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"If This Is Your First Time Hearing This": Listening in on The College Dropout in the (Privileged) College Classroom
Posted on December 14, 2012 by tessalaprofessa
[Note: This is the 20-page writing sample I submitted with my PhD application this fall. On that document, I invited readers to view it here, in its native online format, so I can fill it with the hyperlinks and video clips it deserves. Feel free to leave comments below – I hope to expand it in the future, and I'll be glad to hear what you think. -TB]
1. Intro: Writing #HipHop
Hiphop is practice and forms. It's those fine arts: graffiti, breakdance, DJing, rap, dropping science—that is, philosophy. Hiphop is also community style: swagger, dress, language, belief.
American rap music is four-beat poetry composed in vernacular English and delivered over looped and remixed jazz, funk, and soul. These layered fruits of the DJ and the emcee constitute a music, a literature, and a discourse.
#HIPHOP is a hashtag. Like so much in hiphop, #hiphop is a creative deployment of a (Twitter) technology not designed for but coopted by youth voices of color. #Hiphop is an orthographic unity movement, a search function that describes a community. #Hiphop is new media organizing, because it organizes information. #HIPHOP is why I spell it hiphop.
Hiphop is a teacher. Hiphop songs and style unfurl alternative lessons for inquisitive eyes and ears, articulating counter-hegemonic norms and ways of being. Hiphop's pedagogies are sung, spoken, remixed, reused, danced, acted, and scribbled on walls; its lessons are interdisciplinary, practical, organic, grassroots. Hiphop drops science, but also history, statistics, emotional skills. The cipher is a classroom: participatory, demonstrative, collaborative. The cipher thrives on argument, persuasion, and style.
Hiphop is created, extended, and disseminated—that is, written—across American media every day. As the subject for a college writing course, hiphop exploits students' extracurricular interests by tapping into their pop culture universe. But relevance is just the hook. Writing hiphop demands close reading, listening, and watching; management of multiple registers; and mastery of form, style, and proof. Hiphop pedagogy is a teaching practice that uses hiphop texts to engage and educate, but hiphop has its own lessons to share. Hiphop's pedagogies are critical, democratic, and liberatory for all people: dropouts and valedictorians, students and teachers. On his debut album The College Dropout, Kanye West remixes education to articulate critical lessons with relevance for all students.
2. Something So Cold
Yes, I teach a Kanye class. At the University of Michigan I teach a freshman writing course called "College Writing on The College Dropout," which uses West's 2004 debut album and an interdisciplinary set of thematically related texts as the basis for college-level writing and inquiry. On the second day of class, names shared and practiced, we review the rhetorical triangle. Then we listen to the album's first song, entitled "We Don't Care."
In our discussion, the rhetorical triangle quickly proves prescient. West speaks of "we" and "you," "us" and "they." He begins, "If this is your first time hearing this, you are about to experience something so cold." If we don't know the stories he tells, he wants us to listen—and bring a coat. "The second verse is for my dogs working nine to five who still hustle." But if we already know the story Kanye tells, well, this track's for us, too. Weeks later, some students will question this track's rhetorical stance in their first paper, a close reading. They'll discover that West has two audiences: "us," lower income African-Americans adopting a variety of extra-legal measures to "get by," and "you," the folks in charge of the failing schools and the overcrowded buses. My students find that West uses the first-person plural to express solidarity with his urban community of hustlers, and the first person possessive—"my dawgs," "my niggas," "my
people"—to express affection for them, just as he uses "you" to address a nebulous oppressor.
Later in the semester, my students read the first chapter of Tricia Rose's seminal rap study Black Noise. Many of them white and Asian-American, students notice Rose's treatment of white listeners; she insists rap is a fundamentally "black idiom that prioritizes black culture" (4). Yet Rose acknowledges that "black culture in the United States has always had elements that have been at least bifocal—speaking to both a black audience and a larger predominantly white context. Rap music shares this history of interaction" (5). In this moment, Rose lays ground on which to examine rap as speaking not only to the African-American community but to other Americans as well. She recognizes rap's attention as bifurcated between "a black audience and a…white context." This dual focus could be used to explain West's explicit concern both for sympathetic black listeners as well as uninformed suburbanites, out of touch with the inner city yet somehow still here, now, listening.
