“The most promising thing about spilled milk is that it has ventured from its container.”
-William Upski Wimsatt
Bomb the SuburbsOriginally, I intended this essay to be a sort of primer for white teachers who teach students in low socioeconomic areas. I wanted to point out where teachers are going wrong with students using my vast knowledge of teaching, hip-hop, and slam poetry. I admit; it is quite the pretentious undertaking. What the essay ended up being, once I realized how much shit I was talking when I started out, is a personal exploration of how I grew to be an “authentic” teacher (who just happens to like hip-hop and slam poetry) of poor(ish) African American, Latino, and white students on the east side of Aurora, IL. The terms “down” and “authentic” are winged about quite a bit throughout this exploration: “down” is used in tongue-in-cheek reference to my virtually non-existent status in hip hop and “authentic” is used to describe my observation of myself as a teacher of the students at East Aurora High School in light of the experiences I have had with hip hop and rap in particular. What did come out in the organization and the writing of this essay was the reality of two major observations I have made over the past fifteen years about teaching, hip-hop, and the relationship between white teachers and minority students: 1) White teachers who think they are “down” with the African-American culture will go to great lengths to display their “downness”. The teachers who are actually reaching their students often do not fit the description of “down” considered by the students. There is much more to be said about taking honest interest in one’s students and maintaining open communication than self-congratulating and posturing. Some examples will be explored in this essay. 2) Hip-hop, like Gospel music, Jazz, and Blues, was originally not intended for white, middle-class consumption, and many African American and Latino children of high-school age are quite bitter about this fact. This essay should be considered in the context of these observations.The “Down” White Boy: The Formative YearsWhoever was in charge of PR knew what he or she was doing. The poster displayed six young black men, one deftly clutching a glock pistol, peering angrily at the viewer who, from the way the photo was taken, appears to be looking up into the faces of the executioners. It felt like an epiphanic moment in any John Hughes movie where the main character realizes that he is going to get his ass kicked; in fact, I believe I audibly gulped.
“What the hell is N.W.A.?”
“Niggas With Attitude.”
“They actually call themselves niggers?”
“No. Nigg
as, man! It’s different!”
“How, exactly, is it different?”
The poster was hung on the bedroom wall of my good friend Christopher Buccheri, a name one would normally not associate with gangsta rap, especially in 1988 Blue Island Chicago. In fact, Chris and I were proud to be self-appointed Ambassadors of Good Will between the then-intolerant burnouts/metal-heads and the theatre kids/punk rockers at Quigley Preparatory Seminary South
[1], a racially-diverse, all-male Catholic high school on Chicago’s south side. It took us until our junior year to get relations between the two factions on solid ground, and, frankly, I thought that throwing a bombshell like N.W.A. into things would probably undo our hard work.
We adhered to the societal need to place ourselves into a certain category, and in the two years I had gone from freshman to junior, I had painstakingly fashioned myself into a burnout/ metal head by sewing on an Iron Maiden patch to my Gap denim jacket and adding various metal and punk band insignias with a thick, black Sharpie. Chris was very much a theatre kid/ punk rocker who dressed in black and listened to music like Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy and other emerging Goth bands who made music with heavily distorted guitars and nihilistic lyrics, quoting Camus and Neitzsche.
I enjoyed my comfort zone, and wasn’t so sure that there was a purpose to venture into an entire other American culture, especially one that seemed to clearly not want a couple of white boys from Chicago as a part of it. At the same time, I was quite intrigued by this alien culture that even the African American students at Quigley weren’t into yet. That this music was available to me to experience in the comfort of my own room without the uncomfortable burning and itching of actually venturing into the ghetto or even talking to any real black people was very appealing, and I entertained the idea of actually purchasing an album… for about fifteen seconds.
Jump cut to 1994. I was a student at the University of Illinois a Chicago, going for my Bachelor of Arts with focus on the teaching of high school English. I picked up a copy of William Upski Wimsatt’s Bomb the Suburbs because of the cool poster of the book’s cover hung in the window of the student bookstore. I recognized the name “Upski” because at the same time I was not buying N.W.A. albums, I was venturing out on the weekends on graffiti tagging missions with Scott Ferns, a little Polish kid in my class who spoke an entertaining patois of Mexican street English and African American hip-hop slang and went by the tag name, Rascal. I would see the tag, “Upski” on CTA busses and subway cars.
