Identity Theft

Today was my first full day in Seattle. It was a long but varied day. It has suddenly hit me that I am one hour away from midnight, west coast time, which is nearly 2 a.m. in New York. After a full day of feeling like I was back home on the West Coast, my body is suddenly deciding to remind me that it now resides on the East Coast.

I began my journey into a poetics of place with a day in the International District. The choice of locale was dictated by plans to meet two very old friends -- by old, I mean, back from my undergraduate years at Northwestern in the early 1980s (before hip-hop had gotten going) -- for lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in town. Walking from my hotel on the eastern edge of a neighborhood known as First Hill took me into the area in about 15 minutes. If you follow the logic of geography that Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest dictates, you will soon learn that the logic ends once you've crossed the last J, or Jefferson. From there, the main east-west arteries become Yesler, Jackson, King, and then Dearborn.

The International District sits roughly between Yesler and Dearborn. At one point in its history, it ran all the way to Puget Sound, but land appropriated to build sports stadiums beginning in the early 1970s, sandwiched the district to a space between Fourth Avenue (more or less) and 15th (more or less).

Within those 11 north-south avenues are neighborhoods within neighborhoods: a section called Little Saigon and an area known as Chinatown. I am not sure where the City of Seattle has designated that the boundaries of these areas begin and end. I just know that the neighborhoods exist. A visit to the Wing Luke Museum, which has moved to a beautiful new site on King Street, between Seventh and Eighth, helped me understand the political logic of how these neighborhoods came to be formed through waves of migration that began first in the mid-1880s with Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian laborers and continued into the present era, with moments like the initial arrival of Vietnamese refugees and then Cambodians helping to form the most recent neighborhoods.

The Wing Luke Museum calls itself a national model for how museums and communities can work together to capture history and mobilize it to gain better understandings of the present. One of its strongest features (from the perspective of someone who can only be a passive recipient of information for a few minutes) is the interactivity it deploys in many of its exhibits, a feature that nudges participants to become players in the process of making history. It is perhaps no coincidence that Seattle's world renowned b-boy crew The Massive Monkees have a studio across the street and a bit further down the block from Wing Luke, and that the front desk attendant at the museum told me that they had had an exhibit recently on Asian American hip-hop. Interactivity is integral to hip-hop, with emcees and deejays in their own ways issuing calls to an audience, hoping (and usually getting) a resounding response.

"Don't put your name in there; that's wrong."

The rebuke, delivered by a woman who appeared to be of Asian descent, jolted my thoughts out of reflection. A grandmother was scolding her grandson for taking part in an identity project, which is one of the interactive aspects of the museum's current exhibit on Talking About Race. Just as the Words Beats & LIfe teach-in emphasized the numerous ways that Africans brought to the Americas as slaves and their American-born descendants on plantations had been stripped of their identities, Wing Luke's exhibits detail how the process of scrutinizing incoming immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries often resulted in a loss of a sense of self on the part of Asian immigrants and their children. The exhibit curators then introduced their own identity reclamation project: a computer program that allows you to take a picture of yourself that is then printed onto an identity card, with certain categories that you yourself can fill out.

The grandson tried to claim his identity, and was scolded for inserting his name into the computer and then for behaving in a way that "was not very Asian." I cannot detail the full account of what he tried to do because several family members of this particular grandmother and grandson were at the museum together, and I was trying very hard not to invade their privacy, even as their conversation had entered my space.

What struck me about what I did hear, however, was an odd dilemma. The grandmother's rebuke seemed to revolve around her sense of what should be private and what was appropriate to reveal. Real names, and real histories -- with dates of birth, or dates of significant milestones in life -- were private and "un-Asian" to reveal. You could share but only in a partial sense. Hold back who you really are.

The grandson who seemed to be about ten or eleven years old defended himself well. He declared that he was only trying to input the person he thought he really was, the person who existed under the skin, the core essence of his humanity. He was not worried about revealing himself and opening up a prospect of identity theft. He wanted to self-express.

