In her opening remarks to one of the hip-hop sessions at the 2018 joint meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Society for Music Theory (SMT), Lauron Kehrer asked the audience to think about what it means for there to be a session on hip hop in which all of the presenters (and most of the audience) were white at the AMS in 2018. The question stuck with me, and it is similar to those I wrestle with on a regular basis, as a white cis-het man who has taught rap classes for nearly ten years, and who has a textbook published that surveys rap music from a number of different perspectives. Why am I teaching hip hop classes? What do I stand to gain from teaching this material? What do my students stand to gain from me teaching this material? I trust that most hip-hop scholars teach the material because they have a genuine love and appreciation for it, and, like scholars of anything, we believe that we found some interesting things about our subject and we want to share them with others. But could we--as white scholars of hip hop--be accused of cultural appropriation? Of profiting from the suffering of others? Of perpetuating the systems of oppression that gave rise to hip-hop culture in the first place?
In this series of posts, I argue that being a responsible white hip-hop scholar means using our privileges to dismantle both the racism on which the academy is built and the systems of oppression that it continues to perpetuate: in short, responsible hip-hop pedagogy is necessarily anti-racist pedagogy. Anti-racism involves not just acknowledging our complicity in the structures that uphold white privilege but working actively to dismantle them. In academia these structures range from the lack of diverse representation in our curricula to attracting and supporting students and faculty of color to removing institutional barriers that disproportionately affect people of color.
Kyoko Kishimoto outlines three phases of an anti-racist approach to teaching:
Incorporating the topics of race and inequality into course content;
Teaching from an anti-racist pedagogical approach;
Anti-racist organizing within the campus and linking our efforts to the surrounding community.
Those of us teaching hip hop classes are no doubt well on the way to incorporating issues of race and inequality into the curriculum. But only the first of Kishimoto’s three tenets has to do with what is being taught: the other two deal with how that material is being taught. This is the line between diversity--simply including rap music (or other music by marginalized groups) into your classroom--and anti-racism, seeking to dismantle the systems that uphold whiteness in order to provide equal access for all.
Any responsible study of hip-hop must acknowledge issues of race and inequity, and incorporate them into the curriculum. In order to incorporate these issues successfully, we must first get comfortable talking about race. It can be challenging for white people to talk critically about race since the systems that we are critiquing have been crafted to work in our favor. We often fail to see how they might harm others, and, because we do benefit from them, we are less likely to have a vested interest in changing them. As (predominantly white) music scholars, we may feel ill-equipped or uncomfortable having conversations about race in the classroom, particularly if those issues have not impacted our lived experience. But not talking explicitly about race also serves to uphold white supremacy. The privilege of whiteness allows us to sidestep issues of race, to “disappear,” as Kishimoto writes (543). Mica Pollack uses the term “colormuteness” to describe “an unwillingness to talk about issues of race, thereby perpetuating dominant ideologies.” Whiteness has prospered for so long because it has gone relatively unchallenged from those in the unique position to dismantle it: those who own the property of whiteness. Juliet Hess argues that calls for “diversity” and “social justice” in the music curriculum are often euphemisms or efforts to gingerly sidestep having conversations about racism. Direct language is crucial to identifying and working to dismantle systems that uphold white supremacy in higher education.
Acknowledging your positionality--making whiteness visible--is an important starting point toward building trust. I have successfully used Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of White Privilege” in my classes. The article is fairly brief, and could easily be assigned to students in advance of the first class meeting. You could ask students to compose a list similar to the one that McIntosh developed, or to develop lists of their own. Newly developed lists could also examine privileges associated with gender, disability, and immigrant/citizen identities. It is crucial for you as a faculty member to participate in the conversation and to remark on your privileges. All professors bring with them implicit biases into the classroom, but students also have implicit biases as well. Acknowledging from the start that this culture and history is not yours--that you cannot and will not claim to know the experiences of people of color--is an important first step toward establishing trust.
Rap music (and hip-hop culture more broadly) offers opportunities for counter-storytelling, a practice that involves both meaning-making and challenging dominant narratives. Here are a few examples of rap's counter-storytelling potential:
Brian Turner, head of Priority Records, said of N.W.A.: "What impressed me about N.W.A. and Eazy-E was that these guys lived the things they talk about. All I was hearing on the news was the perspective of the police and outsiders—you never get the perspective of the actual guy they’re talking about. When I saw what these guys wrote, it really hit me that their side of the story was important to tell."
Read chapter 3 in Loren Kajikawa's Sounding Race in Rap Songs and/or Robin D.G. Kelley's "Kickin' Reality, Kickin' Ballistics" in Droppin' Science
Listen to "Fuck the Police" and/or "Straight Outta Compton": what is N.W.A.'s side of the story?
Read Richard Shusterman's "The Fine Art of Rap." What do we value in art? How does rap music either reinforce or challenge those values?
Listen to Lupe Fiasco's "He say, she say." Whose voice is missing? Why is it missing? Write a third verse to the song that fills the gap.
I'm going to stop here for today. More tomorrow, or possibly Thursday! Comments always welcome.