Upski’s book was an instant local success, exploring the white, mainly suburban, reaction to hip hop culture. According to Upski, white America basically flees from African American culture altogether or we embrace it to the point of embarrassment. In a piece he wrote for Source magazine called “We Use Words Like Mackadocious”, Wimsatt outs the American suburban wigger:
One Saturday last summer, Josh and Eric, college students from Birchhead,
Georgia put on some Cross Colours and old school Adidas to wear to a
neighborhood which Josh described as “kind of scary… almost like a ghetto.” The
neighborhood was downtown Atlanta. Jaws stiffened, hats backward, they hit the
city hoping – for what they weren’t quite sure – to fit in, to earn respect, to
participate in a lifestyle they had admired for years on TV. Unsure what to do
with themselves, they shopped and ate lunch. They didn’t talk to anyone; they
barely even talked to each other. “It felt like the black people were laughing
at us,” they said later. (Suburbs, 18)
He quotes Sabrina Williams from Miami Beach, Fl., who criticizes American White youth: “They don’t understand the swagger, the way we walk, the way we talk. It comes from when you don’t have self-esteem, okay, you try to mask it… Being cool isn’t something you do. It’s something you feel. Here come these little white people who never had to live with that shit.” (18)
So, that pretty much verified my fear of outwardly showing my growing interest and love of hip hop. It had taken me five years, but I had begun purchasing rap, beginning with Public Enemy’s Welcome to the Terrordome and Fear of a Black Planet, then N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. They were slaps in the face compared to the familiarity of Beastie Boys and House of Pain, groups I used to prime myself for the “real thing”
[2]. It was easy to tell that they seemed like they were fronting or that they just knew they were out of place. They weren’t quite Vanilla Ice, but they were a far cry from the authenticity of Ice Cube or Eazy E.
I went backwards from there into more African centric artists like Boogie Down Productions, De La Soul, KRS-One, Eric B & Rakim, and more Public Enemy, who by this point had been somewhat played out. They lost some credibility for a while by touring with bands like Anthrax and U2: the hardcore rap fans saw them as selling out, and the “non-fans” saw them as pandering. I was able to score a backstage pass to a show they did with Anthrax and Primus at the Aragon Ballroom in 1991. A group of us, all long-haired white kids, stood waiting to meet the members of Anthrax, and the backstage door burst open. Flava Flav stood there, his gold teeth looking less shiny than on the videos, his alarm clock somehow smaller than on television. He was doubled over, laughing and pointing at us. Then he said, “Don’t nobody want to meet me?!” I replied, “Sure, Flava! Come on out!” He countered by laughing harder; he sighed, “Shiiiiiiit.” then turned around and went back through the door. I was wearing the brand new Public Enemy T-shirt I had purchased earlier that evening. It displayed the outline of a man between crosshairs. In the midst of Flava’s laughing and pointing, I felt I knew exactly at whom those crosshairs were aimed.
The Aurora Community School, Circa 1996 - 1998I began my first teaching gig in November of 1996 at the Aurora Community School, which serviced the clientele of West Aurora High School, East Aurora High School, and Waubonsee Valley High School. The students were sent to ACS for reasons ranging from participating in gang-related activities (usually mob-action, or fights involving more than one person, which explained the high number of Latinas at ACS) to excessive tardies and every reason for extended suspension or expulsion in between. The student population was mainly Latino and African American, with white students in the definite minority. The teaching and administrative staff was all white and predominantly male. I was commuting daily from Aurora into Chicago to teach night classes of American literature and World literature to junior and senior students at Telshe Yeshiva, an ultra-orthodox Jewish boys’ high school.
My experience between these two schools was night and day. The students at the Yeshiva had a morbid fascination with the students I taught at ACS, fueled by the already limited access to news and media that the school and the religion placed on them. I was bombarded with questions like, “Do they smoke crack and engage in unnatural acts in the classroom? Are they smart? Do they read? Do they love anyone or anything?” These were questions that stemmed from fear and misrepresentation due to the sheltered lives these students were forced to live. In hindsight, I also played into their entertainment, telling them about the fight I witnessed during my first week at ACS between a boy and a girl (the girl won), or by the antics of a particularly unruly student. These incidents were really few and far between, standing out over weeks and weeks of monotonous non-communication and complacency both by the students at the Aurora Community School and by me.