I badly wanted to intervene. I wanted to tell the grandmother that the computer program was creating a history of the twenty-first century that was centered not on documentation of big media moments but on the micro-dynamics of lived experience. I wanted to add that her grandson's identity was his story, and that by sharing his story, he was weaving it into a social fabric that had often lacked the perspectives of Asians, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, African Americans, and Europeans who had sacrificed key markers of their ethnic distinctiveness in order to pass for white, the necessary prerequisite from 1795 to 1965 for U.S. citizenship. He was like the graffiti writers who threw their names, their colors and their artistic ingenuity up onto New York City subway trains in the 1970s. He was declaring that he existed and deserved to be accounted for.

I held back. Perhaps it was shyness. More, it was a sense that this was a family matter that might have understandings that would not make sense to a complete stranger. But I did make sure before I left the museum to sit down at the computer, have my picture taken, and fill out my own identity card.

What was my skin? The computer asked.

I replied, "Brown."

Who are you under your skin? The computer asked.

"Brown," I replied. "Being brown creates my lens for the world."

I took some time, too, to scroll through other identity cards that museum visitors had created. I appreciated the wall of self-ness pulled together into collectivity that this particular aspect of 21st century technology had produced. Collectively, the contributors created a graffiti wall that demands to be noticed. Like graffiti, it was renegade and cutting edge.

As I left the exhibit to visit the rest of the museum, I noticed a community bulletin board near the stairwell. Children were being offered free paint -- in the shades of white, gray, and blue -- to help eradicate graffiti. It seemed so ironic. An exhibit invites participants to call out their uniqueness. A community notice encourages them to paint over and eradicate the expressions of those who in real life answered the call.

Remembered space

Tonight begins my second round of travel for the hip-hop project associated with the Keep-Mills Research Grant. This round will be the biggest, most grounded, and perhaps most creative and challenging aspect of the project. I am going back to Seattle, for approximately a week, to revisit the city where I discovered hip-hop and where I got some of what might be regarded as my early education into race politics and the power of building community alliances.

There is much that I wish to say on this topic, and it will be rambling. For tonight, I will speak briefly about geographies of place, and meanings that are put into space. On the long flight from Albany, NY, to Seattle, I read two books: the first was a slim volume entitled Possibilities, published initially in 1977 and reissued in 1983. It is a collection of reminisces and writings by Helen Merrell Lynd, one of the co-authors of Middletown and Middletown in Transition, the two foundational texts of the Middletown Studies archive on Muncie, Indiana, my hometown. The second book was the rest of Vivek Bald’s newly published Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. I will focus for now on Bald’s text.

I had criticized the text’s first two chapters for trying too hard to imagine a life for which no real documentation exists. The text becomes considerably stronger as Bald delves into the lives of early twentieth century South Asian immigrants for whom there are stronger historical records as well as descendent memories and a published memoir. In reading the book, I came to feel that perhaps the title is misleading. The book is not about Bengali Harlem as much as it is about lost histories of a group of people in particular periods of time that are centered on particular places. One of those places is Harlem. But there are others, too.

Bald, near the end of the text, notes that Habib, one of the individuals about whom he writes, had a fondness for walking. “Habib was someone who enjoyed walking through his neighborhood engaging in what his son Alaudin describes as the ‘art of conversation.’ A typical daily circuit would have seen Habib chatting in English and a little Spanish with his Puerto Rican neighbors on his block, then walking up to Paul’s, the Indian-owned jewelry shop on East 103rd, where he would sit and gossip for awhile in Bengali and English, then up to Syed Ali’s restaurant on 109th Street, where he would have lunch with more of his Bengali friends and hear news from the subcontinent.” The day’s journey would continue into the area known as Spanish Harlem, a train ride to the Lower East Side, and finally a return to his apartment in East Harlem. Bald draws a connection between Habib’s physical mapping of his local geography to French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s discussion of how people take ownership of public space, or “the ways people transform the planned, imposed spaces of cities into actual lived places.” “De Certeau describes walking in the city as an act through which people forge unexpected paths, make the urban landscape their own, and thereby ‘organize a here in relation to an abroad, a ‘familiarity’ in relation to a ‘foreignness.’ ” (pp. 210-211). Bald goes on to note that in Habib’s case the walking was not just about claiming space but about “forging new human relationships across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and gender differences, and maintaining those relationships through daily interaction and exchange over the course of a lifetime.” (p. 211).

