Rap as the focus of a writing course means an evolving dialogue on race. To take part meaningfully in the dialogue, the parties involved must have some sense of the history and the issues surrounding the topic. Rap comes from an American literary tradition that has allowed the powerless, the non-prestige-speakers, the rudimentarily educated, to couch a critical theory on race in the form of folk narratives. Post-emancipatory “badman ballads,” for example, used the relentless force of their nihilism to open up a space of resistance in which to contest cultural representation; Stagolee and the Great MacDaddy were folk-theorists, “moral hard men who broke the molds that Negroes were supposed to conform to and created new roles and new possibilities” (Levine 440). Stagolee's exploits were the subject of a countless number of the "badman ballads" sung by stevedores along the Missippi River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was a cruel, powerful figure whose power came from a magical Stetson hat he would let no man touch. Experts in folklore group Stagolee in with other Black Avenger figures designed to counter the values of the dominant culture. Rap continues this tradition, flipping the script on the dominant culture through the voices of counter-discourse. Stagolee as writing instructor reverses almost everything we know about the world (except the desirability of a fine-looking Stetson hat). Such alternative teaching goes a long way toward making the classroom something students never dreamed of: witness Mary’s course evaluation, “In so little classes are the students able to react freely on what their belief is on most subject matter”; or Derek’s final e-mail, “Overall, this class is playing an important role in improving my personal decision making and analitical skills. Which I really am surprised about, because I usually learn nothing practical in classes I take.”

From day one (when I play Melle Mel rapping “The Message”) the locus of concern becomes the lives some people have to live, at the very quotidian level of people pissing on the stairs cause they just don’t care, people needing to go out strapped daily, kids wanting to drop out of school cause their teacher’s a jerk, people getting pushed to the edge (and maybe losing their heads) from living under the cynical truths of money, power, and race. Gangster rap (or better, reality rap) puts those scenarios in your face and demands response and discussion. It facilitates what Malcolm called for when he noted, “Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country—to clear the air of the racial mirages, clichés, and lies that this country’s very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years” (273). Rep. Maxine Waters captures this notion of gangster rap as enabling an opportunity for honest dialogue previously muted: “For decades, many of us have talked about the lives and the hopes of our people, the pain and the hopelessness, the deprivation and destruction. Rap music is communicating that reality in a way we never have” (United States 9). It’s worth looking now at what happens when students are afforded that opportunity for raw exchange. Let me add I will look at this matter, like Malcolm, strictly in terms of black and white. It’s not that I want to enforce the continued marginalization of other cultures, but an anti-white-supremacy focus acknowledges that the main target of white supremacy is black people.