Once this duality is introduced, however, Rose moves quickly to dismiss white participation in hiphop. She writes:
Like generations of white teenagers before them, white teenage rap fans are listening in on black culture, fascinated by its differences, drawn in by mainstream socia constructions of black culture as a forbidden narrative, as a symbol of rebellion…. Young white listeners' genuine pleasure and commitment to black music are necessarily affected by dominant racial discourses regarding African Americans, the politics of racial segregation, and cultural difference in the United States. Given the racially discriminatory context within which cultural syncretism takes place, some rappers have equated white participation with a process of dilution and subsequent theft of black culture. Although the terms dilution and theft do not capture the complexity of cultural incorporation and syncretism, this interpretation has more than a grain of truth in it. (5)
Rose makes clear she doesn't believe rap is for "white teenage rap fans." She describes them as "listening in," "fascinated" by the "forbidden," eavesdropping on a conversation that is not theirs. Lost is the notion from only a paragraph before that a "bifocal" rapper could take advantage of a diverse audience, codeswitching between adressing a peer group and a body of outsiders whose directly addressed "you" is more than a rhetorical straw man. Instead, Rose appeals to "cultural difference" to undercut the possibility of "young white listeners' genuine pleasure and commitment." Citing "some rappers," Rose invokes white "dilution and theft" without taking responsibility for this accusation, only mentioning that it contains "a grain of truth." Despite her fleeting awareness that rap also speaks to those white folks just "listening in," Rose's priority in her introduction is to celebrate and augment rap's blackness at the expense of hiphop culture's openness to diversity.
In their efforts to understand themselves as rap fans, my students find an unlikely ally in black liberation theologian James Cone. Many of my students are alienated at first by Cone's pro-black rhetoric and his assault on the logic of white supremacy. In his The Spirituals and the Blues: A Theological Interpretation, Cone writes that "black music must be lived before it can be understood" (3). At first this stress on experience seems alienating, as though Cone means to suggest that only African-Americans can appreciate black music. Cone writes that "an authentic interpretation of black music [demands] having shared and participated in the experience that created it" (3). He calls for our emotions and sympathies, and even or our participation, if we are to interpret his community's music. To understand the power of the slave spirituals, Cone writes, "'academic tools are not enough":
The interpreter must feel the Spirit; that is, one must feel one's way into the power of black music, responding both to its rhythm and to the faith in experience it affirms. This song invites the believer to move close to the very sources of black existence, and to experience the black community's power and the will to survive. (4)
For Cone, good analysis is affective, and true understanding depends not on "academic[s]" but on empathy. He considers the spiritual refrain, "Every time I feel the spirit/ Moving in my heart I will pray" (4). For Cone, there is no understanding of those lines for the interepreter who cannot "feel the spirit moving" for herself.
Kanye West's debut album opens with an invitation to empathy that resonates closely with the problems posed by Cone. West raps, "If this is your first time hearing this, you are about to experience something so cold" ("We Don't Care"). In West's estimation, powerful storytelling can close the gap between ignorance and understanding. The affect, like the rhyme, is imperfect, but it'll do: "hearing this" constitutes "experience," and West's story is "so cold," he expects the audience to shiver. Kanye's opening track paints a portrait of economic blight and institutional racism, and, like Cone's spiritual, invites outsiders "close to the very sources of [contemporary] black existence, and to experience the black community's…will to survive." That is why Kanye has children sing of "drug dealing just to get by" ("We Don't Care"). He invites us to experience the irony and absurdity of these children's daily choices. Reading Cone together and listening to Kanye's tracks in class, my students and I are able to use the vividness of West's stories as affective entry points. If we can empathize, we may begin to understand.