The De Certeau text from which Bald draws this insight is The Practice of Everyday Life, which I, too, have used for De Certeau’s depiction of stories as containers that hold the narrativity of everyday life in my writings on Muncie. Muncie, unlike New York City, is not a dense, urban, highly walkable space. Yet, I feel that the relationship building occurs.

Seattle, however, has always been my city for walking. From the time that I memorized the mneumonic for the downtown streets – Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest (Jefferson, James; Cherry, Columbia; Marion, Madison, Seneca, Spring, Union, University, Pike, Pine) – the geography of the city has held a certain logic, even as the streets do not flow in a straight, smooth coherent line but rather angle off and against each other at various points in the city.

        Nevertheless, the logic has kept me from getting lost, and over my two decades of walking the city, I have come to associate certain corners with experiences and memories. Some what I hope to do in the city is a memoir-esque mapping that I can then embed with the inner-city histories and memories of other things at the sites. The book that I am starting to envision would contain a poetics of street corners interspersed with histories of racial and ethnic community formation, and interviews and performances of hip-hop artists who do their work against this milieu. I am not sure that the poetics, the histories, and interviews, and the performances cohere smoothly together. They might be disjunctive narratives that fit more as collage in the style of graffiti, than as the unitary history that hip-hop seems continually to resist.

Fitting one's skin

Desdamona, a poet and emcee based in Minneapolis/St. Paul, created a lovely video poem in 2009. Entitled "Too Big For Your Skin," the video featured a poem that Desdamona had written some years earlier in memory of her mother, as well as the images of a range of women in the Twin Cities. Some were deeply involved with the area's hip-hop scene and self-identified as b-girls. Others were women like my friend Bonnie who enjoyed a range of interests but were not particularly into hip-hop. (If you ever see the video, Bonnie's the blonde woman holding her then brand-new puppy, Huckleberry.)

            The theme of the video was that beauty for women comes in all shapes and sizes, and that women's personalities were so beautiful that they simply could not fit into the confines of physical skin. Desdamona posted the video on You Tube, hoping to create a virile effect in which women throughout the world would respond with video stories or poems about their own experiences.

            The video didn't quite go globally "virile" as Desdamona had hoped, but it did receive a fair amount of media attention in the Twin Cities area. I turned "Too Big for my Skin" into teaching material and had students view it, listen to it, and comment on it in classes ranging from Introduction to Political Science to Digital Storytelling. Among women (and often men), the video poem consistently struck a powerful chord. Women used their emotional reactions to the video to embark on discussions of body image, their own issues with self-hatred and desires to be someone else, and on how gender relationships code and constantly re-code society.

            "Too Big for my Skin" came back to me a few days before the Words Beats & Life conference when I made a joke out of an inadvertent grammatical error that came over to me via e-mail. Study rooms for a summer Institute on Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning were being assigned, and since the institute was taking place in the building where I worked, the organizer wanted to know if I wanted to use my office as my study area or if I would prefer being "someone else". I knew she meant "some place else" so jokingly I replied that after years and years of wishing I could be someone else, I had finally reached a stage in my life where I felt comfortable in my own skin.

            That memory lingered into the Words Beats & LIfe conference, as questions of identity, naming and re-naming took center stage. I was intrigued in stories that participants told in how they chose their "hip-hop names" and was especially interested to learn that many of the short one-syllable hip-hop names that are frequently heard often are regarded as acronyms for larger messages. This disclosure made me want to go back to every single hip-hop artist I have ever talked to and ask them more about how they chose their names and the meanings behind them.

