Critical Reflection Essay (3 pages, APA)

Journal of Black Studies 42(5) 768 –790

© The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0021934710376164 http://jbs.sagepub.com

376164 JBS42510.1177/00219347103 76164PetchauerJournal of Black Studies © The Author(s) 2011

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1Lincoln University, PA

Corresponding Author: Emery Petchauer, Lincoln University, 1570 Baltimore Pk, P.O. Box 179, MSC 24, Lincoln University, PA 19352 Email: [email protected]

Knowing What’s Up and Learning What You’re Not Supposed to: Hip-Hop Collegians, Higher Education, and the Limits of Critical Consciousness

Emery Petchauer1

Abstract

This qualitative portraiture study explores the different ways that college students deeply involved in hip-hop at two universities (i.e., hip-hop col- legians) made their personal experiences in hip-hop relevant to their educa- tional pursuits. The results of this study illustrate how students applied their experiences with the critical discourses of hip-hop music and the questioning discourse of hip-hop more generally to their perspectives of university edu- cation and their specific academic pursuits. This article also details the lim- its of these critical perspectives by illustrating how a subsample of hip-hop turntablists did not mobilize the critical and political perspectives that other participants embraced. Overall, this article focuses on the different ways that young adults from various ethnic backgrounds make a cultural artifact cre- ated primarily by Black communities relevant to their educational lives.

Keywords

hip-hop, college students, critical consciousness

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Academic scholarship over the past 10 years has demonstrated that hip-hop is a cultural resource related to the identities, values, and aspirations of youth and young adults around the world (Petchauer, 2009). Hip-hop in these conceptualizations pertains to not just rap music but also other expres- sive practices. These include forms of dance, such as breakin’ (i.e., B-boying), music creation (e.g., deejaying and turntablism), and visual art (e.g., graffiti and aerosol art) (Forman & Neil, 2004; Rose, 1994) as well as language (Smitherman, 1997). For some young adults, hip-hop also exists as a genera- tional identity that signifies common values, ideologies, and perspectives (Kitwana, 2002).

Within the expanding body of hip-hop scholarship, a subset of research has addressed the implications of hip-hop on educational processes and settings. For example, research has demonstrated how students mobilize hip-hop songs to construct notions of identity and history (Dimitriadis, 2001; Hill, 2009) and how hip-hop can be used to promote academic engagement in secondary (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002) and higher education (Harrison, Moore, & Evans, 2006). In higher education specifically, few studies have examined the roles of hip-hop on college campus and in the lives of young adults (Petchauer, 2009).

This dearth of work in higher education is a shortcoming because of the unique ways that both institutions and students have incorporated hip-hop into the academic and social fabric of institutions. These ways include hip-hop courses, curricula, and symposia (e.g., Harrison et al., 2006), campus organizations (e.g., Hip-Hop Congress [HHC], 2009), and the many ways that students create and participate in hip-hop on their own, which like other cultural dimensions of their lives significantly shape their collegiate experiences (Guiffrida, 2003; Harper & Quaye, 2007; Museus, 2008; Petchauer, 2010).

This article helps fill this dearth in education and hip-hop scholarship by illustrating different ways that students deeply involved in hip-hop at two institutions (i.e., hip-hop collegians) made their personal experiences in hip-hop relevant to their educational pursuits. Specifically, this article illustrates how students applied their experiences with the critical discourses of hip-hop music and the questioning discourse of hip-hop more generally to their perspectives of university education and their specific academic pursuits. This article also details the limits of these critical perspectives by illustrating how a subsam- ple of hip-hop turntablists did not mobilize the critical and political perspec- tives that other participants embraced. Overall, this article focuses on how young adults from various ethnic backgrounds make a cultural artifact cre- ated primarily by Black communities relevant to their educational lives.

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Relevant Literature: Hip-Hop and Higher Education

Hip-hop maintains a complex relationship with mainstream parts of society. In its early and formative years during the mid 1970s and early 1980s, hip-hop represented an alternate form of social recognition and status for Black and Latino youth and at times (like previous Black musical forms) was as a vehicle for collective uplift and social critique of policies and politics that often disad- vantaged minority groups (Chang, 2005; Rose, 1994). This critique has also applied to formal education. Au (2005) demonstrated this most clearly by finding that in rap lyrics, formal education is almost exclusively portrayed as a failing system that is unable to meet the cultural and educational needs of students, particularly those who are African American.

While it is important for researchers to explore the content of popular lyrics, it is inaccurate to assume that listeners interpret and apply lyrics the same ways that researchers do, let alone that listeners with different racialized (or economic) experiences construct the same meanings from or attribute the same worth to hip-hop (Sullivan, 2003). Consequently, Iwamoto, Creswell, and Caldwell (2007) explored what rap lyrics mean to 8 college students of different ethnicities. For this sample, the music “elicit[ed] powerful emotions and significant meanings across ethnic and racial groups” (p. 346) through its diverse themes and content, such as overcoming hardships, living in violent environments, experiencing racism, being exposed to drugs, and being in and out of love. Rap music also had psychological and emotional affects on the students due to the diversity of content to match listeners’ moods.