3. Interlude: Whitey on the Web
Last January, I sat down at my computer one morning to discover that writer dream hampton had begun tweeting about Zora Neale Hurston and all of Black Twitter was abuzz. Around 11:45, hampton tweeted a string of three comments that compared Hurston's "radical…privileging of 'black talk'" [this tweet now deleted] to the increasing canonization of hiphop texts in writing.
One of my conflicts with writing Decoded was contributing to this growing idea that hip hop can be canonized in books, that books abt it + (hampton)
may come to be more important that [sic] rap itself. It's a continuing of privileging culture w/written texts over those whose impt texts are oral (hampton)
Zora occupied language. She occupied the front porchers [sic] of storytellers. She was a listener. She privileged our oral traditions. (hampton)
I responded to these organic, intellectual tweets with fear and exhilaration. Exhilaration to watch organic scholarship and discourse be created in real time in a digital medium—but fear, too, at my own position as a white scholar instructing largely nonblack student populations to write and read hiphop. Writing about hampton's tweets on my blog, Hiphopocracy (from which this article is adapted), I expressed anxiety that I was one of Rose's purveyors of "dilution and theft":
…am I just making excuses for a white academic's co-opt of hiphop? Am I just forging space for whiteys like me to be able to participate via writing in a discourse which on a purely oral level is mostly closed to me? And what does it mean for us linguistic outsiders that Zora Neale Hurston wrote black dialect in the first place? Isn't her foray into the written an invitation for us other writers to write back? Or isn't it? (Brown)
Whining aside, hampton's and my anxieties are valid—mine that I am an interloper, and hers that hiphop's living arts are not just being "canonized" but entombed. I don't share hampton's fear that "books abt it" will or could ever "be more important [than] rap itself," but she is right that Jay-Z's self-exegesis Decoded (which hampton co-wrote) makes space for distant writers like me to reply here, on the page, in writing. So too with Hurston's language. While Hurston "privileged [African-American] oral traditions," she also wrote them down. In the context of hampton's tweets, Hurston's acts of transcription acquire a Pyrrhic quality: by translating oral speech for the page, Hurston's talent propelled her black female voice into the American canon, even as this affirmed the western valuation of writing over speech.
My white students arrive for class the first day expecting a teacher of color who can authenticate their love for rap, only to find a white woman balancing on the same rickety racial pontoon as they. I have legitimacy only affirm my students' "genuine pleasure and commitment." Hiphop spits America's open secrets, and dialoguing with rap in the classroom gives students of all races an opportunity and a language in which to discribe the racialized universe that all of our America. I hope that by closing the cognitive gap between the hiphop music we listen to and the voices and experiences that created it, we learn to practice empathy.
4. Hiphop's (Critical) Pedagogies
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, educator Paolo Freire writes of abandoning a "banking system" of education, where the teacher deposits her knowledge into her students, in favor of a decolonized classroom where students learn to ask questions of their own. Writing from 1960s Brazil, Freire's suggestions are designed to awaken dehumanized peasants in the context of a deeply unequal society, a process he promises will open the minds of the powerful as well. As Freire writes, "oppression is domesticating" (51). If such a power divide exists in contemporary America, my classroom falls on the powerful side. Of course, this awareness begs for diversity and for community service. But it also raises the immediate question of who in our classroom will question our privilege. While my students populations are often diverse across ethnic, religious, and class lines, I would suggest that no student who makes it to the University of Michigan is truly marginal or abides by strongly counterhegemonic norms. Though one could be marginalized at the university, the elite university is itself at the center of power. Rose argues that "rap music… prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America" (2), and so one way for us to welcome marginalized voices into our classroom is to do that very thing Rose bemoans and "[listen] in" on rap. My students bring a lot of cultural baggage into the classroom. But by patiently listening to thoughtful rap songs (a subset, that is, of all rap songs), close reading them on their own terms and allowing our presuppositions to be challenged, we "become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow" (Freire 80).