            It did not occur to me at the time that the "hip-hop" names might be a form of armor that shields and protects a shyer, quieter, more vulnerable self from being outwardly focused and very public.

            A few days later, the link between naming and shyness is high in my mind. Let me try and connect the dots. At the end of the second day of the Words Beats & Life conference, a series of awards were given for achievement in hip-hop. One of those awards went to Martha Diaz, director of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University. I happened to be near Martha after she accepted her award, and gave her a congratulatory hug. Exuberantly, she declared, "We're all going out to celebrate!"

            All included me. But quickly a huge wave of shyness washed over me, leaving me feeling almost paralyzed. Work, I could do. But go out? Socialize? Talk? Let down my hair? Be something than all about research, teaching, learning, and work? 

            I ducked out of the conference center quickly while Martha went to take a photograph with Words Beats & LIfe executive drector Mazi Mustafa. I justified my decision to myself by saying that I was tired, that I wanted to get back to Fairfax where I was staying with my aunt before it got too late, that she had been planning to make masala dosa for dinner because I was in town and it would be a treat for me, and that I wanted some alone time to write.

            The bottom line, though, was that I was shy. I was afraid I would come across as socially awkward, as a little bumbling girl (even though I am fifty years old), and that I would no longer be seen as someone who belonged with them at a conference like this one.

            The shyness continued into the next day, a fact that continued to amaze me. A young woman who had just finished her undergrad degree at Georgetown University was sitting in front of me as Fab Five Freddy was being interviewed about his experiences n hip-hop. As he dropped one amazing story after another, the woman kept turning around to exclaim to me how fascinated she was by the history of hip-hop she was learning through his experiences. The interview ended and we chatted for a few minutes. She looked like she wanted to approach Fab Five Freddy, but she also kept hesitating. Finally, I said, "You want to go talk to him, don't you?" She smiled and said she just wanted to tell him how much she enjoyed his stories but was afraid to approach him. "Just go up there," I said. "Everyone appreciates being told they're good. Especially when you really mean it."

            She approached him, and the two of them exchanged cards. A day or two later, I realized that I had not approached him. Or anything of the other more illustrious hip-hop pioneers who attended the conference. Connecting the dots, I understood why. Shyness. Big time shyness.

            Now, if you met me in person, you would know I'm not shy. I might be quiet at times, but when I have something to say, I say it and speak my mind. When I'm passionate about a point I want to make, I don’t even worry about being articulate. I just spit it all out, even if it sounds ridiculous and convoluted.

            Yet, I also remember when I first began my forays into hip-hop by interviewing and hanging out at all-women’s hip-hop events. Girls who were teenagers awed me to silence with their confidence, outwardness, and poise. B-girl icons like Ana Garcia (also known as Lady Rokafella) seemed so strong and bold that I shrunk into corners hoping I would not get in their way.

            Sound like sixth grade? Nope. I was in my mid to late forties, had worked for twenty-five years as a journalist and had stood up in front of students in classrooms teaching for nearly a decade. But awed by the “out there” personality of the artists, I found myself hiding behind my friend from Seattle Beloved1, an emcee who had done much to introduce me to the hip-hop scene in Seattle. Beloved1 was probably twenty years younger than me. Unlike me, she also was a mother. Somehow she mothered me.

            “Really,” said Beloved1 with an incredulous laugh when I told her my story of shrinking away from Rokafella. “She’s super-duper nice, and so dimunitive. You know what she told me, ‘Don’t call me a pioneer. Call me a sister.’ ”

            I had the chance to meet Rokafella again in 2011 at the first Hip-Hop Education Center Think Tank. When I approached her, she greeted me by saying, “Hi Himanee.”

            Did she know me?