How students make meaning of lyrics is important, but this alone is a lim- ited conception of how hip-hop is relevant to college students’ educational experiences and lives. Currently, there exists a variety of ways that college age adults identify with, create, and actively participate in hip-hop, all of which are of greater importance compared to passively listening to rap music or wearing name-brand clothes associated with hip-hop artists. These other ways include the cultural expressions that constitute the four elements of hip-hop: emceeing or rapping; forms of dance, such as breakin’ (i.e., B-boying); music production through deejaying and turntablism; and aerosol and graffiti art (Forman & Neil, 2004). More broadly, active ways of participating in hip-hop can also include spoken-word poetry, hip-hop-based activism and local organization (Bynoe, 2004), hip-hop-based education (e.g., Hill, 2009), and membership in local and national hip-hop organizations, such as the HHC, Universal Zulu Nation (UZN), and Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HHSAN). It is important to recognize these different hip-hop activities because

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they expand the analytical framework beyond the traditional four elements and help better frame how hip-hop exists on campus. In other words, today, a young adult can be deeply involved in a hip-hop community on or around campus due to membership in a hip-hop organization or use of hip-hop as an educational tool. He or she need not be an emcee or a DJ to affiliate with, shape, and be shaped by hip-hop.

In addition to this broader analytical lens, it is equally important to recog- nize the aesthetics, sensibilities, and ways of doing that are within such hip- hop activities. That is, there is an important distinction between hip-hop as content and hip-hop as aesthetic form (Petchauer, 2009). This distinction (although not made in such clear terms) has been signaled when describing the African and African American linguistic features of rap (Smitherman, 1997) or that how rappers speak (rather than what they say) is often con- nected to African and African American linguistic characteristics. Operating upon this notion of form, recent iterations of scholarship have illustrated the more precise aesthetic forms and principles of hip-hop musical sam- pling (Schloss, 2004), language creation and adaptation (Alim, 2006; Pennycook, 2007), and dance (Schloss, 2009). Applied to education, this dis- tinction results in what Hill (2009) has called pedagogies of hip-hop: “the various ways that hip-hop culture authorizes particular values, truth claims, and subject positions while implicitly or explicitly contesting others” (p. 120).

This expanded analytical lens as well as the distinction between hip-hop content and form connects to this study through the conceptualization of hip-hop collegians: college students whose educational interests, motiva- tions, practices, and mind-sets have been influenced by their active participa- tion in hip-hop. From this conceptualization, Petchauer (2010) explored some of these more detailed ways that hip-hop exits in the lives of hip-hop collegians and the implications on educational experiences. The study illustrated that hip-hop activities and spaces on campus were meaningful parts of students’ educational lives, similar to cultural or ethnic student orga- nizations. The study also demonstrated how students conceptualized hip-hop as an approach to education by transferring concepts and practices such as sampling (Schloss, 2004) from hip-hop into education. Overall, the study illustrated that college students who are deeply invested in hip-hop make meaningful connections between it and their educational lives. One aspect not addressed in this study was the (dis)connection between the critical ideolo- gies of hip-hop and students’ conceptualizations of their education. This pres- ent article addresses this aspect.

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Theoretical Framework

This study employed the conceptual framework of worldview (Kearney, 1984) to explore how students made their experiences in hip-hop relevant to educa- tion. The framework was chosen to accommodate the broad conceptualiza- tion of hip-hop collegians and the diverse ways that they might make hip-hop relevant to education. Kearney described worldview as

[a people’s] way of looking at reality. It consists of basic assumptions and images that provide a more or less coherent, though not neces- sarily accurate way of thinking about the world. A worldview com- prises images of Self and of all that is recognized as not-Self [i.e., Other], plus ideas about relationships between them, as well as other ideas. (p. 41)

This definition is elucidated by five dimensions according to which people construct their lived reality: (a) self and other, (b) relationship between the self and other, (c) classification of other domains, (d) causation, and (e) space and time. The first three categories of this framework signify the central structure of worldview. Self refers to how individuals and groups construct themselves and their identities. Other represents categories and domains that are con- structed as separate from self, and relationship signifies that there are different ways that people relate with categories and domains. A heuristic such as this is helpful specifically to this study because it guides the researcher to explore how participants constructed, engaged, and related with the exterior domain of education (e.g., particular classes, course material) at their respective institu- tions and in different areas of study.

In addition to worldview (Kearney, 1984), I also draw from critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 2007; see also Freire, 1973) to frame more specifically how participants constructed higher education at their respective institutions and to understand the relationship component of worldview. Accordingly, critical pedagogy asks “how and why knowledge gets constructed the way it does, and how and why some constructions of reality are legitimated and celebrated by the dominant culture while others clearly are not” (McLaren, 2007, p. 197). From this perspective, critical con- sciousness refers to the ability to recognize that knowledge and metanarratives that communicate how “people are” and why “things happen” are not neu- tral. Rather, they privilege some groups and disadvantage others. Within a hip-hop lexicon and according to some participants of this study, this is called knowing what’s up.

