My work with hip-hop over the past few weeks has been focused on drafting what my Hip-Hop Education Center "Def" Committee colleagues have described as the "foundation" for a document defining key terms within Hip-Hop Pedagogy for a think tank gathering at the Schomburg in Harlem on Nov. 9-10. Our committee work began in March, and has taken place mostly via monthly (and sometimes weekly) conference calls and video-chats via Google Hangout. At some point in the game, around early May to be exact, I offered to begin synthesizing the ideas and thoughts that were accumulating in a Google Docs file that our committee moderator created as a shared electronic space for us to work in. From that point onward, I became deeply vested in the process of trying to understand what being a college faculty member and teaching about and through hip-hop actually meant. The drafting work (which I'm tempted to put in quotation marks because it feels like the document that currently exists is the product of many more hours than one might associate with a draft) culminated more or less with a phone call Thursday with one of my colleagues on the committee, whose hip-hop name is Blue Black. The phone call, like so many "ahh-ha" moments that occurred during the past five months, gave me a sudden and refreshingly new perspective on how hip-hop works.
Before I go further, a little bit of back story might help. Our committee consisted of three faculty members, a high school teacher, and a newly minted PhD holder as well as an associate director of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University and one emcee/community organizer. The latter individual was Blue Black.
I am, of course, one of the three faculty members. I felt honored to be a part of the committee and at the same time somewhat anxious. I was not sure what my place in hip-hop was or if I could be regarded legitimately as an expert on hip-hop. Sure, I'd received a couple grants for my work, had had articles and essays published in both scholarly and general interest publications, and had developed an online course for my college that carries the same title as this blog. But did I know hip-hop? Was I hip-hop? How would I know?
Blue Black raised the stakes of the conversation during our second conference call. Positioning himself as the practitioner who stood outside the academy, he began questioning the premise of hip-hop education from the get-go. Hip-hop has its own way of teaching and learning, he asserted. Hip-hop didn't need the Academy. What was the Academy's motive in trying to create hip-hop?
Defending the Academy, I noted that there were both college administrators and faculty members whose values resonated with ideas of self-knowledge, the acquisition of valuable skills through training in the arts of hip-hop, and valuing the gifts that students held inside them as contributors to the learning community of the classroom. I also noted that I had evaluated some requests for college credit through learning that had occurred outside the classroom (or prior learning assessment) in hip-hop and had found that the knowledge that the students brought approximated what they might learn in a college class. Blue Black's response to this was, "Prior Learning, I dig that. But that's still serving the Academy, not hip-hop."
Blue Black's words struck a hidden nerve, much as a Hawaiian graduate student did back in 1997 when she responded to my questioning of the value of teaching oral traditions with a retort that "we (meaning Hawaiians) don't want you in our community." Both the Hawaiian student and Blue Black were speaking truth to power, and, in the process, I was seeing myself quite uncomfortably in a position I didn't like. In both cases, I was speaking from a privileged position and had revealed how being in that position had given me the ability to deny (or simply not see) how powerful institutions of education could demean the marginalized. In both cases, the pill they tossed me was quite hard to swallow because I had felt that as a woman of color I, too, was of the "minority" contingent in society and therefore an ally. But, of course, being of brown skin does not automatically make one an ally.
I left the call feeling that my heart had turned to lead. A long overdue revision of an essay for a book on teaching practices ground to a halt as questioned what I was doing and pondered how I could share hip-hop with others if I was in the position of the privileged and didn't understand it all that well myself. At the same time, I knew I couldn't back out. I am a believer in the idea that one learns as one teaches, and I had entered hip-hop as a teacher who sought to learn. So, if this was learning, I wanted to experience it, even if it made me feel rather small.
The next call came and our very efficient and supportive moderator suggested we start with a discussion of where we were at with the terms. I chimed in quickly, saying that we'd covered some sensitive topics in the last call and that perhaps it might make sense to check in on those points first. The conversation that ensued broke the heaviness, and created an environment where we, as a committee, were able to start doing what hip-hop refers to as "building". Barriers had been broken, so in the ruins we could, like hip-hop did in the early 1970s, plunge into the rubble and start to create something new.
Writing and editing (which might be thought of as another form of compiling and smoothing out the thoughts of many into one) is a strength for me, and a tool for learning. So I offered at the end of the call to begin pulling together a draft of what had been contributed to date. The draft evolved through June, into July and August, and finally the first week of September. I worked with words offered in the Google Docs file by others, ideas and issues that were voiced in conference calls, and with documents, readings, and narratives that Blue Black began sending me and some others via e-mail. As I worked, I found myself swinging like a pendulum between two emotional extremes: On one end, I felt pride in what I was doing and the document that was emerging and on the other hand, I felt like I was asserting too much authority. I tried to step out of the authoritarial position on several occasions, hoping others would seize the reins. But nobody did. And deadlines being deadlines, we had a draft to finish.
Then, came the call on Thursday with Blue Black and the insight into how hip-hop works.
"What you have done, or what you and I have done is the first step," he said. "We have built the foundation. Now, it's time to let everyone else have at it, with their comments and their critiques, and to then have someone else build from there."
Build, destroy, build. That's the process of creating something new. That's the logic of hip-hop; its rules, its procedure.
The insight offers great peace when I place it in the context of both academic and other metaphors. In academia, deconstructionists break down the congealed relationships of power within such nuggets of knowledge as "facts" and "isms", with a goal -- often forgotten in the brilliance of the breakdown -- of reconstruction from there. In sports, coaches work athletes hard in order to break the inhibitions that reside within their bodies so the athletes can understand what is possible. In Seattle, b-girls Naj and Bean both shared with me stories of how they both went bald trying to learn how to spin on their heads. In the process, they noticed that they were the only women at the breakdancing practices and in noticing this point they also started to see how women were systematically categorized as weak, incapable, and unworthy across multiple sectors of society. B-girling showed them what they -- as women -- were capable of achieving and has made them both into powerful leaders in Seattle's community based hip-hop scene today. What the metaphors suggest parallels what my doctoral advisor once said: If you're feeling uncomfortable, that's good. It means you're thinking critically. It means you're going through growth.
The Hawaiian graduate student's comments "broke me" in 1997, and in doing so, helped me understand how to build a scholarly life centered on a commitment to continue to learn to listen as much as possible, particularly to those who in the past have not been in a privileged space to speak. Blue Black's comments in 2013 "broke me" again. In doing so, they helped me understand how being up front about what I know and what I do not know facilitates the process of learning and, at the same time, of teaching. It is from this space that I look forward to the next steps of building within hip-hop.
