In fact, hip hop taught me how to live. There were mistakes that I didn’t dare to make thanks to listening to Biggie’s Ready to Die or because of watching videos like TLC’s Waterfalls. Although Biggie rapped with a cadence that perfectly meshed with any baseline similar to old jazz musicians like John Coltrane, his lyrics embellished a lifestyle of guns, drugs, and women that I only dared to fantasize about. I didn’t need to be told by a teacher that crime or lust was a frivolous pursuit, I saw it through his stories told in songs like “Everyday Struggle” and “Suicidal Thoughts”. In sex-ed class we cringed as our gym teacher, Mr. Burke, scrupulously used a banana and a Durex to teach us what “safe sex” looked like. Truth be told, I already knew the importance of such measures simply by watching the gaunt face of an actor seemingly stare into his own soul in that TLC Waterfalls’ video while their lyrics rang, “His health is fading and he doesn’t know why. Three letters took him to his final resting place.”  What I was learning in classes about succeeding in life was not quite as powerful as what hip-hop was intrinsically teaching me about it.

English classes taught me how to write ‘properly’ but music taught me how to articulate meaning. I gravitated towards hip hop because that was what best represented who I was. I got it when rappers would drop slick double entendres and witty punchlines. Whereas our teachers would speak to us in pedantic tropes regarding how to best succeed, rappers would share life lessons through elegant word play. “Money and Blood don’t mix like two dicks with no bitch – [you’ll] find yourself in serious shit”, Biggie would warn us about venturing out into the business world with family. Were some of the lyrics of the nineties overtly homophobic and chauvinistic? Unfortunately, yes. Did they provide glimpses into how to be successful? In a sense, that too. But aside from the detriments of hip-hop during that era, one thing was undeniable: hip-hop’s ability to teach us how to make sense of our world. 

Hip hop supplemented this lesson through another, sometimes subconscious, process – it explained life through a shared vernacular and word play that was stripped down and simultaneously luxurious. The more we listened, the more we understood how to analyze and then explain our circumstance through words that were, in fact, universal to everyone in our community. I understood and was compelled by the stories hip-hop artists told of their neighbourhoods and struggles to “live and maintain”. “Live and maintain”, those three words echoed our exact circumstances. The phrase had an almost oxymoronic value. In a sense, to “live” meant to pursue material markers of success: jewellery, clothes, nice shoes and eventually a fancy car. While to “maintain” meant sticking to the core values of our community – honoring family and your clique over almost everything else, staying authentic in all situations, and remaining true to the culture of hip-hop, of blackness. It was a saying so iconic in our communities that it was common for people to respond to “Hey, what’s up?” with “just living and maintaining, bro.” We clung to hip-hop music because through the process of living within our daily realities, the music taught us exactly how to maintain our sense of self, family, and community. It taught us how to see things before, during and after we experienced them – because we had already felt them through the music we tuned our ears into. Through it, we learned how to navigate between dreams of material accumulation and the harsh process of everyday living. Hip hop became the compass. Plus, it was the music being played in the apartments of my friends during the evenings and the music I heard bumping out of car stereos as they whisked by my street all summer long. Although I never thought of myself as a music connoisseur, hip hop was very much a part of my being. And I owe a whole lot to the hip hop music that made major parts of me.  

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When I got a line-up for two dollars back in 1998, Jay-Z, Nas, Pac, Biggie, DMX, plus Spragga Benz, Beanie Man, and the occasional Mary J. Blige augmented the talks at barbershops. Hip-hop is still talked about today, just in a different fashion. Our conversations have changed because its narrative has deviated. Rappers went from rapping about selling drugs to songs about doing them. It diverged from feigns to feigning. I still enjoy the conversations I have with my barber and his barber-friends and the folks sitting around waiting. But lately, I feel like we’ve missed the irony in our talks, both back then and now. 

We always shared stories about our culture but in between those cuts we slowly stopped asking ourselves, “what’s really good?” While keeping our hair tight we forgot to tease out messages and their messengers when it came to hip-hop. Instead we clinched our teeth and closed our eyes while our barbers slapped that blue barbicide liquid on the back of our necks and the fronts of our foreheads and down our cheekbones. Waiting for him to say to “next,” us barely looking at our heads in the mirror. We’ve done the same thing with our music.