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My utilization of critical pedagogy here is not to frame hip-hop itself or its commercial products (e.g., rap songs) as forms of critical pedagogy, although such Eurocentric approaches have guided many explorations of hip-hop (e.g., Stovall, 2006), as have Afrocentric ones (e.g., Wells- Wilbon, Jackson, & Schiele, 2010). Rather, I use these aspects of critical pedagogy because they cohesively outline the general ways that students constructed and deconstructed university education vis-à-vis their experi- ences in hip-hop.

Design and Method of Study This study was guided by the following questions: What meanings do hip-hop collegians derive from and ascribe to their educational pursuits? In what ways does their participation in hip-hop implicate their educational experiences, activities, and approaches? In order to explore and answer these questions, I used a qualitative portraiture approach (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) that focuses on agency, complexity, and dimensionality of actors in their respec- tive cultural contexts. As I will describe below, I also incorporated into this approach in-depth, phenomenological interviews (Seidman, 1998) as well as participant observation in the educational and hip-hop cultural spaces that participants created and occupied. Opposed to traditional qualitative inter- viewing alone or ethnography, this highly textured, portraiture approach positioned me to focus upon the agency of actors in relationship to hip-hop and their specific institutional settings.

Settings and Participants The results in this article are from Colonial University and Pacific State University, which are pseudonyms for two large, public institutions in the southeastern and southwestern United States, respectively. During the 2005- 2006 academic year, 20,800 students were enrolled at Colonial representing the following ethnic characteristics: 70% Caucasian, 20% African American, 6% Asian, 3% Hispanic, and 1% Other. During the time of this study, I described the level of hip-hop activity in the surrounding scene as moderate, consisting of weekly hip-hop nights at local venues, events run by independent (i.e., noncorporate) promoters, a local chapter of the UZN (an international organization for hip-hop culture), and a biweekly open-microphone event called Word Perfect put on by Headz Up, one of the most popular organizations on campus.

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During data collection, 38,000 students were enrolled at Pacific State rep- resenting the following ethnic characteristics: 45% Caucasian, 4% African American, 15% Asian, 23% Hispanic, and 13% Other. During this study, I described the level of hip-hop activity in the surrounding scene as high due once again to a UZN chapter, many local groups and collectives, at least five independently owned hip-hop music stores, and multiple spaces every week for independent hip-hop events. Also important was a locally based Internet radio station at which many participants performed or socialized and a chapter of the HHC on campus, a national organization that attempts to organize and demonstrate hip-hop (HHC, 2009).

Operational construct sampling (Patton, 2001) aimed at studying individ- uals or groups who fit the description of hip-hop collegians guided my pur- poseful sampling strategies. At both institutions, the initial hip-hop collegians I knew were through my participation in the local hip-hop and music com- munities over a period of 2 years prior to the study. Some of these individuals served as participants, and others served as gatekeepers that allowed me to use reputational and chain-based sampling (Patton, 2001) to recruit addi- tional participants. Table 1 gives some essential characteristics of the 8 hip-hop

Table 1. Description of Participants

Name Gender Ethnicity Institution Major Hip-Hop Activities

Nathan Male Caucasian Colonial Asian studies; Japanese minor

Emcee; HHSAN

Dan Tres Male Hispanic Colonial History education

Emcee, B-boy, UZN, event organizer

Barry Male African American

Colonial History UZN, event organizer, poet

Kalfani Male Filipino Pacific State Public health DJ, HHC Raichous Female Filipina Pacific State Biology;

psychology minor

DJ, HHC

Roland Male Filipino Pacific State Engineering DJ, HHC Domingo Male Filipino Pacific State Engineering DJ, HHC

Lino Male Filipino Pacific State Engineering DJ, HHC

Note: HHSAN = Hip-Hop Summit Action Network; UZN = Universal Zulu Nation; HHC = Hip-Hop Congress.

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collegians whose voices appear in this article in different capacities. This sam- ple was selected from a population of at least 50 other students I identi- fied as involved in hip-hop at the universities through my interactions with students. The 8 hip-hop collegians were selected due to their deep involve- ment in hip-hop, which entailed commitment to at least one of the four ele- ments of hip-hop (and conceptualization of such activities as part of hip-hop); consistent membership in a hip-hop-based organization, such as the UZN; or use of hip-hop as an educational or organizational tool. In most cases, students engaged in a combination of these activities. While these criteria are some- what fluid, they created a useful heuristic to explore the central questions of this study.

