poetry.” Carlo later added that the performance could aid the audience’s interpretation by providing another layer of context. Throughout the discussion of all three words, the students demonstrated a great sensitivity to the intricacies and politics of language use, of who can say what to whom, where, and why. They often describe language as a responsibility, as in George’s description of the way he could use the N-word with a white friend from the hood, but not with me because it would be “inappropriate,” and in Jon’s sense of the risks of kids using the word without enough knowledge. Even though the students felt that “nigga” was different from “nigger,” the latter still haunts the former; in their work of reinvention, the black students in particular are still burdened by the “terribleness” and “pain” of a word that bears the weight of racist history. And as evident in Tyrell’s worries about “what society thinks of Alex and them calling me a nigga” and in George’s and Carlo’s mentions of media attention to youth language practices, the students understand that they are the objects of social scrutiny. Given the linguistic and social expectations constantly placed on them, the students’ demands that adults in the audience work to understand the contexts of their language choices, and, in Morris’s words, “come with an open mind,” seem reasonable. For the white people in the crowd, who Al predicts will be “so uncomfortable hearing us say [the N-word] on stage,” this might mean tolerating discomfort. This discomfort is central to the pedagogical potential of the N-word, for a term that should not/will not be uttered by some and not others makes clear the tangible, uncomfortable realities of difference. Language emerges as one of the places in which such differences are experienced, enjoyed, suffered through, struggled over, challenged, and renegotiated. The next and final chapter examines other, informal, sites of hip-hop and spoken word education. Before I turn to these, I end this chapter and the discussion of the performance poetry project with the winning poem from the school slam in 2003. Danielle, a young black woman, wrote a poem, entitled “Stay High,” in which she spoke directly to black men: Every time I look at you I just want to cry You are wasted opportunity You are time gone by You are unspent knowledge You are unfulfilled worth. Nigga, you are far from a nigga

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Ignorance is not what you are Or were But now, shit nigga Stay high Stay posted on street corners Provide me with that high That fucks me up ...

I think it is an apt conclusion on a number of levels. Like many of the poems presented in years two and four, it embodies the spirit of negotiation, rather than imposition, that Tim and I developed in these class conversations in 2002. The author edited the poem, under Tim’s guidance, since it had originally contained 14 “fucks” (what Tim calls the “F-bomb”). While there are still many expletives (five “shits” and two “fucks”), the most “uncensored speech” found in any of the poems in all three years, the poem was undeniably powerful, as was Danielle’s performance. The mixed panel of judges, including teachers and students, recognized as much, giving it top marks. The poem is loving, affectionate, critical, and despairing, all in a few lines. The expletives seem necessary and well chosen, even “precious,” conveying the language of the streets, the speaker’s anger, and the urgency of the message. This held true across the slams, as in the line from Marcel’s slam poem, “I wish I was rich, ’cause living in poverty in America’s a bitch”, or Kurt’s poem (about being fat and having purchased a pair of too small pants), “‘cause I said to/my mom they would fit/shit.” Finally, “Stay High” is an example of the poetic power of a deliberate and conscious use of “nigga.” It takes the listener inside a speech community in which “nigga” has many meanings, and in one line, “nigga, you are far from a nigga,” invokes “nigga” as a symbol of class and race solidarity, a product of the social condition which is the “ghetto,” just another word for man, and a “street corner” petty criminal. It seems to have the “‘tragicomic sensibility’” that Asim (2007) describes, following Clarence Major, in that it is “‘aware of black history’” (qtd. in Asim 2007, 212). In “Stay High,” “nigga” is positive, neutral, and negative, and in this polysemic space, interpretive power comes in knowing the difference.

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T w o y e a r s a f t e r t h is s t u d y, in the same district but in a different high school, Nisha, a young black woman, was suspended from school for raising her fist in the cafeteria and calling out “Black Power!” According to Rashidah, Nisha and a friend had been sitting together and talking about black history month, saying that they did not think the school had done enough to acknowledge and celebrate it and criticizing the topic’s confinement to a month. She raised her fist and made the statement in emphasis. A white teacher passing by heard the call and reported it and Nisha to the school administration, saying she felt personally offended. The administration responded at once by sending Nisha to the computer lab, under the supervision of the school sentry, ordering her to write an apology for her actions. She was told this might lessen the terms of her forthcoming punishment. Nisha chose instead to write a letter of rebuttal offering a rationale and historical context for her comments (on Rashidah’s advice, who found her in the lab and told her that she should only write an apology if she felt apologetic); this letter did not seem to help her case, since the principal suspended her from school. Students in the cafeteria who witnessed the event were upset; in response to this unrest, the administration delayed the first class after lunch in order to call a special school assembly, with the senior class, in which they made clear they would not tolerate any disruptions to school life. Rashidah was working in the school at the time; an administrator came to observe her class after the special assembly in order to monitor its climate and, potentially, Rashidah.

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Rashidah had been teaching performance poetry workshops in Nisha’s class, again building toward a school slam. However, at this point the project had expanded to other schools across the district, and for the first time the winners of each school slam were going on to compete in a citywide poetry slam that would determine who would be on the team representing the city at the international Youthspeaks teen slam finals. These were to be held that summer in San José, California. Nisha had always had good grades (never lower than a B) and was stunned by the harshness of her treatment, which administrators said was necessary in order to avoid a “race riot” similar to one that had happened, reportedly, at the school ten years prior. Nisha told Rashidah that she could not understand why it was that kids who leave school to go smoke weed could be back at school the next day, while her actions resulted in suspension. According to Rashidah, Nisha is outspoken and pro-black, neither of which could justify her treatment by school officials who reportedly referred to her as a “cancer in the school.” This high school has one of the tougher reputations in the city, and the administration had clearly been struggling with solutions to maintain control and safety, which, as in so many schools in the United States, included metal detectors and armed sentries at the entrances. It is also important to note that the school principal at that point was an African American woman, underscoring the fact that tensions between black students and schools are not the sole product of white administrations. I do not know the motives of this principal, but the suspension seems a symptom of a culture of schooling in which students’ rights to freedom of expression get trumped by worries of students being “out of control.” This is a large and fluid category within which are lumped everything from violence and truancy, failure and underperformance on standardized tests, and symbols that get read as counterculturally resistant such as hip-hop styled clothing. It is therefore not surprising that the slam was a site of anxiety for the administration at Nisha’s school, and the principal personally screened all of the potential performance poems. The day before the slam in that school, Nisha was suspended again for reasons not quite clear; Rashidah feels this might have been a preemptive move in response to worries about what she might perform on stage. It goes without saying that these are not conditions conducive to the risktaking by teachers or students necessary for the critical hip-hop pedagogies described in this book.1 Anxious and repressive school cultures, shaped by deficit models of racialized minority youth and of hip-hop culture, mean

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that spaces like Tim’s classroom are difficult to create. I propose a number of ways to think about the future of hip-hop education, related to: (1) hip-hop education as a movement; (2) the fluorescence of hip-hop programming outside of schools; (3) the slam poetry movement taking America by storm; and (4) multilingual, multicultural, and global hip-hop. These respond, in different ways, to the challenges posed by hip-hop for education. Hip-Hop Education as a Movement School spaces that take youth popular cultures and identities seriously need to be hard fought for by students, teachers, parents, and administrators. The coalitions and networks of educators in and out of school who are making a case for rap pedagogies can help strengthen the fight. A key member of the hip-hop education movement is Marcella Hall (2009), coauthor with ­Martha Diaz of The Hip Hop Education Guidebook: Vol. 1, which brings together hip-hop-­related lessons plans referenced to state curriculum standards. (See, for instance, the pedagogic resources aimed at children listed on their wiki, ­hedwiki.wetpaint.com.) She is also one of the organizers of H2ED, a yearly conference on hip-hop education sponsored by the Hip Hop Association (www.hiphopassociation.org). A recent article (M. Hall 2009) shares a vast number of resources related to hip-hop and education, including articles, books, CDs, and DVDs. For example, Kajitani (2006) has recorded a CD called the Rappin’ Mathematician, which teaches math through rap lyrics, and private companies such as Rapademics sell CDs to teach phonics, parts of speech, and multiplication through rap rhythms and rhymes (www .­rapademics.com). Another contribution in this vein is Flocabulary, a program that teaches more than five hundred SAT vocabulary words by embedding them into twelve more easily memorized rap tracks (www.flocabulary.com). While these resources can help teachers tap into some of the pedagogic potential of hip-hop culture, many of them use rap music as a gimmick or hook to engage students in the standard curriculum rather than reimagine a classroom and curriculum significantly shaped by youth culture. They also don’t necessarily acknowledge the significance, magnitude, and scope of the global force that is hip-hop culture. As well, the educational climate in the United States and popular perspectives on hip-hop culture are such that most of those drawn to the resources, and moreover committed to more extended investigations of hip-hop with their students, will continue to be

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members of the hip-hop generation who can’t imagine leaving the music, art, and ideas they love at the door when they teach. Take, for instance, Daniel Zarazua, a hip-hop DJ, high school teacher, and now vice principal at Oakland’s Unity High who infuses his classrooms and school with hiphop-related curricula, including a course on music and social justice (he shares some of his curriculum on his Web site: www.domingoyu.com.) In the same vein is Tony Muhammed, who teaches social studies at a high school in Miami and writes about hip-hop and education in his blog “Trials of a Hip Hop Educator” (www.myspace.com/tonymuhammad). (That said, Irby and Bernard [2010] argue that educators not previously considered in the research on hip-hop based education, such as white teachers in suburban schools, are increasingly interested in learning how to use the culture in their teaching, and that their practices need to be considered in the research literature). This gap between the teachers who are already invested in hiphop culture and those who are not calls out for collaboration. The school district described in this book has a successful artist-in-residence program that helped fund Rashidah’s work with Tim. Similarly, other urban centers across the United States have “urban arts” programs, as in one project, Lyrical Minded, which helped teachers in New York City schools integrate hip-hop culture into their lessons. This was a joint project of the Blackout Arts Collective and Brooklyn College, and it speaks to the value of collaborations between schools and faculties of education where researchers can have knowledge and interests in popular youth culture, as well as access to resources and grants, and thus can help classroom teachers diversify and make more student-centered their courses. In turn, faculties of education also play a crucial role in the development of future teachers who have some knowledge of the interests and abilities of many of their students. For instance, the seminar on hip-hop culture for preservice teachers entitled “Inside the hip-hop Studio,” developed by Antwi Akom and Shawn Ginwright (described in Akom 2009), offers a primer on hip-hop history, culture, and its debates through the study of rap lyrics, hip-hop poetry and film, and guest lectures. Another teacher education course exploring hip-hop brings together in dialog urban student-researchers with preservice teachers (­Rodriguez 2009). As I have argued throughout this book, the need for teachers ready and willing to embark on critical hip-hop pedagogies also requires that the scholarship on the subject be as honest, analytic, and self-aware as ­possible.