Hip-hop requires that the gates for creativity be swung open, but that we also have our own gatekeepers that are willing to object to certain forms of the art. Folks who are able to separate the messenger from the message. A collective community that is willing to disregard certain tenors while validating other ones. If hip-hop music is simply retelling our stories, we need to interrupt these voices by having critical conversations about what is really going on in our communities. About, what’s really good? This is the function of hip-hop tv, radio, and podcast hosts. This is part of the function of the barbershop and barbers.  

Barbers and barbershops still resemble priests and cathedrals to me. And most folks still visit to get cultured and clean waves. When we validate certain music, we ought to be willing, at the least, to check and balance for a diverse word. Especially when we already know what happens with our Black males as a result of hip-hop. Especially when we already know, just like our hair styles, how important variety is. Especially when we already know, just like those hair clippers, how powerful of an instrument our music is in the battle for equity and liberation. 

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I was an adult now so, to me, that meant leaving that hip-hop shit at the door. There was a saying I had heard over an over as I was training to become a teacher that was, “park your biases at the door”. I would have modified it to say, “park your biases in your transmission when you put your car into park in the parking lot”. Heavily metaphoric but, yeah I know, too many words squeezed into one bar. I know why I never became a rapper. Still, I purposely left my earrings in my jewellery case and tucked in my shirt, into my goddamn khakis, that whole first year I taught. I left a real piece of me outside every day during those first years of teaching because I was taught to think of hip-hop as ostensibly opposite of school culture. I parked a piece of me outside because that’s that I was taught to do.

Doing that to myself did real damage. I felt like a fake every day. I actually wanted to quit and go take up another career. I was a grown-ass man thinking these thoughts. Imagine how black, urban, “uneducated” as of yet, boys feel?

Let’s leave the kids out of it for today. Do you know how many black men who become teachers feel like they probably should just quit teaching because they have to put their identity away from nine to three? It’s devastating. I see these articles about black male teachers and how sore we are as an institution because so many of them are missing in action and the ones that stay aren’t the ones that we need. I skim these articles because I already know what the next hundred words I’m about to read are. Because I’ve felt it. I still feel it.

We not only need more black male teachers, we need more black male teachers to stick around. And that is a fact whether you teach in Harlem, New York or Albuquerque, New Mexico. And we need the ones that don’t want to stick around. We need the ones that never ever even think about teaching. We need the ones with hip-hop pouring so vehemently out of their veins that they walk into classrooms on some straight regulators vibes. Hip hop and school culture have been at odds. But black men who embody that damn thing and are able to teach a bit of math and science too, transform entire classrooms. If you don’t believe me, just think about what your class would have been like if a Christopher Wallace or a Sean Combs were your seventh and eighth grade teachers. 

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In my first year, a student told me I looked more like his “hood” uncle than a teacher. I didn’t know how to respond.

The reason why I wear three chains to work, as well as nice kicks, is simple: I wear three chains to work because athletes, entertainers, and drug dealers can’t be the only ones these kids look up and relate to. Trick probably does love the kids, but so do I. And sorry Mr. Trick Daddy, but Mr. Morris now has more influence, at least on a small segment of my local population than you. I work in Toronto but it would also be the same fact if I worked as a teacher who wore three chains in Dade County…I would think.

Seriously though, the way I aesthetically represent myself is important to my pedagogy as an educator. I work in the hood. Not hood in the sense of Crenshaw Ave. or 145^th and Broadway or insert your local systemically impoverished hood here, but my hood. And just like any “hood”, not a lot of people “make it out”. The kids I teach may not get caught up in gang culture and die by the age of 20 (RIP to the ones that unfortunately do), but they have a more-than-likely chance of ending up in a dead-end job, perpetuating the cyclical environment they were raised in, and looking back on life wishing that they had actually listened to the things their teachers were telling them beyond the books.

And that’s the thing. A lot of what I find important in my practice happens beyond the classroom lessons in Math, English and Science. Every single day, I push to elevate the importance of learning academic skills in my classroom but I am also aware that not every student I encounter is going to find his or her happiness through a college degree and an elite-status profession. Not all my students are going to become doctors and dentists and politicians and lawyers. But I hope that none of them will become felons, caught up in the trappings due to the wrong things they see, or have ultimately learned, from the “OGs” on their block. Most of my “teaching” comes in the form of conversations during lunch or after school or even during class about the little important things about life: grinding, finding your value, valuing yourself, understanding that your circle of friends at 14 will not be your circle of friends at 31, and telling them that every high school (I teach in middle school) has its upside and downside.