            Then, she pointed to my name tag and asked me if she had pronounced my name right. We both laughed, and I told her how I had run away from her in fright two years earlier. She was interested in my research and nearly jumped with joy when I asked her if I could come out to where she was based sometime to interview her. She was amused by my shyness and I was thrilled by her openness.

These experiences left me with a question that I posed this morning to educators involved with the Hip-Hop Education Center think tank committee I’m working with: “How does hip-hop work with people who are painfully shy? I am curious for personal reasons and because the culture is so extrovert oriented.”

            The responses were insightful. One professor described a shy student who was able to get through a class presentation by pulling his hoodie up over his head and using it as “armor” to protect himself. A high school teacher talked of how a student created a different, more outward personality for himself through the hip-hop name he had chosen for himself. And, finally, Martha herself chimed in, noting that hip-hop’s fifth element of knowledge creates a space for those who feel uncomfortable with the four performative elements of break-dancing (b-boying/b-girling), emceeing, deejaying, and writing (graffiti). When I responded by sharing that it was she herself who had triggered my inquiry into shyness, she more or less laughed.

“Yeah, you were nowhere to be found after the event ended,” she said. She added that while writing is great, building relationships is what pulls people into the cipher.

Which leaves me wishing Desdamona’s “Too Big For My Skin” video poem had gone virile. If the poem could build the dialogue it has in my classrooms worldwide, wouldn’t the self-image of women be much different? Might we not all be b-girls?

 Here is a link to Too Big for My Skin.

The value of history

            My train ride back home from Washington, D.C., was unusually long, due to an overnight I ended up making in New York City so that a) I could stay for as much of the Words Beats & Life Teach-In as possible and b) my husband would not have to pick me up in Albany (an hour's drive from our home) at 2 a.m. The upshot was that I left DC on a 10 p.m. train, traveled north with stops in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Trenton, and Newark, and arrived at New York City's Penn Station at 2 a.m. My train to Albany wasn't scheduled to depart until 7:15 a.m., which meant that I had five hours in New York City.

            I probably would have headed out to walk the streets of Manhattan if I hadn't been encumbered with a shoulder bag that sort of doubles awkwardly as a purse and briefcase, and if I hadn't been bone tired. I found out later that a rally against the Zimmerman verdict in Times Square might still have been occurring at 2 a.m. If I'd known that, I would have headed out for sure.

            Instead, I holed up in the Amtrak waiting lounge, and continued to read a book I had brought with me to read on the train: Bengali Harlem, a new history of some of the earliest immigrants from the Indian subcontinent to the United States. The study by Vivek Bald documents what is known of a group of Indian seamen and merchants who traversed the American coasts in the 1880s, entering the country sometimes through Ellis Island and sometimes through other, more underground means. Some of these seamen settled in Spanish Harlem (the site of Popmaster Fabel's documentary on his experience of moving from gang participation to hip-hop), after marrying women of Mexican descent.

            I was looking forward to reading this book because Bald had presented some of his preliminary material at an academic conference I attended a few years back. The stories he told in the presentation fascinated me because they opened up a new dimension of the historic presence of South Asians in the U.S. The book itself, however, has been a bit of a letdown in its first few chapters. I feel that Bald is trying too hard to force his readers into a narrative that continually ponders what life might have been like for these seafaring immigrants who in the United States were confronted simultaneously with images of Indian exoticism and racial segregation. Most of the individuals in the United States who had emigrated from Asia were subjected in the late 1890s through 1940s to the same restrictive segregation policies designed to keep African Americans "in their place." The climate of racial hostility  during those decades was such that many immigrants from Asia essentially masked themselves out of America's history. They changed names, kept a low profile, and often began to affiliate more with the Chicano, Spanish, Black, and creole communities that they married into. As a result, primary documents that might help one gain more of an insight into the lives of such individuals are sparse, at best. There also were very few memoirs or autobiographies published during that time. The strength of Bald's book, in fact, is in his assertion that the group of immigrants about whom he writes is, in a sense, a disappeared community. We can't really imagine what life was like because we have very little material to feed our imaginations with in this case. The immigrants, in some ways, wanted that secrecy, because the less that the mainstream world knew about them, the safer they would be in terms of how they lived and traversed the globe.