Data Collection and Analysis The primary means of data collection were in-depth, phenomenological inter- views (Seidman, 1998), according to which each participant was interviewed three times for approximately 90 min. According to this structure, Interview 1 focused on the participants reconstructing the themes of hip-hop and educa- tion in their lives. Interview 2 focused on daily activities of their present lives, and Interview 3 focused on the meanings that participants attributed to the rituals, refrains, metaphors, and daily activities as described in the previous interviews. Interviews took place within 1 week of each other, as recom- mended by Seidman (1998).

Data analysis began by listening to and reading interviews and transcripts and writing reflective and marginal remarks (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to guide the subsequent interviews with each participant. Upon the completion of interviews, constant comparative coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), key- words in context, and classical content analysis were used to identify com- mon refrains, rituals, and metaphors with the aid of qualitative data analysis software. One of the in vivo codes produced by this process was conscious(ness) as a refrain among participants in each setting. The strength of this code was supported by the fact that it contained the second-highest number of refer- ences among participants and generated from the second-highest number of sources across settings in my corpus of data. Through a process of memoing, I interpreted the coded data to arrive at the ways in which participants con- structed education at their respective institutions and the related connections to their experiences in hip-hop.

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Promoting Credibility and Authenticity

The credibility of this study was supported by triangulating interview data with over 100 hours of informal or conversational interviews (Patton, 2001) with participants and other members of the Colonial and Pacific State hip-hop communities. Participant observation in hip-hop and educational spaces (e.g., attending class with some participants, socializing with them on and off cam- pus, attending hip-hop events) also triangulated data collection. Collecting cultural artifacts from campus, such as event flyers, campus newspapers, and university publications, allowed me to understand different aspects of the institutional culture in each setting.

In addition to this credibility, Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) argue that a hallmark of portraiture is authenticity, wherein the final narrative makes sense to the researcher, audience, and participants. The final product should resonate with those who experience the phenomenon. To achieve this stan- dard, before the closure of this study, participants read their extended portraits and (a) offered either feedback that directed revisions or (b) affirmed their portraits as an authentic representation of the hip-hop and educational aspects of their lives.

Findings Believing Hip-Hop Music

For Nathan, an Asian studies major and Japanese language minor, involve- ment with hip-hop entailed leading the campus chapter of the HHSAN, free- style rapping with friends, and listening to and contemplating different kinds of hip-hop music alone and with friends, a consumption practice extending back to high school. For Nathan, in tandem with significant personal experi- ences, hip-hop played a part in adapting a skeptical perspective of the U.S. government and the Iraq War, which in turn influenced to his decision to break a family legacy of attending military institutions and attend Colonial instead. He discussed a nexus of events that included graduating from high school, his father leaving the family to serve in the Iraq War as part of the Reserves, and the role of hip-hop music therein. He clearly summarized the reciprocal relationship between his life events and the new meanings he derived from hip-hop: “I guess hip-hop got more real, you know, because I was in a more real spot.”

Nathan acknowledged that even as a high school student, he recognized some of the more critical themes in the music of progressive hip-hop artists

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(e.g., Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Common) that alluded to structural inequalities in society due to government (in)action. However, as a high school student, Nathan said that he still planned on following the model set by his father and uncle by attending a military institution after graduation. He explained that during his last year of high school, he “put hip-hop aside,” either ignoring or overlooking the critical perspectives of the music in favor of continuing with the family tradition. But when Nathan’s father left the family to serve in the Iraq War, it created a different context that enabled him to derive more sophisticated meanings from the music and apply these meanings to that stage of his life.

But then when Iraq happened and my dad was shipped off again in March of 2003 and I graduated [from high school] . . . I thought about things from a [different] perspective and I just realized—I guess hip-hop was a medium because I was listening to what these people were say- ing, you know, because at first I didn’t really view the government as—well, I just didn’t really look at reality. And I think my dad going away to the war helped me when I was listening to hip hop to really realize another side of hip-hop, [that it was] not just entertainment comin’ outta nowhere.

Nathan’s comment that hip-hop was not “comin’ outta nowhere” refers to his realization that the critical perspectives evident in much of the music—often antigovernment, often related to race and class, and often voiced by young African American males—were reflective of real social experiences.

Nathan described growing up in a lower-middle-class or middle-class home and having African American friends, but as a Caucasian from this economic class background, the “loss” of his father due to the government was the personal experience that enabled him to identify with the critiques in the music and mobilize them as his own rather than just hear them as decon- textualized entertainment.

For me, [hip-hop] lets me see a different side of things. The news isn’t really going to talk about the viewpoint of someone from the street actually in that situation. And it made me feel like yeah, these guys are talking about the fucked-up government because it’s fucked up! You know, opposed to when I was younger, I didn’t get affected by that, or at least I didn’t know about it. Like they were talking about something I didn’t know about. So I think that maybe the fact that my dad went away [and] I was becoming more interested about what was

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going on around me allowed me to maybe understand and relate more to hip-hop.

