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Most black students position themselves very confidently in society’s struggle to represent rap. Knowing the ebullience with which rap has historically posed tough cultural questions, they’re eager to join the mix. Shellie’s final paper explores the agenda underlying the mainstream containment of rap: What is the true reason that society can not accept rap music as a form of art or simply as music in which one expresses his or her views? If you really think about it, it all boils down to racism. There is not one rap song that expresses views that some other artist hasn’t expressed in some shape form or fashion. What is it about rap music that draws so much attention? Could it be, not the content of the music, but the skin color of the people benefiting from it.So she explores not just the racism of making rap artists answer to a higher standard than, say, Arnold Schwartzenegger, but the further hypocrisy involved in white entrepreneurs profiting off demonized black rage: “There are not too many ways the white man can get rich from the sales of rap music, except through production or promotion.” Sylvia, too, sees rap as establishing the space of a counter-discourse; Stagolee’s force is not lost on her: “[Rap] is rebellion against the brainwashing that society has done against black people for over a hundred years. This idea that the white culture is the correct culture, and we must all aspire to be white. Rap shows that this cultural adoption is not happening as planned.” We’ve already seen some white students who live in poorer neighborhoods speak of rap from positions either critical of it or down with it; Teika’s writing on rap, also coming from the inside, is similar to such students' work (say, Peter's paper), the difference between them being that difference of race-as-fate: Before I got in this class I was a fan of rap music but I’m not a fan who gets hyped [on] the lyrics of Snoop Dog or Ice T. I am a fan who is saddened by the world that I live in. When I listen to this music I think of 13 and 14 year old kids that died so close to my house who were trying to make money so they could dress like their friends. I think of all the young girl that live near me that at age 14 have two kids and no education. . . . [Cornel West] speaks of buffers in the 60’s I want to try and get 90’s buffers. I was talking with people over Thanksgiving and we decided that Republicans getting into office may be the best thing to happen to the black community because if there is no welfare then black people will begin to open stores like Malcolm talked about and we as black people will be left with only our selves to depend on.For Teika, writing and thinking about rap opens up larger spaces of cultural resistance that let her make sense out of her world. Black students can voice insider authority because they know the music is historically theirs: Apasha writes, “I use rap music as the slaves did to release their joys and pains in the times that we live.” It is with my black students, of course, that the argument for rap as culturally relevant pedagogical material can be most keenly made. Ladson-Billings speaks of the importance of such materials in helping black students negotiate the complex tensions between self and school: “The dilemma for African American students becomes one of negotiating the academic demands of school while demonstrating cultural competence. Thus, culturally relevant pedagogy must provide a way for students to maintain their cultural integrity while succeeding academically” (476). But not all black students want to own rap as part of their cultural integrity; some don’t want to be tagged with the stereotype that rap is keeping it real, bringing the truth about the ghetto. Rap enters into a tradition which remains uncomfortable for many blacks, so it’s not surprising to find some students voicing the same concerns as older blacks like Al Sharpton and Delores Tucker. Andre, for example, loved a lot of rap, but he despised gangster rap, thoroughly dissociating the lyrics from his reality. His disgust with gangster is interesting to compare with Troy’s: it’s the difference between a racial reading and a racist one. Gangsta rap has no excuse for having to exist. Being a native New Yorker, I have lived in the midst of all the killing, crack bottles on the street and most of all having family and friends dead from the fatal wound of a bullet. The last thing I want to hear is a rap about killing and pimping, bitching and hoing, suck this and suck that, I’ll smack a ho, and all the other obscene pornographic, gangsta glorifying killhappy lyrics with a bouncy dance-to tune in the background, which signified that one should bounce their head in musical pleasure while listening to tales of death, destruction and disrespect of a race of people who have had 350 years of this at the hands of white men and women.I respect Andre’s history and his values, but I can’t help think he (like Delores Tucker, with her almost parodic misreading) misses some of the provocative power of socially incorrect style. But perhaps it's easy for me, as white, to say that. Even hooks, though, comments on how people conflate misogyny with vulgarity and insists that “in thinking about African American creativity and rap in particular, the question becomes how important is it to protect street language, even when it has obscenities within it which some people find problematic” (“Rap Wars” 82). And for Ice T, it’s not a matter of simply protecting vulgarity, it’s the need to actively affirm it, embody it, as a negative politics; ‘field nigger’ as the only sensible moral stance: I wear that term like a badge of honor. If some square Tom politician is not a nigger, then I am a nigger, you understand? I am not what you want me to be. I’m the worst side of it. (105)Andre, like Cornel West, wants uplifting music—in West’s view, recording such music is the “special mission and responsibility” of the black musician: “to present beautiful music which both sustains and motivates black people and provides visions of what back people should aspire to” (Keeping Faith 289). Andre sees gangster rappers in the same way West sees the victims of “the saturation of market forces and market moralities in black life” (Race Matters 24); both he and West, then, are caught in the same dynamic of pathologization, seeing this type of nihilistic young black “as socially deracinated, culturally denuded, and simply ill-equipped to live lives of quality or to constitute a vibrant society” (De Genova 93). It depends on one’s view of the politics of negation: is Stagolee pathology or revenge-fantasy? Nick De Genova sharply contrasts the world-views of Wright and West, in terms of the way each inflects nihilism as a response to social conditions: Cornel West shares none of Richard Wright’s ambivalence about the conservatism of the institutions that have traditionally sustained African American communities. For West, nihilism is not about a struggle with death; it is death. (92)Where Andre’s disgust at the lyrics