And they listen because I am their teacher and give them that real. But part of me also thinks that they listen because I rock three chains. Call it superficial and short-sighted, shoot, call me out for being dead wrong, but identity is socially complex, and maybe just perhaps my “look” counters and challenges some of the perceptions we all grow accustomed to develop and accept. Either way, I do hope that the learning lessons I have with my students throughout the year will be more impressionable than the three chains I wear merely to be myself.

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But in the past five years or so we’ve witnessed hip-hop transform from “our” culture to one that maintains universal appeal through transcending into all areas of our lives. Hip-hop has gone from a fringe product to one that carries validity and power inside some of our most important institutions. Perhaps most important of them all is how hip-hop has infiltrated (and I use that word in its most positive of meanings) education.

We began by using hip-hop as a method to reach students in English classes. Interjecting raps for poems and curating content on syllabi, like “Brenda’s Got a Baby” or “The Message,” that allowed students to interrogate social ills and issues in ways that novels like A Streetcar Named Desire or To Kill a Mockingbird do. Our music held currency that we cashed in on in order to make math class more interesting and we have begun to channel the science behind hip-hop into the actual sciences we teach in schools. This is where we are with education and hip-hop (oh shit, I think I just thought of a new documentary!). Education has hesitantly embraced hip-hop culture (on some levels) and subsequently whispered to young black and brown boys and girls that they matter. But using the art form in a singular manner has some built-in shortcomings. If we only use the music, we do intrinsically validate the culture, but we also impede its overall impact by subconsciously suggesting that the music, the artistic and creative side of hip-hop, is the only part of the culture of substance. The vehicle of hip-hop can carry much more.

In a weekly twitter chat, #HipHopEd, reality pedagogy creator and HipHopEd founder Chris Emdin asked, “How else might hip-hop forms of expression (other than rapping) be utilized in the classroom?” The question was brilliant. It suggests that “the message” of hip-hop is fluid enough to exist in multiple realities. We have figured out how to mesh hip-hop with curriculum and even how to infuse it in teaching delivery. It’s time to examine how our actual classroom spaces can represent the most influential culture of the last forty years.

Many have begun this work. Arts education programs are exploring how to incorporate graffiti culture into their programs. We are continually changing our aesthetic views on fine art by dichotomizing how important American artists like Jackson Pollack compare to Basquiat (and not the other way around). Our next step is to revolutionize the space of the classroom.

Accomplishing this feat is relatively simple. By making our classrooms culturally relevant, we continue to extend and expand our invitation of hip-hop culture into conservative educational culture. Like I said earlier on, I am and will always be a fan of the history behind hip-hop. But I am not naïve enough to think that students born post-millennium will carry this same sentiment. To be quite honest, the 12 and 13 year-old kids I teach barely mess with J.Cole or Kendrick Lamar! Hip-hop education does not need to only look like documentaries about the history of the music. It can also look like classrooms that represent the street corners, language, bedrooms, and iPhones of our new, young hip-hop fans. Opening up our classroom; its arrangements and its walls to reflect modern hip-hop culture is one way that hip-hop forms of expression can be utilized in the classroom. We can extend the mix between hip-hop and education beyond lyrics. This may look different to different educators. That is fine. But it is better than having students explain the importance of a 16-bar verse while staring at a bunch of dead white guys on the wall.

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Kendrick rips into the second verse with lines like, “I got the world’s attention…so I’mma (sic) say somethin’ that’s vital and critical for survival…” illustrating his intention to bring a political consciousness to his rap lyrics. Kendrick ultimately highlights the ignorance in not only highlighting the trivial nature of racial lines but he also points out the home-grown nihilistic side-effects of fighting over space. He eloquently moves from the “racial colors” that affect us onto the gang colors that continuously affect our own communities while suggesting that we need to overcome both. The politics of rap lyrics have taken a beating for years. This is a shining example of the positive.