            Considering this thought led me to ask the question: What is the value of knowing the history of a people with whom you affiliate, of a people who came before you? Those questions, I feel, are highly germane to hip-hop, and help explain why veteran members of the hip-hop community emphasize the need always to know the history of the movement. Knowing the history -- with all of its seamy undersides -- gives one a sense, perhaps, that they are not alone.

            At the weekend teach-in, one participant after another remarked in both public acknowledgements and private conversations how grateful they were to learn about hip-hop's pioneers and how the movement started. The reasons for the gratitude varied, but they often constellated around an idea of growing up without role models and, as a result, a sense of being alone. It struck me that hip-hop history presents a rare opportunity to historians, which is to write histories while most of the key pioneers of the movement are still alive. The history that the pioneers tell is inconsistent and bumpy, but that's the real life of history. It is not a coherent unfolding; rather, it's a messy parchment of debate, argumentation, seemingly disparate facts, and sometimes tedious detail.

            I first learned that persons of Indian ancestry had settled in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from a paper written by Nitasha Sharma, who is now a professor at Northwestern University. Then, she was an undergraduate and had written the paper. I met her parents – Jagdish and Mimi Sharma – while I was at the University of Hawai‘i on a one-year mid-career fellowship for journalists that ultimately stretched into 11 years and a master’s and doctoral degree. Jagdish was teaching the History of India, and I was taking his class. After I expressed surprise that there had been Indians in the U.S. before the 1960s, he gave me a copy of his daughter’s paper.

            Over the years, my knowledge of the early history of Indian immigrants in the U.S. deepened. I learned about Swami Vivekananda’s heralded address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, as well as the race riots that erupted in Bellingham, Washington, in 1904 and involved a number of Indian émigrés working in lumber camps, the now-seven generation strong Punjabi Mexican communities in the Imperial Valley of California, and the radical Ghadar Party that fought for Indian independence from the British outside of India’s borders. This early history didn’t interest me because (for reasons that today seem arrogant) it didn’t seem to be about me. A decade or so later, I have come to realize that it was all about me.

            I had become a person isolated from other Indians because I had grown up without many persons of Indian ancestry around me. When my mother pushed me to become a medical doctor or engineer, it was because that was what she saw other Indians doing. After I got my way and studied journalism, I started to experience the lifelong isolation that comes with being racially, ethnically, and/or culturally different from the mainstream. There were other Indians working in journalism during the same time that I was. But I didn’t know many of them, perhaps because we didn’t have a way to imagine ourselves as integrated into the field.

            Hip-hop offers an answer to this isolation, and in that answer, I think history – the messy kind – is key. Knowing your story within hip-hop is one thing, but knowing that your story connects with scores of others makes it ever more powerful. Over the past five years, I have had the opportunity to hear many early figures within hip-hop tell their stories. I have scribbled notes furiously, seizing as many of the gems about the early days of hip-hop that they were dropping as I could. I wasn’t always sure why I was doing this because my research in hip-hop always was centered on the experiences of women in Seattle, doing hip-hop in the early twenty-first century, women born at least a decade after the first house parties and jams took place in the Bronx. I was always interested, though, and over the past few days, the rhyme behind the reason (I think I messed up the cliché, but it’s okay … cliché’s deserve to be destroyed, anyway) started to become apparent. Telling the stories was essential for the self-esteem of the younger generation of African Americans, Latinos, and others in America today. It is a way of showing – without directly saying – that the kids were not and would never be alone.

Histories, peace, and building

The words that proved meaningful at Day 3 of the Words Beats and Life Teach-in center on negotiation. I brought up the issue of the Smithsonian exhibit and Crazy Legs' response with Blue Black, a hip-hop producer. Blue Black is 45 years old as of yesterday, and grew up, like Crazy Legs did, in the Bronx. He's been working with me and others through the Hip-Hop Education Center's "def" committee to develop some working definitions of hip-hop education. Blue Black has been quite influential to my own thinking because he offers a constant and consistent reminder that hip-hop education is not something that the academy can create because it's already been worked out in hip-hop communities themselves.