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While I understand the reasons for carefully constructed curricula that only bring in classroom-friendly rap lyrics, and teacher resources such as Flocabulary, we also need to be wary of erecting an easy divide between a sanitized hip-hop culture to be found inside schools and the messiness of the culture without. This means that critical hip-hop pedagogies need a critical media literacy component where students are encouraged to grapple with some of the contradictions of hip-hop, and of North American culture more generally. Critical hip-hop pedagogies need to tackle, head on, the politics of representation within which we all are embroiled, reading, for instance, the work of hip-hop journalists such as Joan Morgan who present deeply thoughtful, informed, and critical analyses of sexism and misogyny in hip-hop. Particularly useful in Morgan’s work is her exploration of the tensions she experiences as a hip-hop feminist outraged by many of the depictions of women and sexuality in rap lyrics and hip-hop culture who is also conscious of how deeply her own desires have been shaped by this same culture. Critical hip-hop pedagogies need to be similarly self-aware of the deep investments students (and teachers) might have in the very representations that a critical educational perspective on hip-hop requires they detach themselves from. A helpful example of and resource for critical hip-hop pedagogies is Rap Sessions, a touring “community-dialog on hip-hop,” which can be booked by schools, is structured as a town-hall meeting, and brings together prominent scholars and journalists such as Mark Anthony Neal, Raquel Rivera, and Bakari Kitwana to talk about contemporary issues through the lens of hip-hop culture. Topics include “politics and hip-hop” and “race and hip-hop,” and the organization offers study guides, available on their Web site, for pre- and postsession preparation and processing. These include discussion questions that ask participants to reflect, analyze, make connections, and critique, as well as suggest resources as catalysts for inquiry. For example, the guide to gender includes links to Byron Hurt’s documentary on masculinity in hiphop, opening up topics for discussion such as misogyny and its implications for language use and asking participants to reflect on their own gendered histories as well as the portrayal of men and women in mainstream television programs such as Gossip Girls (www.rapsessions.org). The scholars brought together through the Rap Sessions help map out the dimensions of a critical hip-hop pedagogy aware of the need to constantly reflect on its own possibilities and limitations and those of its subject(s).

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Hip-Hop Education Out of School While schools have generally been slow to capitalize on hip-hop as a way to engage young people, there has been an extraordinary explosion of youth-­ oriented programming based in hip-hop culture in community centers and other informal educational spaces across North American urban centers. (See the appendix in Rose 2008 for a listing of some of the hip-hop programs found across the United States, as well as M. Hall 2009.) A good deal of programming concentrates on helping youth develop their skills in the hip-hop arts, including breakdancing, deejaying and music production, emceeing, and graffiti art. For instance, Elementz Hip Hop Youth Center in Cincinnati, J.U.I.C.E. in Los Angeles, and DC Urban Arts in Washington all teach these elements of hip-hop. The Midnight Forum in DC builds on youth’s interests in hip-hop by combining workshops on the artistic elements of hip-hop with lessons on entrepreneurship, leadership, “asset-based mapping,” and community organizing (www .midnightforum.org). Other programs take advantage of the high priority placed on word-work in rap lyrics and build literacy programs in which students write and listen to lyrics, as in Literacy Through Hip Hop in Toronto and W.O.R.D (Writing Our Rhymes Down) in Montreal. One branch of the hip-hop community education movement mobilizes youth as social change agents such as the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (started by Def Jam records founder Russell Simmons) “dedicated to harnessing the cultural relevance of Hip-Hop music to serve as a catalyst for education advocacy and other societal concerns fundamental to the empowerment of youth” (www.hsan.org). Another large organization with a similar task is the National Hip Hop Political Convention that hosts a biennial conference where delegates develop and vote on a political agenda that represents the needs and interests of the hip-hop generation. The phenomenon of the hip-hop educational and activist organization is not confined to North America. For instance, hip-hop is a central weapon in the fight for HIV/AIDs education and prevention in many countries including the 2001 Rap Against Silence project in Togo and the AMAA campaigns in South Africa. In some countries hip-hop culture is particularly well respected as a popular educational tool; Brazil has a whole network of state-funded hiphop educational organizations such as ABC Rap, Movimento hip-hop Organ­ izado (Organized hip-hop Movement), Projeto Rappers (Rappers Project), and the magazine Pode Cre (Pardue 2004). In Montreal, a growing number of organizations draw on hip-hop culture in work with youth. For instance, Hip-Hop Sans le Pop offers a series of high

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school workshops on the history and elements of hip-hop designed to inform students and teach critical thinking. Café Graffiti features a wide-range of programs that draw on the multiple elements of hip-hop and hires out some of its members to do shows, murals, and even tours of graffiti in the city. The yearly Hip Hop You Don’t Stop youth arts festival highlights the work of local hip-hop-involved youth. In most instances, hip-hop-related educational activities are integrated into the wider programming of youth centers like the YMCA, so they don’t easily come up on Internet searches for hip-hop organizations. This is the case with the Maison des Jeunes (MDJ), or House of Youth, in Côte des Neiges, on whose board I sit. A number of local hip-hop artists have worked or continue to work there, including MC Vox Sambou (Robints Paul, the center’s executive director), Foblaze (a Montreal-based MC via Paris and the Cote D’Ivoire), DJ Syde (who ran the music-production program), graffiti artist and muralist Shalak, and emcees Lou Piensa and Nantali Indongo. These strong ties to the Montreal hip-hop community shape the center in powerful ways. For instance, the MDJ offers a range of programming, including basketball, dance, a community kitchen, academic tutoring, and a film series, but also, through their studio space that they call No Bad Sound, emceeing, deejaying, and lyrics and beats-production workshops. The first young rap crew to emerge from the program released their debut album in the spring of 2010; the second crew of ten youth released a mix-tape in the fall, and MC Lou Piensa is working to expand the studio into a multifaceted urban arts youth center.2 Shalak teaches graffiti and painting classes as part of her work at the center—in the summer of 2009, Shalak transformed the look of the building and the street, with the help of members and staff whose faces are stenciled into the image, with the mural entitled “I Am Hip Hop” featured on the cover of this book.3 The MDJ regularly showcases the art, dance, and music of many of the youth who attend the center; these performances can include local artists such as live hip-hop band Nomadic Massive, Iraqi-Montreal MC the Narcycist, Monk-E, and members of the spoken word collective Kalmunity, which helps draw in audience members and raise funds to support youth activities. The center’s dynamic and very popular programming, offered free to any youth who want to join the center, is a result of a fortuitous intersection between the interests of the young people in the area and the skills and aptitudes of the facilitators hired to work there. In this sense, it resembles community centers in cities across North America in which hip-hop-generation adults

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are working with hip-hop-identified teens, shaping the nature and future of informal education together. My relationships and collaborations with hip-hop educators outside of schools have made clear to me how powerful this work can be. The youth at the Maison des Jeunes, for instance, regularly build strong relationships with the adults who work there, ties forged in trust and caring and, in many instances, shared interests. These adults can act as mediators and advocates for the youth with their parents, school administrators, the police (and the MDJ frequently invites local police to come speak to the teens), and the community more generally. However, I do not want to paint these as utopian spaces; as Tan (2009) and Kim (2007) have made clear, difficulties of inclusion and exclusion shape the dynamics of teaching and learning in informal educational settings as well as in schools. And it is not surprising that youth are more drawn to programs out of school where they get to decide how they spend their time, unhampered by curricular requirements. Community centers also regularly struggle with finding adequate funding to support their programs, which can make for many one-off initiatives. Community centers and schools usually operate quite separately from each other (and, in some instances, from the perspective of community educators that work with youth systematically underserved by schools, in opposition to each other). However, I think that the youth moving between school and informal learning settings could benefit if these existed in some kind of relation. For instance, I know that many of the youth who are active and involved participants in programs at the Maison des Jeunes, some taking leader­ship roles, are not strong academically. Keeping in mind that not all of the skills from one realm are transferable to the other, ideally teachers and youth leaders could work to forge relationships between these two worlds so that skills that are transferable, such as initiative, creativity, commitment, and leadership, get recognized and supported in both places. This two-way relationship could benefit both the formal and informal sites of learning. Schools could have their curriculum infused with some of the youthful energies as well as popular interests of youth workers. They might also get fuller portraits of their students’ talents and interests by knowing more about their participation in activities outside of school. (As I write this, I am working with center director Robints Paul, advocating for one of the youth with his high school’s administrators; the youth representative to the board and one of the most engaged and motivated young people at the center, he is

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regarded as a problem student by his school, which is attempting to switch him into a vocational program.) In turn, community educators could learn, in many cases, from the pedagogical expertise of trained and experienced teachers. For youth workers often know little about the dimensions of curriculum planning, including setting learning objectives and assessing how far the participants have come to meeting them. Schoolteachers could help informal educators support and measure growth in the youth they work with. This might also help informal educators back up their claims to the funding agencies that support them that their programming is beneficial to participants. And schools could help youth centers infuse what they do with skills that have a tangible transfer value to academic programs, such as having students work with different writing genres or develop math literacy (for example, by having youth write up budgets and proposals for activities they would like to see offered at the center). Such collaborations between informal and formal educational environments would also be very important to research, shedding light on the pedagogical dynamics of both spaces and the ways they shape the lives and aspirations of young people. Spoken Word Education So far this chapter has only examined possible futures for hip-hop education; a powerful and potentially less charged access point for youth engagement, self-expression, and education is spoken word culture. Hodari Davis, executive producer of the Brave New Voices International Teen Slam Finals, mentioned in conversation that a number of the young people he works with, who might previously have identified with hip-hop, now think of themselves in terms of spoken word. Reacting in part to the sense among progressive circles that “hiphop is dead” (a claim broadcast most widely through the Nas [2006] album and signature track by the same name) due to the excessive commercialization and attendant lack of originality of its mainstream, spoken word can seem a less restrictive moniker. And spoken word, rap music, and slam poetry exist in a similar cultural nexus, mutually informing each other. That said, they are not coterminous, and their differences can be profoundly pedagogic, as students already invested in rap, either as lyric writers and performers or as listeners, can build on those interests and/or skills or develop competencies as practitioners and audiences for spoken word. For the students in Tim’s class, slam poetry was a new genre, and few had heard or thought about spoken word as a contem-

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porary movement drawing on past oral traditions. All, however, had heard of rap music, a number already wrote lyrics and/or freestyled, and many of their poems dealt with themes common in rap lyrics or treated hip-hop culture as subject directly. This meant that the course could extend what students already knew and take them to new places; Gerard’s shift from gangsta rapper to street poet for peace, documented in Chapter 3, embodies this journey. The breadth of the category of spoken word opens up some powerful currents for curricular inquiry, including explorations of poetic oral traditions past and present in North America and across the globe. Steve Zeitlin, the head of New York’s City Lore and one of the founders of the People’s Poetry Gathering mentioned in the Preface to this book, describes the curatorial objectives of the Gathering’s programmers. These objectives might also offer an exciting rationale for a school spoken word curriculum: (a) To preserve and rekindle a heritage of oral poetry that is endangered by numerous forces at work in contemporary life; (b) Raise public awareness of the rich, varied traditions of poetry recitation and traditional forms of poetry as a central form of artistry in communities across the country; (c) Build audiences for different genres of oral poetry, and, in so doing, for all poetry; (d) Validate local oral poets and reciters in their own communities, and work to strengthen the local poetry traditions; and (e) Bridge the gap, perceived or real, which often exists between academically-based poetry and popular recitation. (Zeitlin 2003, 7) Slam has received so much media attention that there are many resources available for teachers and community-based educators. These include Web sites and chat rooms that publicize slam events and share slam’s history, such as www.poetryslam.com, www.poetry.about.com, www.e-poets.net/library/ slam, www.slampapi.com, Web sites for the yearly National Slams such as ­www.­austinslam.com, and international sites such as the German www.estrad poesi.com. Spoken word record labels, including Kill Rock Stars and Mouth ­A lmighty/Mercury, produce recordings. Feature films Slam (1998) and Love Jones (1997) and the documentaries SlamNation (1998), Poetic License (2001), and Slam Planet (2006) translate the intimacy and immediacy of slam’s story­ telling onto screen and into larger dramas. A recent seven-part HBO television series, Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices (2009), with voiceover