Since hip hop music has seemed to move beyond a creative art form into speaking for the possibilities of black identities, a song like this is here at a most critical time. Teaching people about “life in the ghetto” is more than talking about violent experiences of crime and money. Music should speak on not only life in the ghetto but on how to grow up and realize the traps of the institutionalized surrounding that the ghetto perpetuates. Kendrick is speaking on this through a track like “Complexion”. He is illustrating a story that is beyond a person standing on the corner slanging dope. He is “preaching” about causes, he is speaking on the life plight of black culture. This is needed and appreciated.

Simply put, the intrinsic allegory Lamar spits on “Complexion” is indeed complex in its assertion about complexion. Whether it is about the white or black thing, or the internal rife between light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans, or about the perpetual battle between gangs, Kendrick once again exposed a vulnerability within our collective urban mood while also suggesting a direction for a utopian collectiveness. And he does this all through his language – the language of hip-hop music. It goes to show that even his filler tracks (which are not the least bit fillers) on To Pimp a Butterfly are not too complex to be put into context.

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No generation has ever come as close to associating itself with an art form as the hip hop generation has. Hip hop has split classes, ages, and colors all equally. As much as hip hop has provided a platform for critical self reflection, it has spent many days dividing our culture. Ironically, this is what Willie Lynch articulated through his infamous “The Making of a Slave” speech. Kanye West was right in suggesting that black culture and the individuals within are indeed new slaves. However Kendrick Lamar, choosing the route of exposing and providing a model for improvement, goes beyond simply narrating a flaw in our culture. His track, “Complexion” strives to break through the barriers that presently exist not only in greater society but that have perpetuated their insidious ways into black culture.

Through hip hop we feel the manifestation of the divide and conquer mentality. The divide between male vs. female, between young vs. old, and between dark skinned vs. light skinned. All voiced through the capacitating grip of white supremacy that is subconsciously voiced through the innocuous echoes of our music. The critical acclaim of the album TPAB is warranted. But on a deeper note, listening to the lyrics on the album, and in specific tracks like “Complexion” reveals the true travesty that our “democratic” society has fostered. Maybe I am overstepping and reading too much into Kendrick Lamar’s word. But maybe that is why he put these words on wax in the first place.

The fact that Kendrick Lamar would include a track like this on his album reveals an ever-growing consciousness and vulnerability of his music, in light of the travesties that have re-birthed the racial schism that were laying dormant in America for a few years. The lyrics he spits reveal how he is situated within it all. A close read of his poetic verses on “Complexion” reveal the complexity of his artistic mentality.

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There has been no rapper who has taken it upon themselves to narrate their version of the #BlackLivesMatter movement with such sonic substance and clarity than Kendrick Lamar. The dichotomous relationship between blacks and whites in America seems to gain more saliency every time we turn on CNN. And the relationship between blacks and whites has never been rhymed with more elegance than on a “sleeper track” from Kendrick’s latest critically subversive and politically acclaimed album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Appropriately titled, “Complexion”, K dot rhymes through insurgent tones pertaining to a multitude of experiences brought on by skin color. He speaks on the seemingly innate yet trivial complexities of black self-hate that is created by simple differences in melatonin levels. The hook clearly proclaims the message of the track: Complexion means nothing. Unfortunately Kendrick is grappling with the utopian ideal of living in a post-racial society while still living in one that is institutionally segregated along racial lines. Kendrick is right – completion doesn’t mean a thing. But unfortunately his hook would be more accurate if it said, complexion shouldn’t mean a thing.

Listen closely to the first 16 bars of the track as Kendrick puts himself in the historic shoes of a slave who is lusting after a lighter-skinned “house servant”. The line, “Sneakin’ through the back window, I’m a good field nigga. I made a flower for you outta cotton just to chill wit ya,” is so metaphorically potent that upon each listen you can feel another layer of its meaning. On the surface it describes the obstacles that impede society’s unity and the division that is founded on race. On a deeper level, those very lines can be used to sum up the entire TPAB album. The butterflies in this case are rappers, or on a grander level, the exploitation of black culture and the symbolism can be meant to represent the route that black culture had, and has, to take just to get “a seat at the table” – through the back window. The flower out of cotton made just to chill is the packaging of our culture’s hard work and determinism. Yes. Shit gets deep.