Emotions were raw at ACS at the time I began teaching due to the impact that the murder of Tupac Shakur had on the culture of rap music. From when I began teaching in November until about early February, there was a tension among the students of the school that pervaded the normal gang-related fights and student-teacher disagreements. The students were lost; they were fumbling to attach a new central identity to the world they knew, and spent much of that time following local labels that produced talented artists, but whose message was more limited to street experience rather than the worldly knowledge and commentary that Tupac gave them in his music. I am convinced that Master P became so popular because of the death of Tupac Shakur, and because of that unfortunate opportunity, he actually made the attempt to expand his image from No Limit Soldier to doting father and legit rap artist.
In his book, Holler If You Hear Me, Michael Eric Dyson explores the more widespread impact that Tupac Shakur’s death had on the African American community:
Tupac’s death has functioned as a symbolic substitution for the youth he loved
and for the urban castaways for whom he spoke. He has been elevated to a
cultural demiurge, his death drawing attention to and elevating black youth
whose own lives of violence and misery were folded into the recesses of public
consciousness. His remarkable reappearance as a spiritual force – through
unreleased music, through films and videos, through a posthumous persona
[Makavelli] – means that his martyrdom might cast a big light on the people he
loved and cherished. It might also underscore the perilous circumstances that
claimed his life, even if to decry the destructive path he took, the
self-annihilating impulse he followed, and how contemporary youth recklessly
take up his mantle. (266)
The fact that the faculty was made up of mainly white males who really saw no relevance in getting to know the students and their interests other than the occasional half-hearted attempt to insert a media-popular phrase or well-known song lyric into a lesson, nor did we consider the direct correlation to the level of respect the student might have toward the teacher if a concerted effort were made on our part to really listen to the students about what they enjoyed listening to and reading. The students felt the loss of Tupac passionately and fiercely, and felt that they lacked the appropriate language to convey this pain to the staff of ACS. They kept it inside and acted out, and we stuck to using planning time to complain about the behavior of our students, often affecting an unfair and downright sorry interpretation of African-American dialect and slang in our stories of the students’ misbehavior.
During the first semester of my second year at the Aurora Community School, things began to simmer down climate-wise. I had quit teaching at the Yeshiva the previous year so I could devote my time to preparing relevant lessons for the students and improve on my own teaching approaches. It was a Thursday in November, and my sophomore class was working on finishing up Moby Dick by the time Thanksgiving break rolled around the following week. I was embarking on a mini-lecture on the significance of the line, “Save me, Coffin!” when I noticed two students engaged in a quiet, but heated rap battle. I tried to ignore them and continue, but I was losing the class two or three students at a time, their eyes quickly darting back and forth from the back of the room back to me, their heads tilted and necks strained slightly to catch the words exchanged.
This was the first time I had ever experienced freestyle rap in person, and until then I hadn’t believed that it actually existed. I didn’t believe that anyone, white, black, or Latino, could fire off meter and rhyme with a purpose at the drop of a hat. The students involved in this particular battle were… I have to apologize for forgetting the name of one of the students involved. His style was very much in the vein of the No Limit artists, and the school was riddled with those types of rappers, all talented in their own ways, some ripping through it like Bone Thugs, some carefully laying it out with strength like Tupac, but all saying essentially the same thing: either Vice Lords rule the streets, or I am the Big Balla – look at all my money, or I am the Big Pimp – look at all my women, or something about the housing development they were living in at the moment. So, the name of the student who represented that area of rap, as talented as he was, escapes me at this time. The other student opened my eyes to a whole other dimension of hip hop.
He was a light-skinned boy of Haitian descent with dreadlocks and piercing, wise, blue eyes. He went by the name, Dahji, but wouldn’t answer to it anymore on account he’d found Jesus the previous summer. It’s true. He literally would not answer you if you called him Dahji, only if you called him Thomas, his Christian name. This was tough to get down, because during the previous year, he would only answer to the name Dahji, when he wasn’t out on suspension for possession of marijuana or calling one of the faculty any number of foul, but creative, nicknames he had for us. This year, he was a changed man, and his actions proved that his words weren’t just words. He was earning A’s in most of his subjects, and he was very involved in the business department of ACS (which consisted of one teacher and two classes) because he wanted to go into business for himself when he graduated, maybe start a record label or open a church. Although, a combination of both would be an ideal situation in his eyes.