It is important to highlight here that the critical meanings Nathan overlooked early in high school but believed around graduation were due in equal parts to hip-hop and to the personal “loss” of his father to the government. It was personal events such as these that enabled him to construct and adopt the critical themes of some hip-hop artists. This relationship between hip-hop and personal experience is important to highlight because it underscores that identification with themes in music does not happen in a contextual vacuum. That is, a young adult such as Nathan does not discover some a priori mean- ing in the music but has a set of experiences that enable him to construct the themes in the music as critical, valid, and ultimately, his own.

Applications to Different Disciplines The clearest way that Nathan applied this critical perspective to his education was deciding not to attend a military institution. However, other students with this perspective made more specific connections to their academic majors. Dan Tres, in the major of history education, believed that the overall goal of educating younger generations about history was to give them the tools to question and evaluate the world rather than passively accept the dominant and prevailing ways that previous events have been portrayed. Within the topic of American history, he wanted his future students to question events such as the signing of the Constitution.

[The signers] locked themselves in. They didn’t let nobody in. They didn’t let the regular poor guy in. They didn’t let the Native American in. Now, who were they talking about when they said “We, the people”? That’s what I want them to understand, you know, and go from there.

Dan Tres believed that educators need to give students the tools that will enable them to “critically analyze everything” and “think for them- selves.” In his conceptualization of education, teaching students to question in this manner was not confined to the subject of history or social studies. Instead, the intent was for this critical disposition to apply to other areas, both academic and nonacademic, so that students do not think in compart- mentalized ways.

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Dan Tres also located the genesis of this perspective in hip-hop but not according to a specific rap song or text. He identified that this disposition became part of hip-hop since its formation in the early 1970s among a nexus of critical ideas toward education and other governmental institutions. Sometimes he called it an “anti-establishment” mentality developed in response to the monetary cutbacks made to public education, after-school programs, and recre- ational programs in the 1970s in New York that affected the generation of youth and young adults who composed the hip-hop pioneers. “That [attitude] leaked over to the people who took [hip-hop] from there, particularly people like the Nation of Gods and Earths [and] people like the Universal Zulu Nation. ‘Oh you know, be careful what [teachers] teach you,’” older people in the com- munity would tell him and other youth while growing up in the Bronx. “‘They’re gonna teach you lies.’” Dan Tres assessed that this critical attitude toward education and other domains still exists today and is one trait that dis- tinguishes hip-hop collegians from other groups of students.

For Kalfani, a public health major, involvement in hip-hop at Pacific State entailed a board position on the campus chapter of the HHC, practicing and performing as a DJ and turntablist, and consistently listening to both com- mercial and independent (i.e., underground) hip-hop music. For Kalfani, having a critical perspective meant desiring to learn information about how minority groups are educated about health risks, how health care is made accessible, and how health is related to racial and economic oppression in the United States. Learning about the Tuskegee Experiment, in which African American men were intentionally denied penicillin treatment for syphilis, was particularly startling to him: “I was like, ‘Wow! That happened? Fuck!’ That shit is fucked up, you know.” When articulating these most interesting and exciting aspects of his education, Kalfani summarized, “It’s shocking to learn that kind of stuff in school. Honestly, I come to school to learn stuff I am not supposed to be learning, like facts like that. That’s what makes school fun to me.”

Because of this perspective of institutional education—that by its design or nature, one is “not supposed to be learning” such material at the university— Kalfani advocated for a particular approach to education.

Myself and a couple other people that go to [Pacific State] have an open mind to everything. Knowing what’s up, taking in life as an edu- cation, [and] being able to go into class and take your knowledge and whatever . . . the teacher is teaching you, but don’t take it into [full] effect. Just basically mesh that in with yours. Take what you learned before and take whatever someone else is telling you, and just make

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some sense out of that yourself. In class they’re never gonna teach you about like certain things that go on in the world . . . someone else needs to tell you that.

This approach that Kalfani described is based upon the hip-hop aesthetic prac- tice of sampling and its related epistemology. Sampling refers to the practice whereby a hip-hop music producer uses a digital instrument (i.e., a sampler) to capture musical elements, most often from vinyl records, and use them to assemble a new, complete instrumental track (Schloss, 2004). This practice, however, has an epistemological element concerning how one constructs a reliable perspective by sampling from different sources of information. For Kalfani, since there are perspectives and bodies of knowledge that one will not learn in school, one must sample sources of information outside of school. This is not an isolated, idiosyncratic process but is a feature of how some local hip-hop communities construct knowledge (Schloss, 2009), which other hip-hop collegians have conceptualized and practiced as part of a hip-hop approach to education (Petchauer, 2010). In Kalfani’s case, he alluded to the fact that sampling from the knowledge and experiences of his friends back home in Sacramento (a kind of “street smarts”) was necessary to counter the limitations of higher education.

