Northern Touch”: Using Hip-Hop Education to Interrupt Notions of Nationhood and Belonging

Chapter10 The “Northern Touch”: Using Hip-hop Education to Interrupt Notions of Nationhood and Belonging

Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert @hiphopscholar82

On January 29 2008, Canada’s largest school board in Toronto, Ontario voted to open an alternative school in order to pilot Afrocentric pedagogy, combat an estimated 40% drop out rate among Black teens, and establish a center for research on how to close the learning gap between Black students and their non-Black peers. Since 1995 when the province’s Royal Commission on Learning suggested that a Black-focused school might help stem these statistics, and the city’s school board reported that 40% of Caribbean-born and 32% of East-African born students in Toronto drop out of high school yearly, administrators have attempted to find strategies to address the issue. Today administrators, activists, and parents continue to argue that Canadian provincial curriculum is Eurocentric. This Eurocentricity leads school systems to overlook the heritage of Black students, with teaching failing to reflect racial diversity in their classrooms and to productively interact with Black students. During the 2008 proceedings, community leader Murphy Brown argued that due to the failure to incorporate even the most basic of African Canadian history instruction, Black youth are being pushed out of the system in what she calls a “school-to-jail-pipeline” (Brown & Popplewell, 2008). Following the 2008 proceedings, Toronto education groups, both institutional and community-based, discovered that hip-hop curriculum retained the capacity to combat this exclusionary education model. Specifically, educators have recognized that hip-hop can alter educational outcomes by creating a transformative educational space where youth can become critically conscious of self as well as the effects of historical and contemporaneous structural inequities (Akom, 2009). This occurs when hip-hop exists as, what Education scholar D.T.Baszile calls a counter story. Baszile (2008) argues that in telling stories from the bottom up, hip-hop curricula attempts to uncover subjugated knowledge by speaking the marginalized into existence. Moreover, when students consume these counter stories, scholars, educators and curriculum designers agree that students are better able to analyze and challenge the logic of a Eurocentric model that works to maintain various forms of hegemony (Akom, 2009).

By using Canadian Rap music as a case study, this chapter suggests that one of the ways in which #HipHopEd challenges Eurocentric education and its outcomes is by engaging with the nation’s master narrative of nationhood and belonging. In Canadian curricula, the master narrative is often reified through the stories the nation tells about itself through educational resources. Like Baszile, I argue that Canadian rappers, like their American counterparts, use hip-hop culture to create counter-stories that speak Canada’s marginalized into existence and problematize the meaning of belonging and nationhood from their diverse perspectives. Once employed in the classroom, Canadian Rap possesses counter-hegemonic curricula potential in two ways. First, it offers students a transformative pedagogic space where they can uncover subjugated knowledge that challenges the logic of Canada’s master narrative as well as the Eurocentric model of education. Second, it allows students the ability to consume contradictory responses to Canadian cultural hegemony that can aid in disarticulating the historical and contemporaneous contradictions of Canadian belonging and nationhood, as well as their place within this web of complex relations. The potential of Canadian Rap to be incorporated into #HipHopEd constitutes what I have termed the “Northern Touch.” In the 1998 recording titled “Northern Touch,”1 Canadian rap group Rascalz asked listeners to, “check the lingo spread through the atmosphere [that is] so distinctive no other style comes near” (Rascalz, 1998, Cash Crop). The Rascalz (a multi-racial group) suggested that the “Northern Touch” was a unique style of performance, lyricism and musicality that differentiated Canadian Rap from its American counterpart. I will use “Northern Touch” as metaphor to suggest that Canadian rappers have a distinctive way of using rap music to speak the marginalized into existence to disrupt and disarticulate notions of belonging given the socio- historical relations particular to Canada. I will do so by first outlining the master narrative that frames the daily realities of Canadian citizenship, followed by a discussion of the ways in which Canadian rappers confront, through counter- stories, Canada’s national discourse of belonging. In doing so, I suggest that Canadian Rap, when employed as curricula, contains within it transformative possibilities intended to encourage student engagement, and interrogate Eurocentric curricula and diversity both within and outside of the classroom.

1 Canada’s Master Narrative: The State-Sanctioned Project ofMulticulturalism

Canada’s multicultural policy, first recognized by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, is a state-sanctioned project that frames the