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by Queen Latifah, follows teams from their cities to the 2008 international teen slam finals in Washington, DC. It builds on the success of the Def Poetry Jam series, which aired on HBO between 2002 and 2007, a half-hour of spoken word poetry bringing together slam poetry veterans like Beau Sia, Taylor Mia, and Staceyann Chin with poets such as Nikki Giovanni and The Last Poets, as well as popular musicians such as Jewel. It was hosted by well-known rapper Mos Def and later became a Broadway production that toured throughout the United States. A central aspect of slam poetry that makes it so conducive for school districts or other organizations to take part in is its competitive element. On the one hand, the competition takes back seat to youth self-expression and the exploration of ideas in slam. As “slam impresario” Bob Holman has described, the competitiveness is one of the contradictions that is at the center of slam’s dynamism, for just as the audiences tend to be both heckling and attentive, playful as well as very serious, the competition is both important enough to fight about and so insignificant that in his “Slam Invocation” Holman (1994) proclaims that “the best poet always loses” (1). At the same time the competition offers a growing infrastructure through which poets compete to become part of a team (representing their classroom or school, for instance), which can then go on to compete against, or form, other teams. The Brave New Voices teen slam finals is an ideal capstone event, in that it offers teams the opportunity to travel to another U.S. city for a five-day festival in which they become interpellated into a powerful social movement of poet-activists. (In 2010, I have been working with some colleagues, Maison des Jeunes, and some local performance poets to build a youth slam poetry scene, called SLAM MTL, and to send a team representing Montreal in the near future.) Hip-Hop as Global Movement I have mentioned that hip-hop culture is an international force with a growing reach. In this last section, I discuss the implications of this phenomenon for education, drawing on my recent research on hip-hop in Montreal and Toronto. This exploration closes Slam School and points outside and beyond the frames of the domestic, which have largely shaped this inquiry, to the international. As part of hip-hop’s transnational spread, it gets localized in particular ways as artists draw on their own particular musical and poetic traditions, references, and languages in order to make the culture their own. The various

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“glocal” forms of hip-hop language, identity, and community are produced through diasporic networks of affiliation, influence, appropriation, and identification, and they loudly and polyvocally contest any claims that “hip-hop is dead” through their dynamism and growth. In many instances, emergent and established hip-hop scenes outside of the United States escape rampant processes of commercialization, less subject to the creative vice-grip of industry and marketing control. This can be a deliberate move for crews who choose to be outside the mainstream in terms of their audience and thematics, as in, for instance, members of the global indigenous rap movement. In an interview, indigenous rappers and hip-hop artists Darryl “DLT” Thompson, a Maori activist in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Litefoot, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma, and Grant Leigh Saunders, an Australian aborigenese of the Biripi tribal group, describe their commitment to using hip-hop as a vehicle for political and social activism and organizing (Chang 2006), as well as their integration of indigenous cultural and aesthetic practices into their art. A position outside the reach and interest of the major U.S. music labels can also be an unintended by-product of language, so that rappers in Quebec whose base language in French cannot hope to get signed by a U.S. label, and so, almost without exception, do not earn a living from their work. I am part of a research team with two colleagues, Mela Sarkar and Lise Winer (Low, Sarkar, and Winer 2009; Sarkar 2009; Sarkar, Low, and Winer 2007), that has been exploring the multilingual rap lyrics of Montreal, a city we speculate is the site of the most extravagant language mixing in rap lyrics in North America (this research extended to include Toronto in 2008). The frequent code switching in Montreal lyrics is the result of the congruence between the hiphop generation and what gets called the “Bill 101” generation, young people whose language is shaped by a language in education policy instated in the 1970s that means that most new immigrants to Quebec must go to school in French (instead of English, as they previously had). Many of the hip-hop community’s members are also proficient in English, and many are from “allo­ phone” backgrounds (a category unique to Quebec that refers to non-French or non-English native speakers), speaking languages such Haitian French Creole, Jamaican English Creole, Spanish, and Arabic. Hip-hop’s strong ties to African American culture means that AAVE also shapes Quebec hip-hop vernaculars, as it does hip-hop around the globe. In our interviews with rappers and their fans, we have found that this mixing is deliberate, a marker of a “Montreal style” that both asserts French as the

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lingua franca of many in the community while insisting on the social and political importance and poetic power of other available languages in local registers. As J-Kyll from Haitian-origin Montreal rap crew Muzion explains: Cette espèce de mélange de langues-là, c’est pour inviter les autres cultures aussi à nous accepter . . . d’inviter toutes les cultures à accepter c’qu’on est, comment on vit, c’qu’on mange, notre façon de tripper, notre musique, notre langue. [This mix of languages, it’s to invite other cultures to accept us too . . . to invite all cultures to accept who we are, how we live, what we eat, our way of having fun, our music, our language.]

This language mixing also constitutes a site of negotiation of linguistic standards and a tacit and sometimes explicit challenge from Quebec members of the “Hip-Hop Nation” to the language policies enacted by the “Quebec nation” (peuple). We have been arguing that Montreal rap acts as and exemplifies a challenge to any intention policymakers had to “maintain” (or make) Quebec French “pure”; as these French-schooled youth are mastering French, so are they changing it (Low, Sarkar, and Winer 2009). Among other forms of protest, members of Montreal’s hip-hop community are implicitly and explicitly challenging the official “(standard) French” identity that is promulgated and asserted by government and schools. Montreal rap—like much rap in other places—seeks to realign power relations and express resistance to received authority. This careful attention to language as a tool for reworking and expressing cultural and political realities makes multilingual rap lyrics a vital medium for critical language awareness pedagogies. Such critical language pedagogies have been most thoroughly developed, to date, by Alim (2009, 2007) in relation to HHNL in a U.S. context; still unexplored are the pedagogic possibilities of examining rap lyrics from other parts of the world that draw on languages other than English, AAVE, and HHNL with students in the United States. These students might be largely unilingual, or bi-dialectal in the case of African American students, or they might be multilingual, exploring their own home or second languages as well as those of their classmates through rap lyrics from around the globe, and in some of the “foreign”-language rap lyrics from U.S.-based rap artists. Multilingual rap lyrics often take to an extreme the playful and generative attitude toward language found in HHNL, celebrating in the process the creativity of language mixing and diversity. Just as K’naan began learning

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English through rap lyrics, and the youth in Forman’s (2001) and Ibrahim’s (1999) studies performed being “black” in North America by modeling their identities on hip-hop culture, youth in the United States might begin learning languages and about cultural diversity, domestically and internationally, through music that is both different and familiar. For instance, some of the young Montreal rappers we’ve spoken to have described how multilingual rap lyrics provide an entry point for educating themselves about other languages, as they work to decipher them by asking around for what something means. Montreal rappers not only draw on the languages that they regularly speak but those they do not too. J-Kyll describes the verbal artistry and play that shape her writing process: Mais si tu veux t’amuser après avec le slang, t’amuser avec les mots avec le flow, même t’amuser avec l’accent . . . ça peut très bien arriver que j’arrive pis que je fasse un verse en joual. Pourtant moi quand je parle, je parle pas tellement joual. Mais je peux vouloir artistiquement dans ma musique faire un verse en joual. Tout comme je peux faire un verse totalement en anglais alors que je parle pas vraiment totalement en anglais tout le temps. [But after that if you want to have fun with slang, have fun with the words and the flow, even have fun with the accent . . . it can quite easily happen that I happen to do a verse in joual (a form of nonstandard Quebec French). However, when I talk, I don’t really use much joual. But artistically in my music I may want to do a verse in joual. Just as I may do a verse totally in English although I don’t really speak totally in English all the time.]

This kind of borrowing is what Rampton (1995) calls “language crossing,” in which whether one speaks a language is less important than what one wants to do with that language. It seems to be extending to the hip-hop speech community more widely so that even some white francophone Quebécois might use Haitian Creole lexical items, a testament to how important the language and its native speakers have been to the Montreal hip-hop community. The process of learning language through rap lyrics can extend to learning the cultural and historical references with which rap lyrics everywhere are replete; in this way, global hip-hop becomes an important site of teaching and learning about the inventiveness and dynamism of culture under conditions of globalization. UK-based rapper M.I.A.’s second album, Kala, embodies this creative spirit. Denied entry to the United States (perhaps due to the politics of her

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lyrics, or her father’s association with the Tamil Tigers) where she had signed with Interscope and planned to record her next album with help from artists such as Timbaland, she became a troubadour MC. M.I.A. traveled to many different countries, including Liberia, India, Angola, Trinidad, and Jamaica, collecting sounds and rhythms from around the world. As Chang (2007) describes it, M.I.A “met the children who shaped the record, holding recording sessions as she went and collecting the noises, movements and rhythms of those moments into often sublime songs. Youth whistles, cheers, interjections and cries drive singles like “Boyz” and “Bird Flu,” which, in their boldly antisubcultural use of, say, Hindu dhol drumming, Trinidadian chutney-soca and New York hip-hop, deliriously suggest a new kind of everywhere.”4 The joyful delirium of this movement across nations, traditions, languages, and cultures, and the political commentary that emerged as the artist traveled through the slums and outskirts of global cities could valuably infuse classrooms in North America and elsewhere. Kala also acts as a vibrant metaphor for the argument put forward by this book about the value of testing the bounds of what is already known, of risk-taking across differences, and of working to reimagine relations between self and other.