might stem from a highly developed sense of moral outrage and concern, another equally concerned black student, Thomas, vigorously defends gangster rap against the “people [who] want to point the finger instead of looking in the mirror and finding the problem hidden within.” Compare Andre’s attack on gangsta with Thomas’s attack on the attackers, particularly black ministers (Andre was studying for the ministry at the time): African Americans are so oppressed of their own race that we feel like our own people is a threat to our society by rapping gansta lyrics. Rev. Butts personally rented a steam roller and actually scattered tapes and CDs all around the street and rolled over them. What are other people suppose to think about our race and rap music when they turn around and see a black man of little power turn around and be violent himself?As these various subjectivities come into play in classes, they generate the dialogue Malcolm desired (as I write, the fury in the rap media by black rappers and critics angry over Eminem's seeming appropriation of the genre proves this dialogue is still very much on-going). The rap writing class becomes a race-based salon. Andre’s paper above, for example, became a key source for his classmates. Despite my ultimate reservations with Andre’s conclusions, I’m happy the course allowed him to write an important document. I read it aloud the class after he wrote it, and afterwards Andre elaborated on it from his seat, after which most students voiced agreement—even though in previous class sessions most had supported gangster rap. Jack used his next writing to continue the exchange, trying to resolve that contradiction on the class’s part: I think that the discussion in the class last thursday was really good. I’m glad that the black people in the class finally spoke on their opinion. The thing that I noticed though was that when Andre gave his opinion on the gangsta Rap and about how he did not like the west coast rap I saw a shift in the classes opinion. At first when everyone was saying how much they liked it the class seemed to back that, then they get a totally other opinion and they back that. I guess what I am asking Is are people in the class really open minded or are they just being followers. I think there might be a few that are open minded (now remember this is just my opinion), but I think that most of the kids are followers. I think that this is one of the major problems with the gangsta rap I think that most of the people that listen to it are followers and they have just hopped on the bandwagon.Andre’s text became a genuine source, worthy of being referenced. I want students to leave my classes knowing the world is a text that is read analytically, hermeneutically; knowing that the world is formed, in fact, as a result of accumulated texts that are read and responded to in new texts, which in turn get responded to. I want students to know they can become scholars of that on-going, textual world. Jack, above, demonstrates a tacit awareness that he needs transracial knowledge to read the world in any depth. Of course, there is no pretending that rap is an untroubled opportunity for exchange. Many times I get end-of-semester notes from white students telling me how uncomfortable they felt in a class filled with a number of vocal black rap aficionados. So Sally writes: First I will start by saying that I think this class is really interesting. The only thing is that I feel very uncomfortable sometimes when I give my opinion. I know I shouldn't but I can't help it. I feel that I am the only one with the views that I have and [if] I express those views, certain individuals will put me in my place, and tell me that I am wrong. I also feel that everyone is intitled to their own opinion and again certain individuals don’t feel that way.Sally became a strong writer by the end of the term. I’m sad she felt silenced, certainly, but I agree with Malcolm: what can help undo such attitudes of social unease but opportunities for raw, naked exchange? The flip side to Sally are the comments from black students that they wished they could have heard what the white kids felt. Even if it’s in clumsy, halting ways, gangsta composition has students considering the other, the(m)-self-as-other. Rap allows that, I think, because it provides a scenario, a scene—or really, to use a word overused in our field, it creates a community, one like Lingis’s other community: Beneath the rational community . . . is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the one with whom he has nothing in common, the stranger.Gangsta underscores contemporary culture with a Wayne’s World “. . . Not!” and, in so doing, creates a negative shadow-space in which frustrations can coalesce. I respect a lot of what Delores Tucker is trying to do, in terms of community concern (if she genuinely has it), but what disturbs me about her is her vision of the larger culture, her refusal of the other’s imperative: “They [the music industry] can stop it. They don’t do it to their own. They won’t let it be sold to Jews. They won’t let it be sold to white kids, only to Black kids” (Dawsey 59). And even within that skewed, bigoted vision, she further reduces it, as if the young black kids she worries about are listening to this music uncritically, like Nazi-zombies awaiting their next orders from the Thug Reich High Command. As if they are not also reading the hip-hop press, which constantly checks and complicates itself. Rap opponents deny this fully contextualized literacy, depicting rap fans as blank slates. The media, then, by constructing a simulation of reality—in which most people are a community of like-minded, upstanding citizens, kind and decent (never cruel); and rappers, exiled from that community, are viscous and misogynist (never decent)—occupies the position of Lingis’s rational community, “the community that produces something in common, that establishes truth and that now establishes a technological universe of simulacra, [and which] excludes the savages, the mystics, the psychotics—excludes their utterances and their bodies” (13). Under Stagolee’s un-instruction (unstruction?), rappers and their fans, if we use Lingis’s logic, become “the community of those who have nothing in common, of those who have nothingness, death, their mortality in common” (13). “I’d be a liar if I told you that I never thought of death; my niggaz, we the last ones left,” is the way Tupac, on the All Eyez on Me CD, kicked Lingis’s truth, forming, through such songs and his media exposure, that very community: That’s why I live this way. For my homeboys who are geniuses, who are mathematicians, who can’t get no work. Who the only thing he could see is being a drug dealer, that’s why I live like this. For my homeboys that’s pimps who don’t even know what a real woman is because they never met one, that’s why I live this way. For all of that. For my momma who struggled and starved, for my family. For everybody who could never do, I can, and I’m gonna do. (Strange 86)
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