The Questioning Discourse of Hip-Hop An important detail to the role of hip-hop texts above is that experiences were only loosely attached to specific rap songs and artists. In other words, par- ticipants referenced hip-hop artists, such as Talib Kweli, Ras Kass, Gang Starr, and Mos Def, who are often considered socially conscious or political, but it was not simply an experience with the content of a single, specific song or perspective that was responsible for students developing such views. Rather, it was also the more general questioning discourse of hip-hop as illustrated through competing ideologies and cultural logic.

Raichous, one of the DJs at Pacific State, explained this questioning discourse of hip-hop by drawing from a common distinction in hip-hop: independent (i.e., underground) music compared to commercial (i.e., main- stream) music. Specifically, she cited the ongoing, competing definitions of authenticity and accusations of inauthenticity between the two musical categories.

A lot of [underground] hip-hop questions the mainstream scene. Like a lot of [underground] emcees will call out mainstream emcees and

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say, “You say this and that, but you never came from the ’hood” . . . so from [underground emcees] questioning like people who claim things, it made me kind of question things too.

In this instance, critical questioning is modeled when underground rappers call into question the representations of reality depicted by mainstream rap- pers, whether they concern one’s place of origin or exaggerated claims of wealth and status.

Barry also illustrated the questioning discourse of hip-hop by drawing upon the Talib Kweli (2002) song “Get By.” He referred to the chorus or “hook” in which the background singers suggest the paradox of consuming harmful sub- stances as a means to “get by.”

This morning, I woke up / Feeling brand new and I jumped up Feeling my highs, and my lows / In my soul, and my goals Just to stop smoking, and stop drinking / And I’ve been thinking, I’ve

got my reasons Just to get by, just to get by / Just to get by, just to get by.

“There’s a struggle right there,” Barry identified in reference to the chorus.

It’s kind of like, I want to stop, I know I need to stop, but this is how I get by. That’s a contradiction. I know it’s wrong, but I do it anyway? You gotta sit back and analyze that. How can I know something is wrong, even want to stop, but I can’t or I won’t? It’s like, that’s hip-hop to me.

It is important to highlight that in this instance, Barry’s reflections on the music were not about an explicit message or ideological perspective given by the song. Instead, they were about the form of questioning modeled in the song— which he equated with hip-hop—that can be applied to other topics. As a his- tory major, Barry applied this questioning to issues such as voting, national and local leadership, and other forms of political participation.

Should we participate in politics? Should I vote or die? [laughter] Should I vote? ’Cause it’s like, it’s pushed on you. But then there’s a certain point where it’s like, I don’t relate to [either candidate]. So who am I gonna vote for? The lesser of two evils? But when you say the lesser of two evils, isn’t that saying they’re both evil and I’m voting for evil either way? Now I might not necessarily even feel that way, but that’s the question that I ask. And then if I hadn’t asked that question,

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I wouldn’t have come to understand the importance of [the local level]. Okay, what’s the importance of voting on the local level with people that you can actually go to their office, or you can write them a letter, or call them on the phone, or go to city council meetings? So if I hadn’t asked those questions about national elections, see I would have never learned anything about the local elections.

As Barry described it, a hip-hop song models a process of questioning that can be applied to certain topics and issues. Applying this form of questioning then leads one to a deeper, more meaningful conclusion.

The Limits of Critical Consciousness Although hip-hop as a resource to construct higher education from a critical perspective was a consistent theme across settings, there was a distinct group of 3 Filipino American students at Pacific State who acknowledged these aspects of hip-hop yet did not mobilize them like other students. That is, they advocated for an educational approach open to multiple perspectives like other students, but this perspective was subordinate to their desire to partici- pate in hip-hop as an expressive activity void of any specific social or political message. This perspective was due to their participation in hip-hop strictly as turntablists and a related belief about the “pure” history of hip-hop that focused on music rather than message. The collective voice of these students serves as a requisite dissonant voice (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; see also Miles & Huberman, 1994) that contrasts and deviates from the themes of other participants.

Turntablism within hip-hop is when a DJ conceptualizes a turntable as a musical instrument and uses it along with a mixer instrument to manipulate records according to a variety of patterns and techniques (i.e., scratching or cutting) to produce new sounds and music. Although it is considered part of hip-hop, it resembles some elements of jazz, wherein musicians show mas- tery through how far they can “push the limit” of that instrument (see Pray, 2001). In turntablism, there is generally no person rapping over the music and thus no explicit opportunity to express any social or political ideas. The par- ticipants who did not see hip-hop in this critical manner were strictly turnta- blists who often met together to practice or host turntablist events. Although they participated in broader hip-hop events too and were part of the HHC and the same social circle as other participants at Pacific State, they preferred turntablism and (unlike Kalfani) generally did not play rap records for audi- ences at hip-hop events.

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The turntablists recognized the political potential of hip-hop yet preferred to see it as an apolitical form of expression and creativity. Lino explained,

A lot of people like to try to shed light on certain issues in the com- munity through hip-hop. Like they’ll write a rap on [the Iraq War] or something. And for me, that’s cool, you know, I’ll support that. But it’s like for me, everything boils down to [the fact that] when I do hip-hop, it’s about the culture and the love for the music.