Notes

Preface

1.  I have assigned all teachers, including Tim and Rashidah, and all students in the study pseudonyms. 2.  See the organization’s Web site: http://www.bravenewvoices.org/ Chapter 1

1.  In Slam School I will be using the terms “black” and “African American” interchangeably, reflecting the multiple discourses that shape the research, including scholarly and popular ones (the students almost always used “black”). I will use “white” but not “European American,” given how rarely the latter is used by anyone. I will also use “Latino” except when referencing government census figures, which use “Hispanic,” and I will try to be as specific as possible, for instance, referring to Puerto Rican American students that way. I will not use the vague “Spanish” designation, although the students often did, because of the way it collapses culture into language. 2.  Retrieved at http://www.naacpldf.org/content.aspx?article=828). 3.  “Rap” is a term with some currency in the history of African American Vernacular English. Cooke (2004) defines the verb “rap” as “to talk in a highly stylized manner” (40, n. 8), but which can also mean “the kind of personal talk a man engages in with a woman” (45, n. 11). Kochman (1972) discusses “rap’s” usage in the black idiom of Chicago: one of a number of terms used to refer to “talking,” rap is sometimes a synonym for “ordinary conversation,” but it is “distinctively a fluent and lively way of talking which is always characterized by a high degree of personal style” (242). Rapping might also denote “narration, a colorful rundown of some past event” (242). Dalby (1972) says that rap can also designate “to tease, taunt; con, fool” and traces this usage to black West African English (Sierra Leone), where the term “rap” means “to con, fool, get the better of (someone) in verbal play” (184). Members of the hip-hop community also consider rap an acronym for “rhythm and poetry.” 4.  “God-father of hip-hop” Afrika Bambaataa traces back the phrase “hip-hop you don’t stop that makes your body rock” to Lovebug Starski, a DJ in the South Bronx (qtd. in Keyes 2002, 59). 5.  An interesting addition to the research on women and hip-hop is Gaunt’s (2006)

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study of the influence of the song games of African American girls on some of the sampling practices, rhythms, and rhymes of rap music. 6.  In Montreal, “slam poetry” can describe performance poetry more generally, sometimes accompanied by musicians, as used in France to describe the noncompetitive performance poetry movement there in which “slam” invokes a street sensibility and urgency. 7.  It bears mentioning that when I talk about race I do so as a social construct rather than a biological fact. Most of us live in a highly racialized world in which perceived racial membership has profound consequences. However, there remains a danger when speaking of “black” and “white” and “mixed race” of reifying these as factual categories, which goes against more than fifty years of scientific and social-scientific thinking, including that which informed the statement on “The Race Question” issued by UNESCO in 1950. It made clear that while there were some genetic variations among populations, these did not correspond to popular concepts of “race,” and that “for all practical social purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth,” which has “created an enormous amount of human and social damage” (8). 8.  For a list of these, see http://hiphoparchive.org/university/courses. 9.  In a similar way, many of the students in the PE class in year one were very critical of a guest speaker who came in to perform some of his poetry. The students met his anticapitalist values and politics with a good deal of skepticism and resistance. The poet made the case that “the system” effectively maintained an underclass through strategies such as underresourced schools and ideologies of consumerism that had people “buying junk” and “going from paycheck to paycheck.” In response, several students’ comments made clear that they resented the implication that they were not in control of their own futures. One claimed that “he made it seem like you were almost helpless and that if we came from the ghetto then we can’t get out,” and “even though I came from the baddest, the most rankest, the most dirtiest [primary school] and they’s being taught to work these nickel and penny jobs . . . I still feel that I’m still going to be whatever I set my mind to.” Students also disliked his portrait of capitalism, commenting, “how else do you come up, we’re all capitalists,” “you almost seem to have to be dirt poor to be moral,” and “he made it seem like if I go to college I’m immoral.” Chapter 2

1.  My categories, developed with emcees Louis Dufieux and Nantali ­Indongo, overlap at points with McLeod’s (1999). He creates a six-item typology of the “semantic dimensions” of authenticity in hip-hop through discourse analysis of a significant data corpus, which includes interviews with rappers, fans, and music executives, articles in hip-hop magazines, album lyrics, hip-hop newsgroup postings, and press releases for rap albums. He outlined the various dimensions as: social-psychological (staying true to yourself rather than following mass trends); racial (black versus white); politicaleconomic (underground as opposed to commercial rap); ­gender-sexual (hard versus soft); social locational (the street); and cultural (the old school versus the mainstream of rap music).

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2.  Guignon’s (2004) history of authenticity dates the emergence of a theory of self to sixteenth-century Christianity and its notion of an inner soul. While the concept marked the beginning of interiority as a value in which one accessed God through quiet and solo contemplation, the soul still existed in relation to a Creator. The self imagined as the center of experience, the seat of action, set “over and against a world of objects to be known and manipulated” (32) and separate from society, is the more direct legacy of seventeenth-century scientific revolution. However, nineteenth-century romanticism emphasized the need to recover a sense of oneness with nature and the world, developing the concept of an “authentic self ” in part as a backlash against scientific rationalism and the discrete self. The romantics felt that one could rediscover the authentic self as connected to the world through the work of deep feeling, creativity, and the imagination. Here we see the emergence of the artist as a paragon of authentic fulfillment, a notion shaping hip-hop’s equation between authentic self-discovery and creative word-work. 3.  Afrika Bambaataa (George 2004) has pointed out, in an interview, “when we say Black we mean all our Puerto Rican or Dominican brothers. Wherever the hip-hop was the Blacks was, the Latinos and the Puerto Ricans was, too” (50). Of note is that Afrika Bambaataa is a minority when it comes to admitting Puerto Ricans and Dominicans within the hip-hop nation. And the subsuming of Latinos under the umbrella of blackness still doesn’t speak to the specific locations of Latinos living in North America and U.S. colonies, nor does it address the complicated linguistic diversity that Latinos (who are inherently a mix of black, indigenous, and European roots) bring to the mix table and dance floor. Also significant are the “sisters” still left out of the category. 4.  Perry’s argument also downplays the inherent hybridity of rap music, including the way it samples from rock, pop, classic (even opera), funk, jazz, and techno-culture, and the more traditional sounds and instruments of Latin American and the Caribbean; this hybridity is central to hip-hop’s dynamism and freshness, its future-orientation, and its ability to take root in other nations. 5.  Piensa noted that in 2010 white rappers are not subject to the scrutiny of the 1990s, which could mean people are forgetting the important history of struggle and contestation over hip-hop cultural identity. The VH1 reality program Ego Trip’s White Rapper Show, hosted by MC Serch and airing for one season in 2007, suggests that despite any cultural amnesia, the negotiation of racial identity for rappers remains a charged, often awkward, affair. A competition to find the “next great white emcee of the new millennium” (www.vh1.com/shows/white_rapper/series), the show offers a hip-hop lens on stereotypes and fantastic constructions of both blackness and whiteness. (See the rich roundtable discussion by Kyra Gaunt, Cheryl Keyes, and others about the show [Gaunt et al. 2008]). 6.  Located at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7klcNEnwshM. 7.  Eminem’s success is part of a disturbing trend in which white rappers coming to the fore increasingly play the sociopath. These include Cage, who took on the persona of “Alex” from Clockwork Orange, and Necro, self-described as the “brutalest rapper on the planet” and “the godfather of the gore genre” on his MySpace page. Necro’s (2001)

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lyrics draw heavily from horror and slasher films, including lines such as “You stupid fucks’ll catch crew cuts/A chainsaw’ll take the top of your brain off ” from “Bury You with Satan” and “I had sex with all my ex hoes/ Then I chopped off their legs and arms” from “Do the Charles Mason.” 8.  From the Los Angeles Times, 2004, April 25, E1. 9.  Located at http://www.urbandictionary.com. 10.  Ice Cube even samples the song’s signature synthesizer riff in “Check Yo Self,” subtitled “Radio Remix: The Message.” 11.  Ja Rule and his lack of credibility within the hip-hop community point to the crossover of debates around the hip-hop real into the wider music mainstream. Arguably, J-Lo (singer and actor Jennifer Lopez) does duets with MCs like Ja Rule and “rap royalty” like Puff Daddy, Busta Rhymes, and Fat Joe in order to keep her own street credibility. A Nuyorican from the Bronx who first came to the public eye as a “flygirl” hip-hop breakdancer on the television show In Living Color, J-Lo is now an A-list celebrity. She also wants people to remember that she is still authentically street, as in her song “Jenny from the Block” with its chorus “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got, I’m still Jenny from the Block.” 12.  The widespread homophobia in hip-hop and dominant culture more generally is being challenged in interesting ways by the global “homo-hop” movement, which includes Oakland’s Deep Dickollective (D/DC), Tori Fixx from Minneapolis, and MZ Fontaine from London and Guyana. 13.  Tan (2009) studied a group of hip-hop-identified youth collaborating to create a documentary about the role of hip-hop in their lives. This project illustrated the tension between authenticity as being true to yourself and authenticity as insisting on the importance of individual interpretation of what hip-hop culture means, as youth participants vigilantly policed each other’s dress and attitudes to see if these were hip-hop enough or not. Taylor (1991) points to the paradox of cultures of hyperindividuality in an observation about how “new forms of conformity” arise among people who are striving to be themselves” (15). 14.  This dilemma shapes the career of rapper T.I., who in his early music sounds like a young Tupac, introspective and political. This did not sell well, anywhere, while his more recent lyrics glamorizing the “real” gangsta lifestyle have made him a hot commodity across urban and suburban demographics. 15.  The students’ reactions to this poetic experience, which most listeners would find odd (save, perhaps, initiates of the rarified world of sound poetry), were to me strong proof of the value of moving outside of one’s comfort zone. While many of us were at points uncomfortable by the senselessness of the performed text, exhibited by nervous laughter and shifting in seats, students afterward described imagining themselves in a land where they did not know the language and drew parallels to children learning speech. In a beautiful marriage of call and response, vernacular speech, and sound poetry traditions, after the performer verbalized a string of “fe, fe, fe, fe” sounds, one student interjected “fe wha?”

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Chapter 3

1.  Parts of this chapter were originally published in Low 2010. Chapter 4

1.  Harrison’s (2009) ethnographic study of the San Francisco Bay underground hip-hop scene argues that the meanings of race need to be understood in terms of “situational racialization” (17), which suggests that these negotiations are inflected by time and place; in the Bay Area’s multiracial underground subculture, Harrison witnesses young people “engaging in creative and substantive efforts to re-draw the color-line through their own understandings of integrity and ethics” (172). 2.  Nielsen SoundScan is an information system that tracks sales of music and music-video products throughout the United States and Canada, collecting sales data weekly from more than fourteen thousand retail, mass-merchant, and nontraditional (on-line stores, venues, and so on) outlets. It is the sales source for the Billboard music charts, and when it first appeared in the early 1990s, it shook up the music industry by revealing that sales of country and rap music had previously been greatly underreported in earlier data gathering methods in which sellers self-reported sales. Rap music, at that point largely produced and distributed by indy labels, was undeniably part of the fabric of pop music in America, a fact that the music industry could no longer ignore (Watkins 2005). 3.  See http://www.metacafe.com/watch/452359/stanley_crouch_on_hip_hop /­Stanley Crouch. 4.  The problems of equating whiteness with money emerged elsewhere in these classrooms. In the first year of the project, one of the students, the son of a white minister, interjected into a similar discussion that he was also from the same neighborhood as some of the other students who had been claiming they were from the black “ghetto.” In another classroom moment, one white student was accused of talking too “black” by another white student. In response he described his many voices, including how he talks differently to “ghetto” people. When his classmates objected to what they saw as a racist term, he clarified that he was from the “ghetto,” adding, “Have you seen my house?” 5.  See http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p20-559.pdf. 6.  See Reading Teacher, April 1, 2004; http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/­ summary_0286-7012172_ITM. 7.  Rapper Tupac Shakur has garnered a great deal of attention and acclaim, a good deal of it posthumous. This includes academic attention, in, for instance, Dyson (2001), due to the complex identities he performed as both gangsta and revolutionary. This stance garnered much respect since he spoke to his Black Panther militant roots (his mother’s generation) and connected that radical politics to the current reality of growing up a “hustla’” in the post-Reagan era (thus acting as a bridge between two generations of black political life). He was able to straddle and perform both identities and even made “T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.” an acronym speaking about oppression (“The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone”).