I stopped the both Thomas and the other student, noting the importance of Melville and the time constraints. They were disappointed but respectful, and they allowed me to continue on with my lecture. About five minutes later, Thomas raised his hand, and I called on him. He asked, “If [other-student-whose-name-I-can’t remember] and me, if we show you our notes, can we continue the battle at the break?”
How could I resist this proposition? I held them to the note-taking and added a few of my own rules at the break: No foul language, no degradation of women, no insulting the other rapper’s family, ethnicity, or other personal attributes. At the break, the class formed a circle of desks and Thomas and the other student stood in the center of the circle. A student began a simple beat on a desk, Thomas gracefully offered the opening “remarks” to the other student, who asked the student providing the beat to please slow it down. He spoke of the Eastwood Apartments, a development where many of the black students lived, which also housed many of the gang members and drug dealers from the area. He spoke of having an “E” emblazoned on his chest, showing his allegiance to the apartments, to the Game. Thomas’s turn came; he motioned for the student to speed up the beat. “You’re proud of that “E” on your chest? Well, I’m proud of the cross on mine. I’m blessed!” No one heard the following rhyme because the crowd reaction was so strong, so electric, that for a full minute nothing could be heard over the awe-inspired cheering. The other student reacted to Thomas’s verbal assault as if he were taking a physical beating, but loving -no, savoring- every blow. With every competed rhyme, the student clutched his heart, first dropping to one knee, then the other. When Thomas had finished his turn, the student was lying on his back on the floor moaning and grinning. He then got up, hugged Thomas, and thanked him for kicking his butt.
The popularity of the break-time battles grew, and soon all 110 students of ACS were crammed into my classroom from 10:00AM to 10:20AM every morning, mostly watching Thomas take on any fool who challenged him. It was inspiring. It rejuvenated my desire to teach.
The break-time rap battles inspired many discussions between Thomas and me. One in particular had to do with the fact that both hip-hop and education require that we play some sort of game, usually involving a truth or irony behind the words spoken in a song or in a lesson. The irony in rap music follows what James Baldwin used to describe the character of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, to some extent. Baldwin coined the term “exploitation of the nigger” (Notes of A Native Son, 43) to explain a situation involving a black character playing into a stereotype or fear generated by the white concept of the black race, usually the black male. The concept is illustrated in the following excerpt from N.W.A.’s song, “100 Miles and Runnin’”:
MC Ren, I hold the gun and
You want me to kill a mutherfucker and it's done
in.
Since I'm stereotyped to kill and destruct -
Is one of the main reasons
I don't give a fuck.
Thomas explained that much of what white teachers say to black and Latino students carries some of the same irony Baldwin describes, that a lecture touting the virtues of education to a room full of students who have been suspended indefinitely or expelled from their home high school needs some kind of context to make it valuable and authentic to the students. The teachers, as well as the students, know that some of the rhetoric spoken in the classroom by both parties involved is part of the system of education rather than the experience of actual give-and-take learning taking place. Thomas suggested that if the teachers just acknowledge that what is taking place during these instances is part of the game, or the paradox of rhetoric as I call it, then the students will be more apt to take the teacher seriously. For example, many high school teachers will teach a part of their curriculum strictly to prepare the students to take a state test or a college aptitude test like the SAT or the ACT, and teach in a completely different way with completely different materials for student experiences that many teachers would describe as “real” learning. The tests are believed (proven and implied) to have direct correlation to the positions of employment that the students can achieve upon graduation. In the book, Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit calls this “the culture of power” (24) for which there is a specific lexicon for those in the know. Thomas felt that if teachers made students, especially African American and Latino ones, privy to that information, then the teacher would be able to make an impact on all levels earlier on in the his or her relationship with those students. I argued that the students can tell the difference between a lesson that is specifically being taught “to the test” and one that the teacher believes will contribute to “real” learning. Thomas maintained that isn’t the point; the moment the teacher acknowledges that all the students are playing the same game on the same level, but at the same time acknowledges that the African American and Latino students are still challenged even with this information - this validation, he or she will have gained credence with those students.
