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• Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy
  
  Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy challenges traditional paradigms, while
  providing a framework to challenge systems that reproduce social
  inequality. Their belief that debate is a meritocratic educational
  system derives from a position of privledge.
  Akorn 09 (A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip
  Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009)
  In this article I combine hip hop studies with critical pedagogy to
  introduce a new framework called CHHP. CHHP differs from hip hop
  pedagogy because it simultaneously (1) foregrounds race and racism and
  their intersectionality with other forms of oppression; (2) challenges
  traditional paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the
  experiences of students of color; (3) centralizes experiential
  knowledge of students of color; (4) emphasizes the commitment to
  social justice; and finally, (5) encourages a transdisciplinary
  approach (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Embedded in this
  framework is a pedagogical approach that uses Freire’s problem-posing
  method and case study research as tools for helping student teachers
  to identity and name the societal and systemic problems students of
  color face, analyze the causes of the problem, and find solutions
  (Smith-Maddox & Solorzano, 2002, p. 80). This framework is important
  precisely because it challenges the role that schools play in
  reproducing social inequality. Schools use “hidden” and “official”
  curricula that promote the hegemony of the dominant class (Apple,
  1990), and embrace pedagogies that devalue the voices and backgrounds
  of urban and suburban students of color (Friere, 1970; McLaren, 2002).
  School cultures and practices encourage students to believe that a
  meritocratic educational system exists, that students are responsible
  for their own failure (Akorn, 2008a, MacLeod, 1987), and that issues
  of racial inequality, hip hop, and social justice are not worthy of
  study inside or outside schools.
  CHHP challenges these assumptions by suggesting that transformative
  education for the poor and disempowered begins with the creation of
  pedagogic spaces where marginalized youth are enabled to gain a
  consciousness of how their own experiences have been shaped by larger
  social institutions. Undoubtedly, it is difficult, however not
  impossible, to change the tacit beliefs, understandings, and world
  views that institutions of “higher learning” often hold toward youth
  of color and low-income youth. However, I contend that by implementing
  CHHP it is possible to increase the space in the curriculum for
  students to unlearn their stereotypical knowledge of race, class,
  gender, sexual orientation, and other axes of social difference while
  analyzing, problem solving, and theorizing what it means to be part of
  a diverse population (Smith-Maddox & Solorzano, 2002)
  
  Hip Hop as a liberatory practice functions within a historical and
  cultural manner that challenges the white education system
  Akorn 09 (A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip
  Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009)
  In trying to make sense of the relationship between hip hop and
  critical pedagogy, I argue that the use of hip hop as a liberatory
  practice is rooted in the long history of the Black freedom struggle
  and the quest for self-determination for oppressed communities around
  the world. As early as the late 1970’s, hip hop artists, such as
  KRS-One, also known as “The Teacher,” criticized the educational
  system, its power, its practices, and its pedagogy. In particular,
  “The Teacher” was concerned about the role of an embedded
  Eurocentricity in the U.S. public school curricula and its impact on
  Black children and youth. In “You Must Learn” (KRS-One, 1989) “The
  Teacher” flows: “It seems to me in a school that’s ebony, African
  history should be pumped up steadily, but it’s not and this has got to
  stop.” In another rhyme that sounds like it is straight out of a Black
  History Class, KRS-One (1989) further elucidates the importance of our
  “real” history:
  No one told you about Benjamin Banneker, a brilliant Black man (who
  created an) almanac... Granville Woods made the walkie talkie, Louis
  Latimer improved on Edison, Charles Drew did a lot for medicine,
  Garret Morgan made the traffic light, Harriet Tubman freed the slaves
  at night.
  By using Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) as a form of literacy for
  freedom, KRS-One paved the way for a younger generation of critical
  hip hop pedagogies. For example, New York Based Hip-Hopers, dead prez,
  draw on Malcolm X, Carter G. Woodson, and other Black freedom fighters
  in “they schools,” while offering a scathing critique of the ways in
  which Black folks remain mentally incarcerated if and when we rely on
  a Eurocentric education system rather than developing curriculum that
  reflects our own culture, history, socioeconomic, and spiritual
  realities (Alridge, 2005). According to dead prez (2000):
  They schools can’t teach us shit. My people need freedom, we trying to
  get all we can get… Tellin’ me white mans lies straight bullshit. They
  schools ain’t teaching us what we need to survive, they schools don’t
  educate, they teach people lies
  Through the use of “imagining”—a term Alridge (2005) describes as “the
  process by which Hip Hoppers reproduce or evoke images, events, people
  and symbols for the purpose of placing past ideas into closer
  proximity to the present” (p.229)—they “they schools” (dead prez,
  2000) video is able to illuminate both symbolic and active forms of
  racism by equating the image of the noose with the ways in which the
  U.S. educational system means a slow death for too many students of
  color (Tatum, 1997)
  
