Towers of power

It might be unfair and at the same time totally appropriate to begin a brief report on the second day of the Words Beats & Life teach-in with commentary about the world outside the conference. Unfair to all of the people who shared insights and thoughts today. Appropriate because it serves as a reminder that academic discussions of social movements and cultures like hip-hop cannot and should not occur in a way that shields the debates and participants from the world going on around them.

The jury in the case against George Zimmerman, a Sanford, Florida, security guard who shot and killed a 17-year-old African American teen named Trayvon Martin reached a verdict shortly before 10 p.m. The jury engaged in two days of deliberations, and found Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder or any other crime. A white man walked free out of a courtroom surrounded by crowds of angry demonstrators. Exhortations to stay calm that numerous police and political figures issues may not be heeded, and cities may burn tonight.

I got addicted to Twitter during the jury deliberations. As a result, I spent the day listening to discussions of how hip-hop artists, practitioners, and scholars need to be defining the culture instead of having it defined for them and checking on tweets every few minutes to see if there were developments in the Zimmerman case. I was exhausted by the end of the day, partly by the junk that gets posted on Twitter when you're not following a specific hashtag-defined topic or commentator. But I also was exhausted by the verdict itself. It seemed almost like a slap in the face of what hip-hop is advocating in terms of ground-up education, student-centered learning, an understanding of skills and knowledge as intricately related and always growing, and political change to make the world a more egalitarian, racially harmonious, socially just and peaceful place. It also seemed like a sign -- a troubling sign -- that white power (yes, that's what I will call it) is alive and well, and ready to call the shots.

While jumping on Twitter to follow tweets on the watch for the verdict, I found myself thinking of other highly publicized events of racial injustice and the seeming perpetuation of crimes. In my lifetime, Watts has burned, riots have broken out in the Bronx during power outages, five teenage boys from Harlem were wrongfully convicted in the brutal rape and beating a white woman jogging at night through Central Park, the not-guilty verdict of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King led to riots across the U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court upheld stripped indigenous Hawaiians of control over elections of an agency established to look over their interests, African Americans were left to drown and/or starve in the New Orleans Super dome following Hurricane Katrina, and a white security guard was acquitted for shooting to death an African American teen who, in accordance with most of the evidence, had done nothing wrong. I will emphasize that these are just a handful of examples of the daily occurrences of injustice that occur in the United States all the time.

My husband and I saw a documentary on the Central Park jogger case a few months ago called "The Central Park Five." I wrote about the film in an earlier blog posting, and noted that he had muttered as we left the theatre that the same riots could happen right in the small rural community where we lived. I had responded that the threat of such outbreaks of riots as justified responses to unjust circumstances was one reason why it was so important to recover marginalized histories and memories in order to make sure that the experiences don't get wiped out of the American mindset altogether.

The recovery of such histories and memories and the work of keeping them alive is an important theme of a growing area called Hip-Hop Studies, and is central to my research on hip-hop. It also is a theme that comes up at many hip-hop conferences that I've attended over the past four years that bring scholars, practitioners, K-12 educators, and activists together. Today, Martha Diaz, director of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University, made the important point that it is research and work being done in the academy -- in the ivory towers, so to speak -- that establishes what kind of curricula gets developed for K-12 educators and sets national societal standards of understanding. The point was reiterated somewhat differently by one of the hip-hop pioneering b-boys Crazy Legs, who was one of the original members of the Rock Steady Crew and continues to serve as its leader, at age 47. He, like many others at the conference, spoke of the importance of knowing one's personal relationship to hip-hop and how that personal set of beliefs shapes the ethics one practices before a collective. Implicit in both of their remarks was a need for those within hip-hop culture to be in charge, in a sense, of defining the culture and establishing its standards. That's why hip-hop needs to be in the academy, emphasized Diaz. Because if hip-hop is going to be in the academy -- and it already is -- it should be in there in a way that is defined by those within hip-hop who create the culture and are sustained by the culture, not merely by those who consume it.

One of the last presentations of the day seemed to both slap Diaz and Crazy Legs in the face, while simultaneously proving them right. A curator for the American History Museum of the Smithsonian unveiled plans to include an exhibit on the 1970s Bronx in a future exhibit on inventions and innovations. The exhibit will occupy a very small space within a larger exhibit, but will allow visitors to touch a turntable and record, and to practice scratching, among other things. In presenting the plan, the curator said something that stunned me. "I am now going to give all of you a brief history of hip-hop so that you can see the exhibit in context." I wondered if she realized that she was speaking to an audience whose members included many who grew up in the 1970s Bronx and had created the very history she was now delivering to them. I also wondered if she realized the implication of her story, which was laced with terms like "those kind of people" and "that kind of music". She was sweet and polite, and she herself was not disrespectful. But the discourse from which she was speaking was disrespectful.

At any rate, it is late and I need to wrap up and sleep. But before signing off, I wanted to speak to the title I chose for this post, "Towers of power". Towers are the ivory towers of which Diaz spoke, and power refers to an oft-repeated sentiment that Crazy Legs voiced in speaking of his own role within hip-hop culture: "With power comes responsibility." It seems that the academy needs to be responsible in the manner in which it creates space for hip-hop so hip-hop culture is defined from within hip-hop culture and not the academy. The same could be said for the Smithsonian.