“Brown skinned but your blue eyes tell me your mama can’t run” is another example of the historical markings that slavery has left on our society. The controversial nature of skin color is fervently challenged in this telling track off of TPAB. There are rappers who make catchy songs that sonically sound great but have little social relevance and there are rappers who purposely and unknowingly are pressed into appropriating our culture, and then there are rappers who maintain a vision of the roots of hip hop and use their words to tell a story. A story about what growing up black feels like. The realest rappers are not the ones who claim to slang the most dope, drop the most bodies or bag the most shorties; the realest rappers are those who still feel that this tool of music can be used as a weapon for both economic stability and social change. A song like “Complexion” reveals why Kendrick is one of the realest rappers out.

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We can no longer discredit the importance of culture and identity as it pertains to the perceptions that urban Black males feel they need to occupy. As well, we cannot silence the truth that school incorrectly views this type of identity performance as deviant. Hip-hop culture is not deviant culture; the contemporary perception of it boxes it in as such. But in truth, hip-hop culture is the result of, “selective appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulating of European ideologies, cultures, and institutions, alongside African heritage,” which led to, “linguistic innovations in rhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupying an alien space, heightened expressions, hairstyles, ways of walking, standing, and talking, and a means of constituting and sustaining camaraderie and community” (Hall, 1992). Incredible stuff. But not viewed as such. So what do we truly expect from our urban Black males when we ask them to navigate a space like education while they are also subjectified to the discourse that sees hip-hop culture and it’s aesthetic representations as abhorrent and anti-intellectual?

Until we root these types of questions into the forefront, urban Black males can learn the “superficial features” of dominant discourses, as well as the more subtle aspects, and if placed in proper context, can acquire these traits without feeling that they are “bowing before the master”. Taking an understanding that identity is fluid and that one needs not to hide his textbooks in a pizza box for sake of disaffiliation with his peers must be a central point of conversation if we want to reverse the detrimental discourse that surrounds Black masculinity, hip-hop aesthetics, and identity that urban Black males experience and navigate through while in high school.

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Our current school system leaves Black boys set up in a way that is meant to deceive and ultimately fail them in the long run. If you look close enough you will see that schooling slowly breaks down the self-concept and self-esteem of many Black boys. Whether it is low teacher expectations, labelling, or the absence of supporting structures, everyday Black boys walk away from school questioning their identity and how they ought to represent themselves in our society. The sad part is – little is being done to change the status quo. Black boys continue to drop out despite educational initiatives. In classrooms across the country, Black males settle with D’s and C’s, struggle to attain B’s, and battle both internal and external frictions when they actually do succeed with A’s. All the while our Black sons and brothers are internalizing what the institution of education foreshadows about society in general. So when authorities accost Michael Brown and Eric Garner, it’s not anything new to them. Unfortunately, the authorities “surveilling” our schools are not much different than those policing the real world.

Black males are meant to fit into specific molds and are held to specifically lower standards. When Black males meet these standards, everyone accepts it. In my experience as an elementary teacher and as a Black male educated by the public school system, it is unusual to see Black boys encouraged or affirmed in the domain of academics. This is a volatile subject amongst teachers but it is the ugly truth. Despite the “forced” acceptance of multiculturalism, our notions about the “universal student” have not changed. Unfortunately we are not all welcomed to the table when deciding what this “universal student” looks, talks, walks, and acts like. What happens then is that school teaches us the “right” ways to define ourselves but never allow us to question whether what’s right for Adam is also right for Treyvon. What’s worse is that most Black boys don’t even come close to fitting this ideal and are marginalized because of it. So where does that place them? What exactly are they suppose to do? Black boys are stuck trying to be validated and affirmed by school, but scripted social identities leave them in no-man’s land. So some Black males seek affirmation in other ways; some arrive at validation by expressing passive or aggressive resistance to the social structures that have a history of scarring them. Unfortunately, these approaches have come with far too many deadly consequences lately.

Many things need to change in how we “school” children. Pop culture teaches us that Black men can only be athletes, entertainers, or the criminals. And schools foster this acknowledging consent. So who was Michael Brown? How about Eric Garner? More importantly, what did the police assume about these men? Our schools offer very little for the Black boy in terms of the flexibility of his identity. They have a heavy hand in internalizing the conflict of representation that plagues our Black boys. Thus they have the responsibility (and the power) to open up the narratives of the Black male. Our schools must work to challenge how Black boys are read in society. If schools do not counter the current narratives regarding Black males and create alternative ways of knowing our Black men, then Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin will be simply names in a long list of causalities that our schools system teaches us to accept.

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