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Chapter 5

1.  Parts of this chapter have been published in Low 2007. 2.  Derrida (1998) suggests that the predicament of language has different degrees of severity. He describes the “historical and singular” (54) dispossession of the colonized subject and, in particular, of the Algerian people under French colonialism, forcibly cut off from their language, culture, and history and made instead to learn the French language and culture. However, he also argues that “all culture is originally colonial. . . . Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some ‘politics’ of language. Mastery begins, as we know, through the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations” (39). This means that the notion of alienation “more literally and more sensitively” (23) describes the postcolonial subject’s relation to language, but it also characterizes every subject’s conundrum, for language is always a preconstituted field one enters and comes into being within. 3.  Three mass-market examples of this spirit of word-work, reinvention, and selfexpression in rap are Sean “Puffy” Combs’ multiple reincarnations, first as Puff Daddy and now as P-Diddy, Shaun Carter/ Jay-Z’s turn as Jay- HOVA, the new God of rap, and, perhaps most infamously, the three personas of the character known alternately as Slim Shady, Marshall Mathers, and Eminem. 4.  As part of his counter to the N-word reappropriation theory, Asim (2007) contrasts it with queer and gay. He explains that the latter always had more than the one homophobic, derogatory meaning and a much briefer history of use. While the N-word has been used as a racist and racialized epithet since 1619, queer and gay became common slurs in the 1900s and were more quickly reclaimed in the 1950s (gay) and the 1980s (queer). Chapter 6

1.  There is disappointment in progressive educational circles about Obama’s choice for secretary of education, Arne Duncan, previously CEO of Chicago’s public schools. Duncan is thought to be an advocate of corporate models of schooling that operate via neoliberal market principles and can feed into the school-to-prison pipeline, as zerotolerance disciplinary measures cast students out of the school system and into the youth “justice” one. Giroux and Saltman (2008) claim that under his command, “Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools and fired entire school staffs” (retrieved August 1, 2009, at http://www.truthout.org/121708). 2.  For a short participatory documentary about some of its members, go to http:// s­torytelling .concordia.ca/refugeeyouth/no-bad-sound/video/roots-rap. 3.  See the video documentation of the metamorphosis at blogs.myspace.com/ shalak81. 4.  Retrieved August 1, 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/chang/2.

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Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The Message. http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=0408TeqkhgY. JoJo Pellegrino. Mambo Italiano. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8xOBFR9RLI. N. W. A. Straight Outta Compton. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPb4s0-Qcl. Young Black Teenagers. Nobody knows Kelli. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_JU -HBC-yg. Sound

Big L. 2000. Ebonics. The big life. Priority Records. Black Sheep. 1991. U mean I’m not. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Universal Music Group. Busta Rhymes. 2006. In the ghetto. The big bang. Aftermath. Chase, Tara. 2004. Northside. The college graduate mixtape, Prod. DJ Merciless. http:// www.imeem.com/cangal/music/YJe6FKOs/tara-chase-northside-prod-dj-merciless/. Chocolair. 1999. Ice cold. Ice cold. EMI Music Canada. DJ Khaled, featuring T Pain, Young Jeezy, Ludacris, Busta Rhymes, Big Boi from Outkast, Lil Wayne, Fat Joe, Birdman, Rick Ross. I’m so hood. We the best. Koch Records. Eminem. 2000. The Marshall Mathers. Universal Music Group. Eve. 1999. My bitches. Ruff ryders’ first lady. Ruff Ryders. Everlast. 1990. I got the knack. Forever everlasting. Warner Brothers.



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Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. 1982. The message. Sugar Hill Records. Ice Cube. 1990. The nigga ya love to hate. Amerikkka’s most wanted. Priority Records. Immortal Technique. 2001. Revolutionary, volume 1. Viper Records. Ja Rule. 2001. Down ass bitch. Pain is love. Murder Inc/Def Jam. Jay-Z. 2001. The blueprint. Roc-a-fella. Kajitani, A. 2006. The rappin’ mathematician. Los Angeles, CA: Kajitani. Kardinall Offishall. 2001. Bakardi slang. Quest for fire: Firestarter volume 1. Universal Music Group. KRS-One. 2001. Hip hop knowledge. Sneak attack. Koch Records. ———. 1993. Return of the boom bap. Jive. Lopez, Jennifer. 2002. Jenny from the block. Jenny from the block. Sony International. Lupe Fiasco. 2006. Daydreamin. Lupe Fiasco’s food & liquor. 1st & 5th ­Atlantic. M.I.A. 2007. Kala. XL. Mia X. 1997. I’ll take ya man ‘97. Unlady like. No Limit Records/Priority ­Records. Nas. 2006. Hip hop is dead. Def Jam. N.W.A. 1993. Straight outta Compton. Priority Records. ———. 1991. Efilzaggin. Priority Records. Necro. 2008. Bury you with Satan. Gory days. Psycho+Logical. ———. 2003. Do the Charles Mason. Rare demos and freestyles, volume 2. Psycho+ ­Logical. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. 1998. Nigga please. Elektra/WEA. Public Enemy. 1987. Yo! Bum rush the show. Def Jam. Queen Latifah. 1993. U.N.I.T.Y. Black reign. Motown/PolyGram Records. ———. 1989. All hail the queen. Tommy Boy Records. Roots. 1996. What they do. Illadelph Halflife. Geffen Records. Sans Pression. 1999. 514-50 dans mon reseau. Les Disques Mont Real. Sans Pression, featuring Mizery. January 8, 2007. Black on black. 13 deep, volume 1. Disques Sizzle. Salt-n-Pepa. 1986. Hot, cool, and vicious. Next Plateau Records. Shakur, Tupac. 2004. N.I.G.G.A. (Never ignorant about getting goals accomplished). Loyal to the game. Amaru/Interscope Records. ———. 1992. 2Pacalypse now. Interscope Records. Termanology. 2006. Watch how it go down. Hood politics IV: Show and prove. Brick Records. 3rd Bass. 1990. The gas face. Cactus revisited. Def Jam. Too $hort. 2006. Call her a bitch. Blow the whistle. Up All Nite/Jive Records. ———. 2000. 2 bitches. You nasty. Jive Records. West, Cornel. 2001. The N-word. Sketches from my culture. Artemis. Young Black Teenagers. 1993. Tap the bottle. Dead enz kidz doin’ lifetime bidz. MCA. ———. 1991. Young black teenagers. MCA.

Index

Aaron, Charles, 41, 90, 91, 92 AAVE. See African American Vernacular English Abby, 9 Abrahams, Roger, 115 Ace Man, 9 administrators: African American administrators, 145; attitudes regarding hip-hop culture among, 1, 11, 20–21, 24, 27, 63, 65, 66, 67, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 95–96; relations with African American students, 1, 3, 5, 27, 63, 65, 66, 67, 74, 76, 80, 95–96, 144–46 African American folklore, 52; Dolemite and Stagolee, 32 African American poetry: anthologies of, 51; blues poetry, 16, 25, 53, 59, 111; jazz poetry, 16, 25, 53, 59, 111. See also slam poetry African American students: relations with administrators, 1, 3, 5, 27, 63, 65, 66, 67, 74, 76, 80, 95–96, 144–46; relations with white students, 1, 3, 23, 53, 87–89, 93–103, 128–30; relations with white teachers, 1, 3, 5, 27–28, 76, 80, 92–93, 103–12, 113, 130–31, 140–41, 144–46, 163n4; segregation of, 3, 96; underachievement of, 2, 5 African American teachers, 3, 5, 53, 103, 104–5, 113, 131 African American terminology, 159n1 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 33, 37, 46, 104, 105, 155, 159n3; relationship to HHNL, 114–16, 125–26,

156; semantic inversion in, 115–16, 125–26 Aftermath Entertainment, 41 Akom, A., 3, 18, 20; “Inside the hip-hop Studio”, 147 Alim, H. Samy, 17, 36, 60, 121; on hip-hop authenticity, 37; on Hip-hop Nation Language, 114, 115, 116, 119, 156 Alvermann, Donna, 11 American dream, 37 Anderson, Edward, 21 Androutsopoulos, Jannis, 44 Apple, Michael W.: on hidden curriculum, 2 Armstrong, Edward, 30, 35, 36, 41 Ashanti, 43 Asian Americans, 9 Asia One, 9 Asim, Jabari: on the N-word, 124, 140, 143, 164n4 A Tribe Called Quest, 13, 48, 91 Au, Wayne: on rap lyrics, 13 audiences: and rap music, 27, 35, 37, 41, 42, 49, 50, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 73–74, 77–78, 83–84, 89–93, 120; and slam poetry, 14, 54–55, 56, 79, 80–82, 85, 93, 141–42, 152, 154; white audience for rap music, 27, 89–93 authenticity: being true to yourself, 31, 46–50, 160n1, 162n13; and blackness, 23, 31, 33–36, 53, 89–93, 114, 160n1, 161n3; and commercialization of rap music, 33, 41, 47–48, 49, 50–51, 53; Guignon on, 31–32, 161n2; “hard” heterosexual masculinity, 13, 14, 31, 38–43, 58, 75, 79,

1 8 0 I n d e x

160n1; and internationalization of rap music, 44–46; “keeping it real”, 29–30, 32–33, 36, 48; McLeod on, 13, 30, 43, 46, 48, 50–51, 160n1; and performance poetry course, 26–27, 52–59; and politically conscious/“underground” hiphop, 31, 36, 47–50, 53, 160n1, 162n14; relationship to criminality, 40–41, 42, 43, 49, 50, 52–53, 57–58, 61, 75, 162n14; relationship to exaggeration, 54–55; relationship to identity, 31, 34, 50–51, 53, 75, 114; relationship to personal experience, 30, 39–41, 46–47, 50–52, 54–55, 56–58, 60–62; representation of place and culture, 31, 43–46, 53, 160n1; “representin’”, 29–30, 36; the “streets”, 13, 31, 36–37, 39; and thug mimicry, 42, 43, 75; typology of hip-hop realness, 26, 30–31; vs. voice, 27, 30 Baby Love, 9 Bad Boy Records, 44 Badu, Erykah, 10 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 52, 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 73 Bambaataa, Afrika, 8, 32, 47, 48, 159n4 Baszile, Denise, 20 Beastie Boys, 9, 90 beatboxing, 7 Benzino, Ray. See Scott, Ray “Benzino” Bernard Hall, H., 147 Big L: “Ebonics”, 60, 119–20, 121 “bitch”, 28, 113, 114, 116, 122, 131–40 Bitch magazine, 134, 139, 140 Black Arts Movement, 16 Black Atlantic cultural forms, 61 Black Entertainment Television (BET), 33, 86, 116 BlackGirlsRock!, 11 blackness: and authenticity, 23, 31, 33–36, 53, 89–93, 114, 160n1, 161n3; marketed to white youths, 27, 89–91 Black Panthers, 163n7 black power, 72, 145 Black Sheep, 48; A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, 42, 64, 122