Roland added on to this perspective, clarifying, “Where we come into play, we’re not even about the commercial side or the activism side. For us, we just wanna stick to the original roots of it, which is just about the music, period.”

In their thinking, ideas like “the culture” and “love for the music” refer solely to the music produced by instruments and not the political or critical content of what a person may rap over the music. They also conceptualized hip-hop as a socially and politically neutral tool or engine that could be used for different purposes (e.g., commercial marketing, education, activism). Subscribing to what I call an apolitical narrative of originality in hip-hop and conceptualizing it as a tool allowed them to participate in hip-hop yet not integrate it with any personal political views or their education in ways other participants did. In other words, hip-hop was not a resource for them to con- struct Pacific State as hegemonic because they thought about and practiced hip-hop differently compared to other participants.

Another element related to this perspective of hip-hop among the turntab- lists was that their academic majors allowed for fewer connections to hip-hop and critical perspectives. Unlike Kalfani, Dan Tres, and others who where pur- suing social science majors, the turntablists were engineering and graphic design majors. This means that the core content of their studies pertained less to power and people in society and, consequently, less to the critical themes in some hip-hop songs. Raichous, a biology major on a premed course of study, explained this disconnect. In a class like organic chemistry, she said, “You’re not trying to think differently” because there is an exact mathematical and procedural way to solve problems as well as much rote memorization required to do well in the course. Even though she articulated a critical perspective similar to Kalfani, Dan Tres, and Barry, she saw few connections between it and her major studies.

Finally, this perspective should be seen in context with racial identification and the representations of race in hip-hop writ large. Many of the most promi- nent sociopolitical hip-hop artists are African American (again, Mos Def, Talib Kweli), whereas the Asian and Filipino American contributions to hip-hop have

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been most clearly in the realm of turntablism (e.g., DJ Q-Bert; see Pray, 2001). Consequently, the models available to the turntablists (who, once again, were Filipino American) according to race in hip-hop are typically ones that have not demonstrated hip-hop as an overtly political medium. People often identify with areas where they see themselves reflected; thus it is possible that these students gravitated toward turntablism and an apolitical perspective due to the racial and apolitical models available to them in hip-hop (see de Leon, 2004).

Discussion Student Organizations and (Dis)engagement

One area to which this study contributes is research on student organizations and (sub)cultures on campus. The ways that students in this study participated in hip-hop were due in part to their personal interests, but activities were also situated within hip-hop-based organizations on campus and student membership in these organizations, whether these were the UZN at Colonial or HHC at Pacific State. Although research has shown that students view hip-hop spaces and organizations on campus as important to their engagement on campus (Petchauer, 2010), like other student organizations and subcultures (e.g., Guiffrida, 2003; Magolda & Ebben, 2007), this article raises questions about how students can use such organizations and activities to formulate their perspectives of university education. In other words, from the standpoint of faculty members, is it desirable for students to view university education as containing limited representations of knowledge and reality?

Kalfani illustrated most clearly an instance in which this perspective of university education could be beneficial to learning when he described that information in classes from a counternarrative perspective makes him most interested. Thus if a course is organized in such a way or contains information from critical perspectives, the attitudes described in this study could be benefi- cial to learning. However, the converse may also be true. What if such attitudes cause students to disengage with academic content? The sample of students in this study were all enrolled in classes (i.e., there were no students who had decided to discontinue university education), so this study is limited in provid- ing significant findings regarding whether such attitudes can help create seri- ous academic disengagement.

It is important to point out that these attitudes of distrust are not limited strictly to hip-hop collegians, such as the ones in this study. This finding is supported by research that has identified a general attitude of distrust among more recent generations of college students compared to earlier ones (i.e.,

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1960s). Students have little confidence in U.S. social institutions, big busi- nesses, media conglomerates, and Congress; they believe that professionals, such as doctors and politicians, are motivated more by money than benevo- lence (Levine & Cureton, 1998). This study extends this body of work by illustrating that hip-hop is one contemporary resource from which students of various ethnic backgrounds can derive these perspectives.

Using Hip-Hop as a Resource In terms of research on how students can enjoy and make meaning of hip-hop and hip-hop songs, this article extends the work in three specific ways. First, the study illustrates how personal experiences factor into students’ either adopting or dismissing the critical perspectives identified by Au (2005). This was illustrated most clearly through Nathan, whose personal experiences helped to validate some of the critical themes in music that were otherwise seen as decontextualized entertainment. Nathan and others help illustrate that hip-hop is a significant source of critical consciousness, but it is not the sole source. This is an important recognition because it helps avoid romanticized or overidealized conceptions of hip-hop’s role in the lives of young adults. Second, this research illustrates that it is more than specific lyrics of hip-hop songs that can facilitate a critical perspective. The aesthetic forms of hip-hop, such as sampling and battling, that are in hip-hop practices have the potential to carry with them an ideology or epistemology. The general questioning discourse of hip-hop as articulated by Barry and the epistemological way to approach classes articulated by Kalfani are examples of this. Finally, this research illustrates some of the limits of critical consciousness, wherein not all students who affiliate with and diligently pursue hip-hop identify with the sociopolitical themes in much of the music. This may seem like an obvious point, but it has been overlooked through monolithic descriptions of the hip- hop generation (e.g., Kitwana, 2002) and very general descriptions of stu- dents’ experiences with rap songs (e.g., Iwamoto et al., 2007).

