ISSN: 1941-0832 Teaching Black Lives in College When Black Lives Didn’t Matter that Much K through 12 by Sarah Trembath PHOTO BY AIDEN MARPLES ON UNSPLASH RADICAL TEACHER 18 http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu No. 116 (Winter 2020) DOI 10.5195/rt.2020.663 learning, and Hip Hop scholarship. My offering has long been the Hip Hip course. The Ivory Tower and the ‘hood. The outside and the middle. Privilege and poverty. Knowledge and ignorance. That course has had many versions—Hip Hop Poetics, The truth and a lie. Dichotomies as extreme as the colors Hip Hop Scholarship, Golden Era Hip Hop—but all treat the black and white. Sometimes my profession has me both subculture as worthy of serious study and rich with areas of skating and crossing these lines, considering how to do so exploration for students’ research-based writing. It’s a with my dignity and my students’ needs simultaneously popular class, with long waiting lists and people talking central in the decisions I make as a teacher. about it on and even off campus. After all, it has primary source material like Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” and Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full on the syllabus. It’s got cool book Teaching Composition, Teaching Black titles like Prophets of the Hood and Black Noise on the Life required reading list. The first assignment on the schedule is often, “Watch Lupe Fiasco’s ‘Bitch Bad’ and, using text I teach composition and the occasional literature class support from the lyrics and the video imagery, take a to undergraduate students. My university’s composition position on Fiasco’s charge against the modern music program is a rigorous and pedagogically driven one in which industry. Sustain an argument in support of your position for my colleagues and I draw our classroom and curricular 5 pages.” Students think it sounds like fun. practices from the rhetoric and composition scholarship and from each other’s experiences. We design and teach writing- Of course, I’m engaging all this material toward the goal intensive, subject-based topics courses. We also design and of developing good academic writers. I teach in a manner teach courses in our university’s core areas of required that meets the course objectives. But I’m also, in many ways, teaching Black Lives. That is, in my Writing 101 Hip classes: Complex Problems, Critical Thinking, Habits of Mind, and Diversity and Equity. And we teach first-year Hop class, and at times when our first-semester material has writing. When we teach first-year writing, especially, we are anything to do with race, racism, or Blackness, I am readying students to do the work that will help them succeed essentially teaching Black Life in addition to teaching throughout the rest of college. We are also helping our composition. students think about things. If we are really doing our jobs In my first-semester course, race and class figure in well, it occurs to me often, our students come out on the heavily: If the community text has a progressive race/class other end of our courses thinking well about the things they bias, I find myself in the role of teaching history to provide write about, rather than just writing well. Sometimes those understanding for my young students. If the community text things relate to race and racism or, more specifically, to is problematic, I put it in conversation with texts from Black lives. minority-group thinkers who can better explain their own situation. Because my own research area and advanced In the first class in the freshman series, students do a lot of that thinking about a community text. A committee in degree are in Black studies, more often than not, those our department selects a book from among recent nonfiction thinkers are Black. publications that address current issues of importance. All In Literature, too, race and class play big roles. For me, incoming students read the book—which, more often than the canon is expansive, and I make sure I include writers not has some relationship to race or class—and then they who not only have a range of origins and identities, but also attend an author talk, discuss the book in class, research a plurality of perspectives. At the multiracial, predominately some topic related to it, and write about some aspect of that White elite university where I teach, the material is almost topic. From there, throughout the semester, students do always unsettling to someone or is, even more other projects. In the process, they locate and evaluate problematically, beyond the life experience and worldview of sources, read critically, think critically about what they’ve those I ask to interpret it. My teaching style often has me read, and synthesize ideas, take positions and formulate feeling, then, like I’m straddling two worlds, trying to blend complex theses, develop those theses with well-supported them, creating good anti-racist pedagogy (specific to both argumentation, make choices in the modes of persuasion Black studies and college writing), but doing so by trial and they employ, organize and reorganize their work, error. In the Hip Hip Studies writing classes in particular, I incorporate source materials, cite properly the sources feel like I have succeeded in helping my students meet the they’ve used, and so on. They continue this development of primary goals of the class, but only half succeeded at skills in their second-semester course, Writing 101. whatever it is that moves non-Black people forward in their For this latter course, professors select our own topics thinking about Black lives. The challenges to this latter, and themes. My colleagues and I get to share an aspect of unofficial objective are many. our own research. We get to spread a personal passion or at In my Hip Hop Studies writing courses, the aesthetics least tap into an interest. Students, too, get to tap into their of the primary source material has been primarily Black. own preferences. Presumably, they choose their 101 classes Historical and cultural contexts have been primarily Black. based on which topic intrigues them the most. In any given The scholarship and documentary films to which I expose semester, the range of choices is vast and may or may not my students—most of whom are neither racially Black, touch upon race and class dynamics. Topics, for instance, culturally urban, nor multicultural in their communities of include feminism and gender, monsters, science fiction and origin—were almost always created by Black scholars and technology, intimacy in the digital age, criminality, illness, filmmakers. But my students aren’t always prepared to talk dystopian media, TaNehisi Coates, country music, service RADICAL TEACHER 19 http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu No. 116 (Winter 2020) DOI 10.5195/rt.2020.663 or write about Black lives or about the lives of the Latinx and they don’t see the real cause of the effect of their own working-class White artists who were also instrumental in suffering,” the song begins (Brand Nubian). creating Hip Hop culture. And so I turn for pedagogy to the Race/class-privileged students of Hip Hop learn about cultural critics of Hip Hop scholarship and the thinkers in my the housing projects where the dances began and the rows [Black literary] tradition who’ve helped me understand the of abandoned buildings where the visual art flourished. They racial moment in which I live by making America’s racial, also learn about the exploitative practices of record political, and cultural history clear. Though, for the most companies in their sky-high towers who courted young part, they predated Hip Hop, people like James Baldwin, the rappers and gave them shady record deals. And if they listen Black Arts Movement writers, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, closely, perhaps to the opening track by Yasiin Bey (formerly David Walker, DuBois, Fanon, Césaire, Manning Marable, known as Mos Def) on his acclaimed Black on Both Sides LP, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Walter Rodney, and Barbara Smith, students hear the echoes of the past from which the obvious among others, prepared me in many ways for the problem wealth binaries arose: of teaching Hip Hop outside of Hip Hop’s predominately Black urban context. For when one teaches Hip Hop on Hip Hop’s My grandmomma was raised on a reservation own terms, one is teaching the history of the oppressed my great-grandmama was, from a plantation people of the world. One is teaching how those oppressed They sang, songs for inspiration people express their genius in forms and with language They sang, songs for relaxation instantly recognizable to their cultural kindred but usually They sang, songs, to take their minds up off that foreign to outsiders. In the face of all that may oppress them Fucked up situation in their communities of origin, Hip Hop artists are, to a larger I am, yes I am, the descendant degree than was intended for them, the agents of their own Of those folks whose, backs got broke destinies and the tellers of their own stories. They create out Who, fell down inside the gun smoke of their own culture and arise out of their own history—a chains on their ankles and feet history that the Southern Poverty Law Center would call I am descendants, of the builders of your street “hard history.” That is, their narratives contain things that tenders to your cotton money are often hard for outsiders to stomach. I am hip-hop I am rock and roll Hip Hop in its purest forms represents the periphery in Been here forever a world with other things and other people at its center.