Blige, Mary J., 7, 10 Blow, Kurtis, 8 blues poetry, 16, 25, 53, 59, 111 Bolgatz, Jane, 99, 102 Bomb Crew, 39 Bond, Beverley, 10 Boyd, Todd, 5, 125, 127 Boyz in the Hood, 37 Braithwaite, Kamau: on Creoles, 114 Brand Nubian, 34 Brave New Voices International Teen Slam Finals, 14, 152, 154 Brazil, 149 breakdancing, 7, 8, 9, 103, 149 Britzman, Deborah: on narrating experience, 4 Brown, Foxy, 10, 134 Bruce, Heather, 17 Busta Rhymes, 44, 162n11; “In the Ghetto”, 36–37 Cage, 161n7 Callahan, Meg, 11 capitalism, 23, 160n9 Chang, Jeff, 7, 33, 155; on M.I.A., 158 Chase, Charlie, 8 Chase, Tara: “Northside”, 46 Chick, 9 Chic’s “Good Times”, 7 Chin, Staceyann, 154 Choclair: Ice Cold, 46 Chuck D: blog/Terrordome, 48 Chunky, 9 Cincinnati: Elementz Hip Hop Youth Center, 149 civil rights movement, 5, 127 Cixous, Hélène, 118, 119 class, socioeconomic, 6, 19, 22, 36, 76, 85, 125 Claw, 9 Clay, Andreana, 18; on the “nigga” and the “playa”, 43 Clockers, 37 close reading, 4, 17, 23, 26, 27, 28 Combs, Sean “Puffy”/“P-Diddy”. See Puff Daddy

I n d e x 

Common, 13, 49, 91 community centers, 5–6, 18, 28, 149, 151–52 conflict: between African American and white students, 1–2, 87–89, 95–103; between school and popular culture, 1–2, 4, 13, 20, 22–23, 27, 28, 63–86, 113–14, 141, 145–46; between students and teachers/administrators, 1–2, 25–26, 27, 63–86, 144–46. See also representation, politics of Cooke, Benjamin G., 159n1 Costello, Marc: on rap lyrics, 118–19 Counting Heads, 11 crack cocaine, 40, 43 Creoles, 46, 114, 120–21, 155, 157 criminality, 72, 126–27; incarceration, 12, 40, 49, 127; relationship to authenticity, 40–41, 42, 43, 49, 50, 52–53, 57–58, 61, 75, 162n14; and school discipline, 5, 164n1. See also violence critical hip-hop pedagogies, 27–28, 148, 156; and authenticity, 59–62; and rap music, 19, 20–24, 59–62 Crouch, Stanley, 90 cultural exchange, 91–92, 93–95, 103–6, 110–11 cultural insiders vs. outsiders, 3, 22, 72–74, 77–78, 81, 95–97, 104–5, 130, 131 Cutler, Cecilia: on white hip-hoppers, 114–15 cypher, 16 Cypress Hill, 9 Dalby, David, 159n3 Das EFX, 44 Dateline, 124–25 Davis, Brian, 17 Davis, Hodari, 152 “dawg”, 126, 128, 131–32 Dead Prez, 13, 49, 91; “They Schools”, 25 Death Row, 44 Deep Dickollective, 162n12 Def Jam records, 149 Def Poetry Jam series, 154 De la Soul, 13, 48

181

Derrida, Jacques, 123; on absence-in-presence, 117; on colonialism and language, 164n2; on French language, 118, 119, 164n2 Diaz, Martha: The Hip Hop Education Guidebook, 146 Dimitriadis, Greg, 18, 22 Diva, 9 DJ Khaled: “I’m So Hood”, 29 DMX, 92 Dominicans, 161n3 Dre, Dr., 35, 39, 41, 42 dub poetry, 61 Dufieux, Louis. See Lou Piensa Duncan, Arne, 164n1 Duncan-Andrade, Jeff, 3, 18, 21 Durgin, Josh, 47 Durham, Aisha, 9, 43 “dyke”, 138 Dynamic Dolls, 9 Eazy E, 42 Eckert, Penelope, 116 economic and social conditions, 6, 126–27; marginalization, 22, 23, 36, 39, 42, 49, 51, 75–76, 94, 125; poverty, 2, 13, 18, 36, 38, 40, 61, 76, 96, 160n9; and student underachievement, 2, 5 8Mile, 36 Eisner, Elliot, 19; on the null curriculum, 2; on planned vs. enacted curricula, 63 Ellsworth, Elizabeth A.: on the classroom, 82–83 Eminem, 9, 42, 90, 123, 161n7; 8Mile, 36; language used by, 35–36, 131; The Marshall Mathers, 36; and misogyny, 35–36; names used by, 164n3 entrepreneurialism, 7, 22–23 Essence magazine: “Take Back the Music” campaign, 11 Eurocentrism, 105, 111–12, 115 Eve, 10, 37, 138; “My Bitches”, 134 Everlast: “I Got the Knack”, 34–35 Fairclough, Norman, 67, 71 Farrakhan, Louis, 43

1 8 2 I n d e x

Fat Joe, 162n11 Favor, J. Martin, 50 Female HipHop, 11 feminism, 11, 132, 135, 140, 148 femmixx, 11 50 Cent, 13; relationship with Ja Rule, 43–44 Filipino Americans, 9 Fisher, Maisha, 17 Fixx, Tori, 162n12 Flava Flav, 35 Foblaze, 150 Flocabulary, 146, 148 Flores, Juan, 8 Florida State Conference: “Arresting Development”, 5 Forman, Murray, 18, 37, 41, 46, 157 Foster Wallace, David: on rap lyrics, 118–19 France: Paris suburb riots of 2005, 12, 50; slam poetry in, 160n6 Frankenberg, E. D., 2, 3, 96 freestyle poetry, 16 Freire, Paolo: on critical consciousness, 20; on limit-situations, 114 French language, 118, 119, 155–56, 164n2 Furious Five: “The Message”, 7–8, 39, 44, 162n10 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 52, 115; on linguistic normativity, 118; on Saussure, 118; on “Signifyin(g)”, 61, 73–74 Gaunt, Kyra, 159n5, 161n5 “gay”, 164n4 Gay, Geneva: on African American communicative structures, 105; on reciprocal exchange, 111; on teachers’ personal testimonies, 105–6; on teaching African American students, 103, 104 gender, 5, 6, 85; feminism, 11, 132, 135, 140, 148; “hard” heterosexual masculinity, 13, 14, 31, 38–43, 58, 75, 79, 160n1; in hiphop culture, 1, 9–11, 13, 18, 21, 22, 31, 36, 38–43, 58, 75, 79, 131–40, 148, 159n5, 160n1; misogyny, 10, 13, 21, 35–36, 40, 42, 43, 132, 148; sexism, 132, 137, 148; use of “bitch”/“ho”, 28, 113, 114, 116,

122, 131–40; women rappers, 9–11, 33, 43, 133–35, 138. See also sexuality generational differences, 11, 104–5, 163n7; hip-hop generation vs. civil rights generation, 5, 127; regarding language, 1–2, 65, 66, 67, 80, 85, 116–17, 126–28, 129, 131, 141–42. See also cultural insiders vs. outsiders George, Nelson, 116, 161n3 Get Me High bar, 14 Gilroy, Paul, 33 Ginwright, Shawn: “Inside the hip-hop Studio”, 147 Giovanni, Nikki, 154 Giroux, Henry, 12, 91, 164n1 graffiti art, 7, 8, 9, 18, 23, 149, 150 Grandmaster Flash: “The Message”, 7–8, 39, 44, 162n10 Guignon, Charles: on authenticity, 31–32, 161n2 H2ED, 146 Hagood, Margaret, 11 Haitian Creole, 155, 157 Hall, Arsenio, 35 Hall, H. Bernard, 147 Hall, Marcella Runell, 149; The Hip Hop Education Guidebook, 146 Hall, Stuart, 69, 122; on popular culture and fantasy, 29 Hammer, MC, 35 Harris, Roy, 117 Harrison, Anthony Kwame, 163n1 Haugen, Jason D., 40, 134 Hazzard-Donald, Katrina, 8 HBO: “Def Poetry Jam”, 13–14, 16 Headspin, 9 Hemphill, Patricia, 54 Heron, Gil Scot, 59 HHNL. See Hip-hop Nation Language Hilburn, Robert, 126 Hill, Lauryn, 10, 135 Hill, Marc Lamont, 3, 18, 23–24, 25, 53 Hip Hop Association, 146 hip-hop culture: aesthetic forms, 17, 18, 19; attitudes of administrators regarding, 1,

I n d e x 

11, 20–21, 24, 27, 63, 65, 66, 67, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 95–96; attitudes of teachers regarding, 1, 11, 20–22, 23–24, 27, 65–66, 67, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 76, 80, 147; elements of, 7; flipping the script in, 72–73, 115–16, 125–26, 134–35; gender in, 1, 9–11, 13, 18, 21, 22, 31, 36, 38–43, 58, 75, 79, 131–40, 148, 159n5, 160n1; the hip-hop generation, 126–28; insiders vs. outsiders regarding, 3, 22, 72–74, 77–78, 81, 95–97, 104–5, 130, 131; internationalization of, 28, 33, 44–46, 47, 115, 116, 128, 145, 149–50, 154–58, 161n4; language in, 1–2, 4, 18–19, 27, 28, 31, 37, 59–60, 64–75, 76–83, 85, 113–43, 156; materialism in, 1, 13, 44, 47; multimedia accessibility/Web sites for, 48, 116, 121–22, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 159n2, 160n8, 164nn2,3; race in, 1, 8–9, 12, 14, 18, 19, 22, 27–28, 33–36, 41–42, 89–93, 103, 148; relationship to youth identity, 2, 4, 17, 18, 19, 22, 27, 46, 58–59, 61–62, 75, 90, 157; and school curricula, 2, 4, 15–18, 19–24, 27–28, 52–62, 112, 146–48, 151–53, 156; sexuality in, 1, 10, 13, 22, 31, 38–43, 52, 58, 63, 65, 75, 79, 123, 132–35, 139–40, 160n1, 162n12, 164n4; violence in, 1, 12–13, 13, 36, 39–40, 42, 47, 49–50, 56, 57–58, 61, 71, 75, 106, 123. See also authenticity; breakdancing; critical hip-hop pedagogies; graffiti art; rap music hip-hop education movement, 146–48 Hip-hop Nation Language (HHNL), 59–60, 114–17, 118–43; relationship to AAVE, 114–16, 125–26, 156. See also N-word Hip Hop Summit Action Network, 149 Hispanic students. See Latino students “ho”, 28, 113, 114, 122, 131–40 Hoechsmann, Michael, 17, 19 Holland: rap music in, 45–46 Holman, Bob: “Slam Invocation”, 154 homophobia, 13, 162n12, 164n4 House of Pain, 9, 34 Howard, Tyrone C., 105 Hurt, Byron, 43, 148