The lack of sociopolitical identification among the turntablists can be due to different factors. First is one’s means of participation in hip-hop. For the turntablists, participating and creating hip-hop through turntablism (opposed to emceeing or another practice) seemed more likely to buttress an apolitical perspective. Second and related is one’s conception of what hip-hop is. If one conceives of hip-hop as a subset of Black culture and an extension of previous sociopolitical Black arts and traditions, then one is more likely to identify with the sociopolitical messages in more progressive hip-hop songs and see them as inherent qualities of hip-hop. However, if one conceives of hip-hop simply

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as a recreational activity, a musical practice, or a tool open to various uses, then one is less likely to identify with sociopolitical content.

These diverse ways that participants took part in hip-hop and made sense of their involvement are important, considering the widespread adoptions and adaptations of hip-hop around the world today. Even from this small sample of hip-hop collegians, it is clear that there are a variety of intentional and sig- nificant ways people can affiliate with and participate in hip-hop. Yet, different ways of conceptualizing hip-hop follow from these different ways of partici- pating in hip-hop. This brings to mind Bynoe’s (2002) critique of so-called global hip-hop:

Anyone can be taught the technical aspects of deejaying, breakdancing, writing graffiti, and rhyming, or can mimic artists’ dress or swagger . . . but the central part of Hip Hop culture is the storytelling and the infor- mation that it imparts about a specific group of people. [Hence,] unless one has at least a working knowledge of Black Americans and their collective history, one cannot understand Hip Hop culture. (p. 77)

This research illustrates how mastery of a hip-hop practice such as turntablism does not necessarily entail the adoption of a critical social sensibility derived from “a working knowledge of Black Americans and their collective history.” Conversely, the research also shows that one does not have to master a hip-hop practice to identify with these social sensibilities. Nathan was a marginal emcee, yet key personal experiences made the social critiques voiced by young African Americans relevant to his own experience.

Implications and Conclusions One area this study implicates is effective pedagogy. Specifically, for students such as the ones in this study, pedagogy could improve by taking cues from the questioning discourse and related epistemology modeled in hip-hop. This has little to do with utilizing hip-hop songs or lyrics in class as in hip-hop- based education (e.g., Hill, 2009), although there is educational value in doing so. Rather, this could take the form of organizing course content according to conflicting ideologies or perspectives on topics, applying general questions to specific local issues, and viewing course texts as positioned and incomplete representations of knowledge themselves, necessitating critique. At a more general level, it may increase interest for students such as the ones in this study to understand that in a way, paradigm wars and competing theoretical perspectives are defining characteristics of specific disciplines and academe

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more broadly. Since such views are not limited to hip-hop collegians alone (Levine & Cureton, 1998), these pedagogical strategies might also benefit other students who derive similar critical perspectives from other personal or cocurricular interests.

This study also implicates how campus personnel view cocurricular inter- ests and organizations. It suggests that personnel should consider how stu- dents mobilize the ideologies or discourses produced by domains such as hip-hop to shape perspectives of education. Indeed, these activities have the potential to connect students to campus and its social fabric, but what do they teach students about formal institutions of learning, professors who facilitate learning, and textbooks that represent knowledge? Questions such as these push researchers to think about how cocurricular pursuits can impli- cate academic learning instead of thinking about these as two separate areas of camps life.

One set of questions that emerges from this study deals with how students who hold such perspectives go about navigating their respective institutions. In other words, how do students go about pursuing their education based upon the belief that what they are reading or being told is at best inaccurate or at worst part of an oppressive system? When Kalfani advised that one must “make some sense out of that yourself” since there are some counter- narrative perspectives that will not be taught in classes, what hermeneutical and epistemological maneuvers are taking place when he or other students follow his advice? How does this skepticism manifest in the daily student activities of encountering information through assigned readings and class- room lectures? As mentioned in the previous section, this study could illus- trate only what animated and interested participants based upon their critical mind-sets. Questions about the more detailed implications of these perspec- tives as well as how they can be gained through experiences with other cul- tural artifacts, such as reggae and blues, guide future research along this line of inquiry.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

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Bio

Emery Petchauer is an assistant professor of education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His current research includes the intersections of hip-hop, educational practices, student development, and culturally responsive pedagogies; teacher prepa- ration, particularly at historically Black institutions; and the policies and preparation surrounding teacher certification exams.