The students who took part in the battles were mainly African American. The Latino students who challenged them were treated with respect but were still eyed with a certain amount of suspicion by both the audience and the African American opponent, while the white participants were hardly tolerated. It was an unwritten rule made clear to me by Thomas in one of our more heated discussions. I asked point blank, “Is there a place in hip hop for Whitey, or is it really just a Black thing that we don’t understand?” He laughed and responded, “When it all boils down to it, no. You don’t know the suffering that we do, or even Mexican people for that matter. It’s your world, Mr. Ridges, and it has been for as long as you known.” He must have observed the dejected look on my face because he added, “It doesn’t mean you ain’t still invited to the party.”
In his book, The Last Black Mecca: Hip-Hop, Robert Scoop Jackson writes that hip-hop and rap was never meant for white, middle-class Americans:
Rap, rap music, and hip-hop are all part of the new American culture. What has
to be remembered is that they are all created by young Black minds for young
Black people… Rap is the gift this Black generation is giving. And even though
it sometimes gets out-of-hand, it is a very special and honorable gift. And
above and beyond anything else (and I don’t care how you want to look at it) rap
has done two major things: 1) ignited the re-emergence of Malcolm X, and 2) got
Martin Luther King a holiday in Arizona (4)
Jackson even goes as far to say that White American industry has wrestled the essence of hip hop away from the “true” artists and has garnered the loyalty of the black audience. A sentiment with which Wimsatt firmly agrees:
…the white audience doesn’t just consume rap, it shapes rap also. Rappers and
record labels aren’t stupid. They know who’s listening and the music gets
tailored to the audience.
Increasingly, rappers address their white audience,
either directly by accommodating our perceived tastes, targeting us for
education/insult, or indirectly, by shunning the white audience, retreating into
blacker, realer, more hardcore stances – all the more titillating for their
inaccessibility. (18 -19)
There is an upside to the infiltration of the hip hop by clueless white suburbanites all over the country according to Wimsatt. This misguided interest and posturing, in many cases, shows the first step in white America trying to understand the black experience. It is a very tricky situation. The white person has to step out of his or her comfort zone and consider the full life, the full experience, of the black person. No more posturing is needed. Really what needs to happen is for us to just shut up and listen.
Rachel Scherr Salgado describes knowledge of this nature as being “finally about experiencing the other in the self.” (Mixing It Up, 40) Taking her approach to James Baldwin and applying it to hip hop culture places much greater importance on it than the culture just being there for our entertainment. It is something that should seep into our psyche, our souls.
Like the black trying to make it in white America, we face a catch 22: We
cannot help blacks without undercutting their self-determination; we cannot be
cool without encroaching on their cultural space; we cannot take risks without
exercising our privilege to take risks; we cannot integrate without invading; we
cannot communicate on black terms without patronizing.
Faced with these choices, we need not become paralyzed. Instead we may follow the example of blacks who cross-over in the opposite direction: develop a double consciousness. We must take the risks necessary to do right, yet we must remain sober in recognizing that, unlike blacks trying to make it in white America, our struggle is not the center of importance. (Wimsatt, 31)
And that is where the quagmire lies. As much as we want to make it about us, it is not important that black rappers can talk shit about Whitey, nor is it important that black comedians can make fun of white people. That is a veneer of power, and that knowledge is just below the conscience of white America. It’s just something else to talk about. We should just shut up and listen for a while.
Eminem, Kanye West, and the American Obsession with the Self
In 1998, I moved to East Aurora High School and became the faculty advisor for the school literary magazine. I held weekly meetings, which turned into weekly impromptu slam poetry sessions/ cultural round-table discussions. I was going to solve the problems of the world with a crew of Marilyn Manson fans and neo-underground-hip-hop pioneers. A Latino graffiti artist/home-studio record producer/rapper turned me onto the artists from the Anticon record label, an outfit out of Oakland, California that houses mainly white and Latino talent. I was immediately drawn to them. The tracks were sarcastic, philosophical, angry and forlorn, and they sounded great. The music on these albums moved away from the Cause[3]: addressing African American struggle in America. Instead, it focuses on a new American obsession: the self. Many of the songs are about how the state of the world affects the artist himself, not how the artist can change the world, like what Public Enemy and Tupac proposed in their music.
Then came Eminem, who intertwined Jerry Springer-type “reality” television with neo-hip-hop introspection. Eminem took off at East Aurora High School among every racial and socioeconomic group because he was brash, brazen, and told it like it was. He was the first white rapper who really made the cross-over, and it was simply because he exercised the double-conscience that Rachel Scherr Salgado and Billy Wimsatt mentioned. According to Eminem, we’re all trailer trash. Why don’t we embrace that? Who cares? Fuck you, and so on. It didn’t hurt that he was good looking and immensely talented, and that he would beat anyone to the punch when it came to making fun of himself.
