Drop It Like It’s Hot! Hip-Hop in the Twenty-First-Century
Classroom
By Simona J. Hill, associate professor of sociology
and codirector of University Honors, and Dave Ramsaran,
associate professor of sociology and chair of the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology, both at Susquehanna University
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Students dance to the rap/hip-hop
sounds of the Collective at Susquehanna University’s
student social club, TRAX. |
There exists that “Every Student” on a
college campus, in a high school, at the mall, who characteristically
parades youth trends with ease, casually uses up-to-date
slang, pops hip fashions and accessories, and mixes
the hottest music. Whether a trumpeting trendsetter
or an Old Skool afficionado, he or she represents what
is important at the moment to our ever-changing youth
culture. A few years ago, we spotted that “Every
Student” on our campus wearing the now-classic
“B-boy” look—baggy denim jeans slung
far below his buttocks, athletic gear, and brand-name
boots, along with the requisite tattoos and moderately
iced-out jewelry: a platinum (or platinum-like) neck
chain and diamond (or brilliant cut cubic zirconium)
stud earrings. Had he arrived at a club in any Urban
City, USA, he would have blended in seamlessly.
Our “Every Student,” our “homeboy”
from “around the way,” however, was white.
He grew up in a predominantly white environment and
rarely had any contact with a person of color before
coming to our private, liberal arts university. He sat
in our classes, pondered his selection of a major, and
strolled the campus with an invisible (or at least,
unheard by us) rhythmic beat, emitting a mass-marketed
urban vibe with his essentially store-bought bravado.
As two sociologists in his environment, we were intrigued
by “Every Student’s” modus operandi
and we wanted to know what motivated him to so thoroughly
adopt an increasingly made-for-MTV, black youth persona.
The vehicle we used to explore this phenomenon was the
hip-hop music of “Every Student.” As one
“Every Student” said to us: “Growing
up where I did in [upstate] New York, I would hear DMX
rapping about places like . . . where I’ve been
and I think that’s what also attracted me to rap
music. . . . I have friends whose favorite music isn’t
rap, but they say they like it because it’s something
that is different. Rap has a different sound than other
music.”
The difference (which our student speaks of with the
spirit of an adventurer) is seductive, and understanding
what that difference means to our students is a complex
and compelling undertaking. For these white students,
rap music provides instant and easy access to black
urban culture; it serves as something like “cultural
fast food” for students who are either economically
privileged or geographically (and many times, racially)
isolated from personal, meaningful exchange with a falsely
presumed “exotic” and often socially marginalized
“other.” This “other,” while
remaining at a safe distance, is nevertheless only a
digital media click away. How did rap and hip-hop, which
were born out of the experiences of black urban youths
trying to “fight the power,” become cultural
currency to white suburban youths—and more importantly,
how did they become central to certain aspects of contemporary
capitalism? To answer these questions we must explore
several issues: the changing nature of contemporary
capitalism and globalization; the process by which a
subculture becomes part of the dominant culture/ideology;
the instruments available to dominant elites to perpetuate
the dominant culture/ideology; and the dynamics of inequality,
a central feature of capitalist accumulation.
In order to explore the art of hip-hop, then, we must
necessarily inquire into systems of diversity and globalism;
in this inquiry our students’ love of the genre
becomes a pathway to learning. The pedagogy of hip-hop
assumes several perspectives acting simultaneously in
a classroom environment, as hip-hop is a cultural art
form that sets as its standard the “crunked”
(i.e., crazily energized and heady) currency of global
existence. Hip-hop and rap, looked at in a systematic
way, allow us to lead our students along a path, not
of least resistance, but certainly of guided opportunity
to discuss race, class, and gender in both obvious and
latent terms. Teaching hip-hop does not demand expert
knowledge of rap and hip-hop superstars. We do not require
that our students master all aspects of the hip-hop
canon; instead, we teach our students how to assemble
cultural data to analyze critically what has become
for them a viable part of their everyday existence.
Our classroom goals are threefold: (1) to explore an
art form in popular culture; (2) to follow its movement
from its subculture roots to its expressions in dominant
culture; and (3) to examine the role one dimension of
culture plays in reinforcing the hegemonic ideology,
thus justifying the social stratification scheme.
Teaching about issues of power and inequality presents
some notable challenges. Just as there is no single
multicultural pedagogical mechanism that is sufficient
in helping teachers meet the challenges of working with
culturally diverse students (Gomez 1994), there is no
one method to help white students understand the extent
of their privilege. In the classroom, we must be culturally
responsive practitioners who address these variable
dynamics and allow students to affirm their cultural
identities in a positive manner. We wholly agree with
Gregory Jay (1995), who advocates a “pedagogy
of disorientation” in which the “exploration
of otherness and cultural identity should achieve a
sense of my own strangeness, my own otherness, and of
the history of how my assumed mode of being came into
being historically” (125). To this end, students
are exposed to the art of “Listening with the
Third Ear” (Hill and Ramsaran 2006), and learn
to apply this technique to contemporary music as part
of oral tradition. Listening with “the third ear”
requires critical examination of the underpinnings of
contemporary culture and its roots in social stratification.
Students learn to analyze both the manifest and latent
meanings of any form of communication, and to understand
the role of such communication in systems of power.
Moving toward a contemporary pedagogy, then, we engage
our students in an explicit understanding of how their
own power (as consumers in a youth-driven market) affects
global industries. We aim to facilitate their understanding
of how power works and how critical independent variables
such as race, class, and gender are important to deconstructing
the varied meanings of hip-hop culture. In the twenty-first-century
classroom, we have found that a critical analysis of
a subject that appeals to “Every Student”
opens inquiry into topics that affect everyone.
References
Gomez, M. L. 1994. Teacher education reform and prospective
teachers’ perspectives on teaching “other
people’s” children. Teaching & Teacher
Education 10 (30): 319–34.
Hill, S. J., and D. Ramsaran. 2006. Listening with
the third ear: An exercise in demystifying hip hop culture,
power and pedagogy. In Critical pedagogy in the
classroom, 2nd edition, ed. P. Kaufman, 153–57.
Washington, DC: American Sociological Association.
Jay, G. 1995. Taking multiculturalism personally. In
Pedagogy: The question of impersonation, ed.
J. Gallop, 117–28. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
