Dearest Donovans,
I closed this evening's class with a provocation. This email is to follow-up on that provocation/outro and to frame where we are going in our next session - cultural conflict in the classroom (and society) and how texts enact those.
So, how can this 90's conscious hip hop loving cisgender straight female feminist reconcile her love for all things aforementioned with the misogyny in the video of Don't Sweat the Technique?
Here's a snip of the lyrics that alight my imagination:
"Scientists try to solve the context
Philosophers are wondering what's next
They couldn't absorb them, they didn't deserve them
My ideas are only for the audience's ears."
You can see, I hope, in connection to our discussions, strengthened specifically by the contributions of so many of you who addressed dominant culture and the choices that are forced (H/T to Kakas specifically here) when you are held at bay of the riches of that culture, why these lyrics speak to me. They are about sovereignty, self-determination and about building from within to perhaps speak outside.
And 90s hip hop, as being in the MRI contained chamber w/ Eminem shrieking in my ears reminded me, painfully, also bring extant amounts of misogyny. So what are the rules of our collective, as we enact and be social change agents, to not privilege pride in our own swag by subsidizing another's marginalization? Because there will be conflict. There is not a social justice movement in this settler colony that has not privileged race over gender, nor a feminist movement space that has privileged whiteness over intersectionality. What are the questions we subject and privilege every text to? How do we remain ourselves living, growing, questioning, revising, and improving? Put another way, can we develop skills to deal with coloniality as it shapeshifts and keeps showing up?
When it comes to hip hop specifically, there are so many other scholars whose words and theories speak to this beautifully: Dr. Gwendolyn Pough, Dr. Imani Perry, and Dr. Regina Mae Bradley all come to mind. Seek out their wisdom.
And this hip hop head chooses to take what she can from Eric B and Rakim and uninvite the rest. It's an incomplete, flawed position.
Yours,
LP.
I think it is really important as teachers to constantly think about what we believe in and why. Without constantly challenging our beliefs, it becomes all to easy to overlook potential faults or complications in the ideas and things we support. This post reminded me a lot of the Lupe Fiasco song "Hurt Me Soul." The lyrics start, "Now I ain't trying to be the greatest/ I used to hate hip hop,/ yup, because the women degraded./ But Too $hort made me laugh/ like a hypocrite I played it/ a hypocrite I stated, though I only recited half/ Omitting the word 'bitch'..." Just as Lupe had to come to appreciate hip hop on his own terms and clearly delineate what he respected from what he didn't about the music he listened to, we have to look critically at the things we choose to support and acknowledge when our views may be problematic. Princeton professor Imani Perry, in "Prophets of the Hood," asserts, "It is important to acknowledge that in a society with such strong hegemonies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, virtually all of us, regardless of how committed we are to social justice and critical thinking, remain conflicted beings" (186). With regards to hip hop, Dr. Perry discusses how the genre often serves as a scapegoat for a misogynistic American society. Perry also discusses that sexist visuals sometimes do not match the feminist words of an author's voice and how this may be a result of how images are cultivated by groups looking to maximize profit and not by individuals themselves. Just as above, Dr. Perry suggests that artists and other ideas should be evaluated in the wide array of contexts that they exist.
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