Kanye West, besides being the source of Greg Kot’s year-long hard-on in 2004, expanded the focus of hip hop to a more respectable level with his album The College Dropout. West was a producer of rap acts like Jay Z and Talib Kweli and had accrued his fortune and fame before he even set out to make his own album. His songs poke fun at himself and at the genre of rap and hip hop for the focus on collecting material proof of one’s success. He unabashedly criticizes himself and, at the same time touts the glory of being famous and making money and gaining notoriety in America as a black entrepreneur. In the song, “All Falls Down”, West seems to make fun of himself and criticize the hip hop culture in one fell swoop:
Man I promise,
I'm so self conscious
That's why you always see me with at least one of my watches
Rollies and Pasha's done drove me crazy
I can't even pronounce nothing, pass that versace!
Then I spent 400 bucks on this
Just to be like nigga you ain't up on this!
And I can't even go to the grocery store
Without some ones thats clean and a shirt with a team
It seems we living the american dream
But the people highest up got the lowest self esteem
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings
We shine because they hate us, floss cause they degrade us
We trying to buy back our 40 acres
And for that paper, look how low we a'stoop
Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coop/coupe
Disclaimer: What Does This Mean for the Teachers? This essay is glaring proof that I am not immune to my own observations. Many of my stories, while serving the purpose of illustrating my growing as a teacher, subtly accentuate my “downness” with my African American and Latino students. I don’t, however, see myself as part of the problem. I am not so much a poser as I am the obvious outsider, comfortable with my squareness, but always looking to fit in somewhere else in society, maybe crack the code of another clique, maybe finally achieve that double-consciousness described by Salgado and Wimsatt.
Last year, an experienced special education teacher approached me in the teachers’ lounge and asked me if she should see the movie 8 Mile in order to understand her students better. My first reaction was, why 8 Mile and not Boyz N the Hood or Menace II Society, or Hoop Dreams for that matter? Was it just that the thought of our students’ culture is repugnant enough, and that a white rapper might make the experience a little more palatable? It was probably more innocent than that; Eminem was relevant in 2004; 8 Mile was the talk of the school; it had Kim Basinger! Remember her? She was in that movie with Robert Redford!
I replied, “Just talk to your students. They’ll help you understand.”
I lied to her to an extent, as I lied about myself throughout this essay. OK, maybe it wasn’t a full-fledged lie, but it was misrepresentation of fact. There is a culture of us-and-them perpetuated by the teachers at East Aurora High School that a few surface conversations will not penetrate, but I had copies to make, and that just seemed too deep a conversation to have eight minutes before the bell.
Maybe if we all just shut up, sit still, and really listen to each other… Maybe then something will happen.
[1] Quigley South was underhandedly sold in 1989 by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin to St. Rita High School, which was my first understanding of the Catholic Church as one of the largest land-owning businesses in the world.
[2] This is not to say that the Beastie Boys did not eventually evolve into real hip hop; however, until this point in the story, License to Ill is my only point of reference, and that is just rather sad.
[3] “This is prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.” (Baldwin, 15)
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press. Boston. 1984
Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The New Press. New
York. 1986
Dyson, Michael Eric. Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. Basic Books. New
York. 2001
Jackson, Robert Scoop. The Last Black Mecca: Hip-Hop. O.S.P. Research Associates. Chicago.
1994
MacPherson, James. “Junior and John Doe”. Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. Ed. Gerald Early. Penguin Press. New York. 1993
Salgado, Rachel Scherr. “Misceg-narrations” Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects. Ed. SanSan
Kwan and Kenneth Speirs. University of Texas Press. Austin. 2004
Wimsatt, William Upski. Bomb the Suburbs. Subway and Elevated Press. Chicago. 1994
Websites of Interest
Afrika Bambaataa – pioneer of modern hip hop: http://www.zulunation.com/afrika.html
Michael Eric Dyson: http://www.michaelericdyson.com/
Tim Wise: http://www.timwise.org/
William Upski Wimsatt Bomb The Suburbs http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-44-5
Adisa Banjoko's 12 Step Program for Hip Hop http://mkhd.blogspot.com/2005/07/adisa-banjokos-12-step-program-for-hip.html
