“Come as you are. We are a family.”: Examining Hip Hop, belonging, and civicness in social studies

ABSTRACT

Hip Hop is a cultural phenomenon deeply rooted in the collective knowledge and resistance of Black and Latina/o(x) youth, who are often silenced or missing from the traditional social studies curriculum. Even as the culture’s presence has spread within schools, the social studies has yet to engage with the civic identities and critical understandings of teachers and students who participate in Hip Hop culture. This critical qualitative study utilizes the politics of recognition and belonging as lenses to examine how the use of Hip Hop culture by four Black and Latina/o(x) teachers disrupts dominant notions of citizenship. These teachers’ critical Hip Hop pedagogical practices revealed a critical civicness that worked to trouble the social studies curriculum by making visible and resonant the civic identity, agency, and membership of systemically marginalized communities. Their work demonstrates how Hip Hop culture can be used to foster more civically inclusive and engaging spaces, as well as the importance of civic recognition and belonging in social studies classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Black/African American teachers
• citizenship
• Hip Hop
• Latinx teachers
• politics of recognition
• sense of belonging

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants for their sharing their wealth of knowledge and classrooms. Thank you to Cinthia Salinas and Amanda Vickery for their mentorship and guidance, as well as Michelle Riedel, Betsy Barrow, and Katherine Ariel for their encouragement during the editing phase. Finally, I would like to extend a special thank you to Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, Anna Falkner, and Esther Kim for their valuable feedback of the many iterations of this manuscript and fostering the most supportive writing group.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In order to facilitate deeper understanding, I will periodically define, explain, or contextualize words and phrases within Hip Hop culture. For example, the phrase “I got you” can be understood to mean “I understand,” “I’ll cover you,” or “I’ll take care of it.” The phrase “no cap” means “no lie.” Hip Hop’s vernaculars, however, are complex and dynamic (see Potter, 1995), so while I attempt to add clarity, I cannot possibly define every phrase or text of the culture. To aid understanding, please see sites like Urban Dictionary (https://www.urbandictionary.com/) for more clarity.

2. There are multiple examples of symbolic signifiers of Hip Hop that can be seen in places like fashion. For instance, J’s (Air Jordan sneakers) and Air Force Ones are shoes commonly associated with Hip Hop. Additionally, the women who participate in Hip Hop set the trend of extra-long artificial nails that are sometimes sharply pointed like a stiletto or squared-off like a coffin (see Hip Hop artists like Cardi B). Also see The Remix: Hip Hop x Fashion (Kahlid & Cortes, 2019) on Netflix.

3. KRS-ONE (2009) noted that we use the term “Hip Hop” to denote “the name of our [(Hiphoppas)] cultural and artistic elements” (p. 63). Since this study examines the cultural elements, I will use the term “Hip Hop” instead of “Hiphop” or “hip-hop” unless spelled/termed differently in direct citation.

4. I will use Black and African American interchangeably.

5. Brown and Latina/o(x) will be used interchangeably to describe people of Mexican, South American, and Central American ancestry instead of the term Hispanic—a word used to whiten people who may not be read as white and erases Indigenous ancestry (see Cruz, 2018) unless the latter term is used in direct citation.

6. I make the conscious choice to lowercase the racial term white. While white as a racial category is not neutral, as the whiteness associated with white people has a large hand in systemic marginalization, and unlike POC, white people “don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color” (Bauder, 2020, para. 2).

7. Someone who engages in Hip Hop culture.

8. See lyrics to Lupe Fiasco’s track here - https://genius.com/Lupe-fiasco-around-my-way-freedom-aint-free-lyrics, a website with crowdsourced explanations of the lyrics.

9. A style of improvisational rapping where artists deliver lyrics over an instrumental beat.

10. In graffiti, repeated use of a single symbol or series of symbols to mark territory.

11. Really all teachers, no matter race or familiarity with Hip Hop, should study culture down to its foundational roots and keep up with the current discourse.