183

Iamblackgirl. See Nantali Indongo Ibrahim, Awad, 18, 21, 46, 157 IBWC (Intelligent Black Women’s Coalition), 10 Ice Cube, 13; AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, 39; “Check Yo Self ”, 162n10; “F—tha Police”, 38; “Gangsta Gangsta”, 38; “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate”, 113; on the N-word, 126; on rap as realism, 38 Ice-T, 35, 38; “Cop Killer”, 57 identity: of African Americans, 50–51; as performative, 31, 115; persona poems, 55–56; relationship to authenticity, 31, 34–35, 37, 47, 61–62, 75; relationship to language, 31, 114–15, 116, 117, 119, 120–21, 122, 125; relationship to race, 87–89; of youth, 2, 4, 17, 18, 19, 22, 27, 46, 58–59, 61–62, 75, 90, 157 Immortal Technique, 13, 50; on gangsta rap, 40, 41 incarceration of African Americans, 12, 40, 49, 127 Indongo, Nantali, 46, 150, 160n1 In Living Color, 162n11 interpretation, 136, 137, 141–42; as indeterminate, 4, 26; of rap lyrics, 27, 64–75, 77–80, 85 Interscope, 158 Irby, Decoteau, 147 Jamaica, 6–7, 44, 61, 114, 120–21, 155 James, Carl E., 109 James, Rick: “Ghetto Life”, 36 Ja Rule: “Down Ass Bitch”, 133; “I’m Real”, 43; relationship with 50 Cent, 43–44; relationship with J-Lo, 43, 162n11 Jay-Z, 13, 53, 60; names used by, 164n3; The Blueprint, 110–11 jazz poetry, 16, 25, 53, 59, 111 Jeremiah, Milford, 21 Jewel, 154 Jin, 9 J-Kyll, 156, 157 J-Lo. See Lopez, Jennifer Jocson, Korina: on June Jordan poetry program, 17

1 8 4 I n d e x

John Q. Public, 56 Johnstone, Percy, 51 JT the Bigga: on rap music, 36 June Jordan poetry program, 17 Juvenile, 37 Kajitani: Rappin’ Mathematician, 146 Kalmunity, 150 Kardinall Offishall: “Bakardi Slang”, 46, 60, 120–21 Kelley, Robin D. G., 51, 58; on gangsta rap, 40, 41; on Ghettocentricity, 36, 125, 126 Kelley, William Melvin, 51 Kennedy, Randall: Nigger, 123, 124, 127, 141 Keyes, Cheryl, 8, 36, 161n5 Keys, Alicia, 10 Kid Frost, 9 Killah Priest, 47 Kill Rock Stars, 153 Kim, I., 151 Kimmel, Michael S., 101 Kitwana, Bakari, 5, 90, 91, 126, 127, 148 K’Naan, 46, 156–57 Kochman, Thomas, 159n3 Koger, Alicia Kae, 105 Komatsu, Eisuke, 117 Kool Herc, 6–7 Koza, Julia: on rap music, 11–12, 21, 71 Krims, Adam: on gangsta rap, 38; on “hardness” in rap music, 38–39; on internationalization of rap music, 44; on meanings of “hip-hop”, 7; on rap genres, 12–13, 48, 49, 60; on rap music in Holland, 45; on reality rap, 39 KRS-One, 7, 13; on being yourself, 47; Return of the Boom Bap, 44; Web site, 48 Kweli, Talib, 49 Labov, William, 37 Ladson-Billings, Gloria J.: on teaching African American students, 103–4 Lady Beat Makers Vol. 1, 11 Lady Heart, 9 Lady of Rage, 134 Lady Pink, 9 L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E., 51

language: as ambiguous, 4, 61, 67, 69, 71, 74, 77–78, 80, 84, 85, 123–24, 135–40, 141, 142–43; changes in, 18–19, 72–73, 115–16, 120, 121, 122, 125–26, 134–35, 138–39, 142, 156, 164n3; Gates on “Signifyin(g)”, 61, 73–74; generational differences regarding, 1–2, 65, 66, 67, 80, 85, 116–17, 126–28, 129, 131, 141–42; “head language” vs. “heart language”, 82–83, 85; in hip-hop culture, 1–2, 4, 18–19, 27, 28, 31, 37, 59–60, 64–75, 76–83, 85, 113–43; hybrid language practices, 18; indirection in, 73–74, 115; linguistic limit-cases, 113–14; multilingualism, 119, 154–58; oral vs. written, 80, 85, 121–22; performative theory of, 115; poetry and reinvention of, 118–19; poststructuralist theories of, 31; power of, 79–80, 85; rap music about, 119–22; relationship to context of use, 124–26, 127–30, 135–40, 141–42; relationship to identity, 31, 114–15, 116, 117, 119, 120– 21, 122, 125; semantic inversion, 72–73, 115–16, 125–26, 134–35, 138–39, 142; sign vs. signified in, 117, 120; sound vs. denotation in, 122; tension manifested in, 101–2. See also “bitch”; “dawg”; “ho”; N-word; representation Larkin, Todd: The N-Word, 124 Lasch, Christopher: on culture of narcissism, 32 Latino students, 1, 2, 81–82, 103, 126, 159n1; segregation of, 3, 96 Lee, Carol, 2, 3, 96 Lee, Charles, 36 Lil’ Kim, 10, 134, 138 limit-cases, 113–14 Litefoot, 9, 155 Lopez, Jennifer: “Jenny from the Block”, 162n11; relationship with Ja Rule, 43, 162n11 Los Angeles: J.U.I.C.E., 149; South Central LA, 38 Love Jones, 153 Lubiano, Wahneema, 50 Lupe Fiasco, 49; on gangsta rap, 48

I n d e x 

Lyrical Minded, 147 Mahiri, Jabari, 11, 21, 109, 125, 131 Major, Clarence, 143 Mali, Taylor, 14 Manson, Marilyn, 96 McIntosh, Peggy, 89, 101 McKinnon, Matthew, 46 McLaren, Peter, 21 McLeod, Kemberley, 32, 36, 49; on authenticity in hip-hop, 13, 30, 43, 46, 48, 50–51, 160n1 Melle Mel, 7 Menace II Society, 37 Method Man, 92 M.I.A.: “Bird Flu”, 158; “Boyz”, 158; Kala, 157–58 Mia, Taylor, 154 Mia X: “I’ll take ya man ‘97”, 134 misogyny, 10, 13, 21, 35–36, 40, 42, 43, 132, 148 Missy Elliott, 10 Mitchell, Tony, 44 Mizery, 49 Monk-E, 150 Monkey, Signifying and Lion, 73 Montreal, 28, 160n6; Café Graffiti, 150; Hip-Hop Sans le Pop, 149–50; Hip Hop You Don’t Stop festival, 150; language mixing in, 155–56, 157; Maison des Jeunes in Côte des Neiges, 150–51, 154; rappers in, 45, 46, 47, 91–92, 119, 155–56, 157; SLAM MTL, 154; W.O.R.D. (Writing Our Rhymes Down), 150 Moon, Jennifer, 11 Morgan, Joan, 11, 132, 148 Morgan, Marcyliena, 115, 119 Morrell, Ernest, 3, 18, 21 Morrison, Toni, 59; on word-work, 121, 164n3 Mos Def, 14, 154 Mouth Almighty/Mercury, 153 Ms. Maggs, 9 Ms Melodie, 10 MTV, 116 Muhammed, Tony, 147

185

Muzion, 156 MZ Fontaine, 162n12 Nappy Roots, 44 Narcycist, the, 150 Nas’s Hip Hop Is Dead, 49, 152 National Hip Hop Political Convention, 149 Nation of Islam, 43 Native Americans, 9 Neal, Mark Anthony, 148 Necro: “Bury You with Satan”, 161n7; “Do the Charles Manson”, 161n7 Nederhop, 45 Nelly’s “Tip Drill”, 135 Newman, Michael, 22, 25 New York City: Blackout Arts Collective, 147; the Bronx, 6, 8, 17, 36, 44, 159n4, 162n11; Brooklyn College, 147; City Lore, 153; graffiti artists in, 9; Lyrical Minded, 147; Marcy Projects, 53; Nuyorican Poets Café, 14; Power Writers, 17; rappers in, 6, 8, 10, 39, 43, 44, 53, 159n4 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn: on African American poetry, 51 Nielsen SoundScan surveys, 89–90, 163n2 Nigerian rappers, 115 No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 5, 6 Nomadic Massive, 150 N.W.A., 13, 35, 41, 58, 124, 126; Efil4zaggin/ Niggaz4Life, 52, 113, 125; “Fuck da police”, 57; Straight Outta Compton, 38, 39, 44 N-word, 116, 135; Asim on, 124, 140, 143, 164n4; as limit-case, 113–14; “nigga” vs. “bitch”, 131, 132, 134, 138, 140; “nigga” vs. “nigger”, 119, 125–26, 127–30, 131, 142–43; student attitudes regarding, 1, 28, 82, 122–30, 140–41; West on, 64, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129; white attitudes regarding, 28, 35, 129–30, 140–41 Oakland, 147, 162n12 Obama, Barack, 164n1 Ol Dirty Bastard: Nigga Please, 113 Omoniyi, Tope, 115

1 8 6 I n d e x

Ong, Walter, 122 orality vs. writing, 80, 85, 121–22 Orfield, G., 2, 3, 96 Pam (the Funkstress), 10 Parmar, Priya, 7 parody, 42, 48, 64, 75, 82, 116, 122, 136 Paul, Robints, 150, 151 Pelegrino, JoJo: “Mambo Italiano”, 47 Pennycook, Alastair, 18, 44, 45, 59; on identity and language, 115 People’s Poetry Gathering, 153 performance poetry course, 1–2, 19–20, 24–26; Advanced Poetry (PE) class, 25, 69, 88, 92, 93–94, 122–23, 125, 127, 130, 131; and authenticity, 26–27, 52–59; conflict in, 25–26, 27; cultural exchange in, 93–95; and gender, 131–33, 135–40; guest speakers/performers in, 25, 53, 59, 100–101, 111, 160n9, 162n15; negotiation of content guidelines, 26, 27, 64; and the N-word, 1, 28, 82, 122–30, 140–41; Pacesetter English (PE) class, 69, 93–94, 122–23, 127, 129, 160n9; and race, 27–28, 87–89, 92–103, 106–12, 124–26, 127, 128–30; rating of rap music in, 122–23; Slam used in, 15–16; storytelling in, 105, 106–12; student journals in, 15; use of persona poems in, 55–57. See also slam poetry; talent night rap Perkins, William, 6 Perry, Imani, 36, 48; on ego and collective in hip-hop, 32; on gangsta rap, 39–40, 42; on hip-hop as African American, 33–34, 161n4; on Lauryn Hill, 135; on realism in hip-hop, 50; on sociological vs. political reality, 60–61; on use of “nigga”, 125, 128 Petchauer, Emery, 9, 17, 18, 19, 23 Piensa, Lou, 34, 150, 161n5 Pinto, Vieira, 114 Pitt, Alice: on narrating experience, 4 Poetic License, 153 pornography, 135 Potter, Russell A., 61