Just before the presentation yesterday on the Smithsonian exhibit, Blue Black gave an interesting and erudite paper on hip-hop as a post-modern identity. How he defined post-modernism was progressive and interesting, and a very good break from the rather overworked, apolitical and sometimes tiresome understandings (and misunderstandings) of the term that were thrown about in graduate school. When I asked him today about his thoughts on the Smithsonian exhibit presentation, he said the key word was "negotiation."

Representing ourselves in hip-hop, in his words, was not about attacking someone for getting it all wrong. Rather, it was about initiating and forming a dialogue that would educate and build alliances. In that sense, he noted, my characterization of Crazy Legs' response as "appropriate" was not one he agreed with. He felt that the response could have been an opportunity to build, rather than an invocation to battle.

Plus, some of the points of the story that the Smithsonian seeks to tell are somewhat true. The curator's approach was off, perhaps, but in Blue Black's eyes, her approach was very hip-hop in and of itself. The curator knew herself to be an outsider to the culture and was presenting a project that had begun to be developed before she had much control. She had to come in strong and assertive because she knew she was entering foreign territory.

What's likely to happen next, Blue Black added, is that he and other organizer/educators with Words Beats and Life will probably end up meeting with the curator and will effect the right outcome in the end run.

Blue Black's thoughts reinforced for me the value of story in writing and teaching about hip-hop. Not just the history but the personal story. At the same time, his thoughts reminded me of the fallibility of history. There is no one single, right version. Everyone who was "there" in New York City in the 1970s, going to jams, listening to deejays, trying their hand at break-dancing, and imbibing the culture has a different version of where it all began. I pointed out to him that I had stopped saying hip-hop originated in the Bronx because so many others who were "there" had suggested that it was in Queens, in Brooklyn, in parts of Harlem. As a Bronx b-boy, Blue Black seemed protective of the Bronx. At the same time, he noted that one of the things that made the Bronx the heart of the origin of the culture that came to be called hip-hop was not so much the fact that the pioneers in the Bronx were better at p.r. than those elsewhere, as one other individual had noted. Instead, a critical mass had cohered around the Bronx, and hence it's a point of origin.

Two speakers followed my lunchtime conversation with Blue Black, both of whom are legends within the world of hip-hop. One hailed from the Bedford-Stuyvescent part of Brooklyn; the other from Spanish Harlem. Both of them talked about jams, break-dancing, deejaying, and emceeing happening in their neighborhoods, and how that convergence of creative activity had moved them. One -- Grandmaster Pop Fabel -- emphasized that while he didn't want to take anything away from the magic that was being created in that time in the Bronx, other related things were happening in neighborhoods throughout the city. The point that I glean from these thoughts is that a culture that Afrika Bambaataa came to call hip-hop sprung from the Bronx, partly because Bambaataa himself was from the Bronx. But the culture was emergent everywhere, and that the more stories of the early days of hip-hop that are put together, the more insight we will have about hip-hop.

I left the conference feeling full of a special kind of history, a history that I always have craved to read more of and to help put into written form. This is a history that is a collection of different voices speaking not always in harmony or in collectivity but speaking truths derived from personal experiences. Over three days, I heard stories about the Bronx, about Brooklyn, and about Harlem from one of the first break-dancers, Crazy Legs; a longtime activist and poet whose art and activism predates hip-hop, Sonia Sanchez; a multi-dimensional media artist Fab Five Freddie; a b-boy and community worker Pop Fabel; and scores of other young and middle-aging deejays, emcees, poets, and deep participants in hip-hop culture. I left with a sense of hip-hop history as rich, poly-vocal, dialogic, and dynamic. I also left with a feeling that trying to bring coherence to the hip-hop story might make some sense but might lose much of the richness through a process of sanding down.