  
  Current structures of education lead us to being passive receptacles
  ready to replicate the current oppressive educational system
  
  Akorn 09 (A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip
  Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009)
  The elements that form the basic core of CHHP draw on YPAR, Freirian
  pedagogy, and critical race theory to challenge racism and other
  intersections of social difference in order to prepare young people to
  be prospective teachers inside and outside of urban and suburban
  schools. Freire’s work, in particular, provides us with the
  foundations for a theory of democratic schooling that is linked to
  serving the most marginalized groups in our society. His critical
  praxis starts from the premise that all education is political, and
  thus schools are never neutral institutions (Smith-Maddox & Solozano,
  2002). Freire (1970) firmly believed that one of the ways that schools
  maintain and reproduce the existing social order is by using the
  “banking method of education” (p.71). This approach often leads to:
  (1) students being viewed as passive receptacles waiting for knowledge
  to be deposited from the teacher, (2) mono-directional pedagogical
  formats whereby students do not feel their thoughts and ideas are
  important enough to warrant a two-way dialogue with teachers;
  (3)”cradle classrooms,” in which students are dependent on teachers
  for the acquisition of knowledge; and (4) students viewing schools as
  key mechanisms in the reproduction of inequality rather than places
  where education is seen as a practice of freedom, a place to build
  critical consciousness, and social mobility (Ginwright &Cammarota,
  2002)
  
  
  Hip Hop helps fight racism by invading the homes of the white youth
  Reid 09 (Shaheem, MTV News ‘Hip-Hop Has Done More Than Any Politician
  To Improve Race Relations.’ March 20, 2009)
  Jay-Z believes the influence that he and his peers have had on society
  goes beyond simply entertaining and showing people fresh new dances,
  the fliest clothes or high-priced luxury items.
  In the new issue of Best Life magazine, the Brooklyn-born mogul speaks
  about the powerful effect hip-hop has had on the country.
  "[Hip-hop] has changed America immensely," He is quoted in the
  magazine as saying. "Hip-hop has done more than any leader,
  politician, or anyone to improve race relations."
  "Racism is taught in the home ... and it's very hard to teach racism
  to a teenager who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg," Jay continued. "It's
  hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like
  that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?' "
  
  
  Hip Hop is political, MLK was Hip Hop
  Cooper 08 (Barry Michael, Writer, Journalist, and filmmaker,
  Huffington Post, “When Politics Became The New Hip Hop,” October 15,
  2008)
  The definition of Hip Hop has always been a political one: at the
  heart of democracy lies the aorta of free speech. Be it George Orwell,
  V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx, or Donald Oliver Soper shooting the gift (of
  gab) in London at Speaker's Corner of Hyde Park, or KRS-One and Chuck
  D voicing their opposition to Reaganomics and a Dickensian New York in
  the late '80s, or Jay-Z, Puff, and Kanye describing theirBrave Rich
  World from Gulfstream-V windows 40,000 feet above Monaco in rhythmic
  iambic pentameter, Hip Hop is the vox of the common man speaking to
  power.
  FDR was Hip Hop: "There is nothing to fear but fear itself."
  MLK was Hip Hop: "I have a dream that my four little children will one
  day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of
  their skin but by the content of their character."
  JFK was Hip Hop: "And so my fellow Americans: ask not what your
  country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
  
  A2: Hip Hop Bad
  
  They look at Hip Hop through a lens of homogeneity. Not all hip hop is
  bad, it can be revolutionary
  Akorn 09 (A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip
  Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009)
  Even though for generations Black people have successfully undertaken
  the task of educating our own children and youth, teachers in the late
  twentieth and early twenty-first century have been slow to critically
  engage with hip hop as a viable discursive space full of liberatory
  potential. I am not suggesting that all forms of hip hop are
  emancipatory, revolutionary, or even resistive—many forms are not—and
  some are quite the opposite. However, I am suggesting that given the
  long history of socio-political conscious hip hop as a tool for
  illuminating problems of poverty, police brutality, patriarchy,
  misogyny, incarceration, racial discrimination, as well as love, hope
  joy—academic institution’s under-utilization of hip hop’s liberatory
  potential in the classroom is surprising.