Pough, Gwendolyn D.: on hip-hop culture, 9; on women and rap music, 10, 43, 134 Pratt, Mary Louise, 76 Presley, Elvis, 90 Pritchard, Norman, 51 Public Enemy, 12, 13, 39, 59, 91; Fear of a Black Planet, 25; Web site, 48 Puerto Ricans, 8–9, 126, 159n1, 161n3 Puff Daddy, 53, 162n11, 164n3 Quebec, 46, 49, 155, 156, 157 Queen Latifah: “Ladies First”/All Hail the Queen, 10; “U.N.I.T.Y.”, 133–34 “queer”, 134, 164n4 Quinn, Eithne, 52, 125; on gangsta rap, 13, 38, 40, 41–42, 51 Quinones, Lee, 8 race, 6, 85, 87–112; ambivalence regarding, 83, 98–99; in hip-hop culture, 1, 8–9, 12, 14, 18, 19, 22, 27–28, 33–36, 41–42, 89–93, 103, 148; mixed-race persons, 87–89; racial stereotypes, 41–42, 57, 72, 87–89; racism, 5, 11, 20, 33, 35–36, 41, 65, 72, 87–89, 96, 98, 109–10, 124, 127, 140, 142, 164n4; segregation based on, 3, 96, 97; and slam poetry, 14, 87–89, 93–95; as social construct vs. biological fact, 160n7 Raimist, Rachel, 9, 43 Rampton, Ben, 157 Rapademics, 146 rap music: anxiety regarding, 11–13, 50, 52, 57, 63, 65, 71, 76, 77–78, 90, 95–96; commercialization of, 7–8, 33, 41, 47–48, 49, 50–51, 53, 57, 89–91, 116, 152, 155, 163n2; and critical hip-hop pedagogies, 19, 20–24, 59–62; the DJ in, 6–7, 8, 9–11, 33, 48, 103, 149; “don” rap, 60; electronic modification in, 59; freestyling in, 35, 65–66, 80, 85, 153; gangsta rap, 12–13, 22–23, 30, 34–35, 38–43, 45, 48–49, 51, 56, 57–58, 60, 64, 74, 79, 132, 134–35, 153, 162n14, 163n7; “hard core” rap, 12–13, 22–23, 30; individual vs. collective in, 32; interpretation of lyrics, 27, 64–75,

I n d e x 

77–80, 85; jazz/bohemia/college-boy rap, 12, 48, 49; about language, 119–22; lyrics vs. music in, 118–19; mack/pimp rap, 12, 13, 60, 133; the MC in, 7, 10, 12, 33, 34–35, 42–44, 46–47, 149; multilingual lyrics, 91–92, 154–58; music videos, 8, 10, 21, 34–35, 39, 44, 47, 48, 90, 116, 135, 137; “old school”, 12, 45, 47, 48, 53, 160n1; origins of, 6–11, 33, 36, 48, 159n3; party rap, 12; protest rap, 12, 39; and race, 8–9, 12; reality rap, 12–13, 38, 41; relationship to personal experience, 30, 39–41, 46–47, 50–52, 56–59, 60–62; relationship to spoken word culture, 13–14; rhyme in, 118–19, 159n5; Rose on, 6, 7, 8, 11, 43, 59; sampling in, 8, 18, 25, 36–37, 45, 47, 59, 61, 161n4; the skit in, 63, 66, 72, 85; vs. slam poetry, 14, 58, 79, 81–82, 152–53; as socially and politically conscious, 7–8, 12, 13, 18, 20, 22–23, 31, 33–34, 39, 47–50, 91 Rap Sessions, 148 Reed, Daisy, 105 religion, 22 representation: aesthetic vs. political, 51–52, 61; of place and culture, 31, 43–46, 53, 160n1; politics of, 1–2, 4, 21–23, 74, 147; vs. reality, 4, 50–52, 54, 55–59; “representin’”, 29–30, 36; Spivak on, 51–52. See also language Rice, Jeff, 18 Richardson, Elaine, 9, 43, 133 Ringgold, Faith, 124 Rioux, Christian, 12 Rivera, Raquel, 8, 125, 148 rock music, 34, 90, 96 Rock Steady Crew, 9 Rodriguez, Louie, 18, 20, 147 Rogoff, Barbara, 85 Rokafella, 9 Rolling Stone, 90 Roots, the, 13, 91; “What They Do”, 48 Rose, Tricia: Black Noise, 6; on hip-hop culture, 6, 9, 11; The Hip Hop Wars, 149; on rap music, 6, 7, 8, 11, 43, 59 Ross, Andrew: on rap music, 12, 13 Ruffin, David, 67, 68, 70

187

Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices, 153–54 Saltman, Kenneth, 164n1 Salt-n-Pepa, 9; Hot, Cool, and Vicious, 10 San Francisco, 163n1 Sans Pression, 514–50; Dans Mon Reseau, 45; and Mizery, 49 Sarkar, Mela, 44, 59, 115, 119, 155 Saunders, Grant Leigh, 155 Saussure, Ferdinand de: on linguistic arbitrariness, 117–18; on signifier vs. signified, 117–18 Scherpf, Stephanie, 20 Scholz, Arno, 44 Schwitter, Kurt: “Ursonata”, 59 Scott, Jill, 7, 10 Scott, Ray “Benzino”, 35, 36 segregation, 3, 96, 97 Serch, 161n5; “The Gas Face”, 35 7 year Bitch, 134 sexism, 11, 132, 137, 148 sexuality: “hard” heterosexual masculinity, 31, 38–43, 58, 75, 79, 160n1; in hip-hop culture, 1, 10, 13, 22, 31, 38–43, 52, 58, 63, 65, 75, 79, 123, 132–35, 139–40, 160n1, 162n12, 164n4; homophobia, 13, 162n12, 164n4; pornography, 135. See also gender Shakur, Tupac, 44, 106, 162n14, 163n7; on “niggas” vs. “niggers”, 125 Shalak, 150 Shanté, Roxanne: “Roxanne’s Revenge”, 10 Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean, 10, 135 Sia, Beau, 14, 154 Simmons, Russell, 14, 149, 153 Slam, 15–16, 153 Slam Nation, 16, 153 Slam Planet, 153 slam poetry: classroom use, 2, 4, 15–16, 19–20, 24–26, 53–59, 64, 74, 76, 78–82, 85, 93–95, 103, 141, 142–43, 145, 152–53; defined, 14, 160n6; and race, 14, 87–89, 93–95; vs. rap lyrics, 14, 58, 79, 81–82, 152–53; slam poetry movement, 146, 152– 54. See also performance poetry course

1 8 8 I n d e x

Slam Poetry, Inc., 14 Slam Poetry National competition, 14 slavery, 53, 88, 96, 110, 130, 133 Smith, David, 42 Smith, Patricia, 14; “Skinhead”, 55 Smitherman, Geneva, 119, 132; on flipping the script/semantic inversion, 72–73, 115–16, 125; on “nigga” vs. “nigger”, 123, 125; on tonal semantics, 122 So-called, 47 Somalia, 46 sound poetry, 16, 51, 59, 162n15 South African AMAA campaigns, 149 Spady, James, 36 Sparxx, Bubba, 44 Spears, Arthur, 123–24, 125, 132 Spinderella, 9 Spivak, Gayatri: on representation, 51–52 spoken word education, 1–2, 4, 5, 16–20, 152–54. See also performance poetry course; slam poetry Spookrijders: De Echte Shite, 45 Starski, Lovebug, 159n4 Stein, Gertrude, 16, 59 Stone, Angie, 7 storytelling, 105–12 Stovall, David, 3, 17–18, 20, 21 street fashion, 7 street knowledge, 7, 39, 79 students. See African American students; Latino students; white students Sugar Hill Gang: “Rapper’s Delight”, 7 Sugar Hill Records, 7–8 Supreme Court, 3, 52 Sutton, Laurel: on “bitch”, 132–33, 136 Suzy Q., 9 Syde, 150 talent night rap, 27, 63–86, 122; and interpretation of rap lyrics, 27, 64–75, 77–80, 85; and school handbook/ community standards/3-M policy, 66–67, 71, 74 Tan, Eloise, 151, 162n13; on critical hip-hop pedagogy, 21–22 Tate, Greg: “White Freedom”, 35

Taylor, Charles, 32, 162n13 teachers: African American teachers, 3, 5, 53, 103, 104–5, 113, 131; attitudes regarding hip-hop culture among, 1, 11, 20–22, 23–24, 27, 65–66, 67, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 76, 80, 147. See also white teachers Temptations, 67, 68, 70 Termanology: “Watch How it Go Down”, 49 The Coup, 49 The Last Poets, 59, 154 The Notorious B.I.G., 44 3rd Bass, 35 Thompson, Darryl “DLT”, 155 thug mimicry, 42, 43, 75, 134 T.I., 162n14 Timbaland, 158 Togo: Rap Against Silence project in, 149 Too $hort, 13, 133; “Call Her a Bitch”, 133; “2 Bitches”, 133 Toop, David, 6, 36, 52 Toronto: Literacy Through Hip Hop, 149; rappers in, 46, 60, 119–21, 154, 155; T-dot identity, 46, 120–21 Tucker, Herbert F.: on poetry and ambivalence, 84 Turrentine, Jeff, 113 2 Live Crew, 13; As Nasty as They Wanna Be, 52 UNESCO: “The Race Question”, 160n7 United States of Poetry, The, 16 UTFO: “Roxanne, Roxanne”, 10 Vanilla Ice, 9, 90; “Ice Ice Baby”, 35; as inauthentic, 35 VH1: Ego Trip’s White Rapper Show, 161n5 violence: in hip-hop culture, 1, 12–13, 13, 36, 39–40, 42, 47, 49–50, 56, 57–58, 61, 71, 75, 106, 123; in slam poetry, 55–56. See also criminality voice, 15, 17, 82, 141; vs. authenticity, 27, 30 Vox Sambou, 150, 151 Vygotsky, Lev, 117 Walsh, Katherine: on ambivalence

I n d e x 

regarding race, 83, 98–99; on conflict/ debate, 99; on individual stories, 105 Wang, Oliver, 9 Washington, DC: DC Urban Arts, 149 Watkins, S. Craig, 40, 41, 42, 90, 163n2 West, Cornel: “The N-word”, 64, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129 West, Kanye, 91 West African English, 159n3 white rappers, 9, 34–36, 89, 90, 161nn5,7. See also Eminem white students, 2, 159n1; relations with African American students, 1, 3, 23, 53, 87–89, 93–103, 128–30; use of N-word avoided by, 129–30, 140–41 white teachers, 53, 147; and language, 107, 109, 110–11; personal testimonies of, 105–12; relations with African American students, 1, 3, 5, 23, 27–28, 76, 80, 92–93, 103–12, 113, 130–31, 140–41, 144–46, 163n4. See also teachers “wiggers”, 91, 114

189

Williams, A. Dee, 20 Wilson, August: Fences, 127 Winer, Lise, 44, 59, 119, 155 Women of the World Poetry Slam, 14 women rappers, 9–11, 33, 43, 133–35, 138. See also gender World Poetry Slam, 14 WuTang Clan, 47 X-Clan, 34 Young Black Teenagers: “Nobody Knows Kelli”, 34; “Tap the Bottle (Twist the Cap)”, 34 youth centers, 5–6, 149–52 Youthspeaks, 145 Yo Yo, 10 Yvette, 9 Zarazua, Daniel, 147 Zeitlin, Steve, 153 “Zulu Nation”, 8