I also left with a new understanding of two terms used often in hip-hop circles: "peace" and "building".

Peace, explained MC K-Swift, was the aspiration of hip-hop, and as such should be used and responded to in exchanges within all who participate in hip-hop culture.

Building never was articulated. But I have come to understand it as negotiation. Negotiations of the type that Blue Black describes to effect a successful outcome with the Smithsonian.

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.

Identity in hip-hop

My posts for the next few days will be dispatches from Washington, DC, where I am attending a strong, well-organized and interesting "teach-in" organized by the non-profit group Words Beats and Life.

I arrived in the Washington DC area last night, and today was at the DC Architectural Building at 9:15 a.m. for day one of a hip-hop teach-in called "Remixing the Art of Social Change," sponsored by the DC hip-hop community organization Words, Beats & Life.
The teach-in runs three days, and is divided into three themes: identity, capacity, and legacy, with a day devoted to each one of these themes. Today the theme was identity, and as the day unfolded, it became clear that within hip-hop, identity has a multi-layered and complex meaning.
Emery Petchauer, a professor at Oakland University north of Detroit, delivered a morning keynote. It featured prominently examples of graffiti and graffiti inspired art, in which identity of self, community, culture, politics, and history could be read into each piece. Petchauer showed a tag from Philadelphia and described how the shape of the letters and style of the tag made it unmistakably Philly to those who knew the coding. He then showed a couple of examples of hip-hop jackets and t-shirts that artists and students of his had designed, and walked us through an intricate decoding.
I love this idea of graffiti as a code. It is illegal, and the term itself is associated with vandalism, as the afternoon keynote speaker Maxx Moses explained. He noted that "we never referred to it as graffiti. We called it writing."
Writing is a kinesthetic practice that allows an artist to work an idea out, struggle with finding herself, and engage in self-expression. Through writing, one might always see themselves as coming back to what Maxx Moses called the essential questions: a) Who am I? b) Why am I here? and c) What is my purpose?
It seems that hip-hop offers both youth and adults a dynamic, creative, and rather risky vehicle for exploring those essential questions. My use of the term "risky" is not mis-placed because risk is what drives one to reach for stronger, loftier, and higher aims. Risk reminded me of the b-girls in Seattle whom I hope to connect with in a couple of weeks, and how they describe their participation in break-dancing particularly and in hip-hop more generally as a quest for knowing themselves by always striving to get better at their art. Their risk-taking involved walking a non-conventional path, sacrificing a more financially secure career path, disappointing perhaps their parents and other family members, and being different from the average American woman. The term risk also resonated when a young African American woman asked Maxx Moses what it was about the 1970s that allowed hip-hop to flourish, that gave black people a coming together in the discovery of "soul" and made them feel for the first time in a long history of slavery and racial and economic oppression as if they could "Say it out loud: I'm black and I'm proud."
Moses' response was "having absolutely nothing." There was poverty, there was crisis.
Today, he noted, there is no crisis. Black people have got food, homes, careers, access to the wealth of society.
Or at least some think they do, the young woman noted.
Some think they do, Moses replied, repeating the young woman's words.
Moses then made what seemed like simultaneously a radical and completely sensible point. If you think you've got it all and you're bored, try doing with less. Get rid of what you don't need. Don't eat so much. Put yourself back into a mode of crisis.
Petchauer made the important point that hip-hop is inherently a localized practice. He said, "Hip-hop is a real-time event, happening in specific places with specific people at a particular time." As a result, everyone's understanding of their hip-hop is going to be different, based on what their own identity within the place and the people they're around at a particular moment. I felt that that offered a fairly cogent discussion of how one might see the self-place relationship within hip-hop.
There was much more to day one. I'll do my best to catch up with more review and reflection. For now, I've hit my 750 words and my eyelids are closing. I'm drifting off to sleep.