Freire prescribes teaching with "themes" culled from students' own lives (96). And despite my students' successes, the critical questions asked of American educational norms on The College Dropout resonate deeply. Questions like: Why am I in college? Is education as important as networking? Why can't I just pursue my passion? To engage students critically, my classroom uses "hiphop pedagogy"—that is, the utilization of hiphop culture in the classroom, often toward activist, critical, or motivational ends. But rap isn't just an empty chair to dialogue with—its music and lyrics speak back. A study of West's album The College Dropout reveals a critical pedagogy of its own. As the album's producer and chief lyricist, Kanye West moves past cricicism into creation. He uses the Afrodiasporic cultural practices of sampling, repetition, and remix to propose an organic black education based in the study and privileging of African-American cultural texts.
On the surface, West's album presents two contrasting visions of education. The first is the mainstream college setting West rejects throughout the album: "My freshman year I was going through hell, a problem/still I built up the nerve to drop my ass up outta college" ("Get Em High"). The second is the education in the streets, what West in a later album terms the "ghetto university": "Sittin in the hood like community colleges/This dope money here is lil' Tre's scholarship" ("We Don't Care"). This dualistic portrait of education largely corresponds to sociologist Elijah Anderson's description of the "decent" and "street" families who populate his study of urban Philadelphia, Code of the Street. In Anderson's work, attitudes toward education are a central axis on which a person's value orientation of decent or street can be plotted: decent folk value education, while street folk reject it. In my course, we use Anderson's study to contextualize many of the practices and norms West describes. On an album titled The College Dropout, West's central thematic concern is to negotiate these opposing attitudes about school.
West resolves the constricting school-vs-street dyad by creatively advocating for a third way, one which rejects both the conformity of college and the defeatism of street life. In his lyrics, Kanye expresses an urge to abandon college for his own version of success. In "Get Em High," quoted above, he continues on: "My teacher said I'm a loser, I told her why don't you kill me/I give a fuck if you fail me, I'm gonna follow/my heart…to the plaques or the stacks." Volleying an alliterative line of F (you)'s toward his teacher, West suggests that rejecting the authority of the school is only the first in a series of aggressive moves toward self-realization. Like many rappers, West reserves the second person for enemies and haters. On other tracks "you" is an unnamed white oppressor class, and above we see it leveraged against his teaacher. But in "School Spirit," West expands his attack to all those who uncritically accept hegemonic norms. "Told 'em I finished school, and I started my own business./ They say 'Oh you graduated?' No, I decided I was finished./ Chasin' y'all dreams and what you got planned/Now I spit it so hot, you got tanned." Here West reveals that the oppressor is not a people but an ideal: the homogenizing forces of "y'all dreams and what you got planned." He fights back with his fiery lyrics, but the site of his ultimate education is not articulated in language. It's West's music which details his education and in turn educates us.
Rose argues that hiphop's practice of sampling is a digital manifestation of longstanding black cultural practices that privilege the curation and remix of available sounds into a new creation that is continuous with the old. She writes, "Rap production resonates with black cultural priorities in the age of digital reproduction" (75). Positioning the birth of hiphop as an artistic recovery in the face of social and political traumas on the 1970s and '80s urban landscape, Rose sees rap's attention to "flow, layering and ruptures in line" (Jafa qtd 38) as Afrodiasporic prioritization of repetition and polyrhythmy reasserted in the face of postindustrial collapse. Black culture's continuity, adaptibility, and polyvocal capabilities, along with a new generation's awareness of and sensitivity to social rupture, are "inscribed in hiphop style" (21). Hiphop aesthetics are an artistic response to social devastation. But hiphop also affirms the continuity of Black cultural life. To Rose, "sampling in rap is a process of cultural literacy and intertextual reference" (89). Sampling "is about paying homage…It is also a means of archival research, a process of musical and cultural archaeology" (79). Recycling older musics in contemporary contexts "affirms black musical history and locates these 'past' sounds in the 'present'" (89). In Rose's attention to literacy, research, and history we see the basis for a pedagogy based on teaching and learning black culture through sampling.
Rose quotes Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy who "offer[s his] lack of training as an explanation for the innovative nature of [his] approach" (81). Shocklee says, "In dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music" (qtd in Rose 81-82). And yet, Shocklee suggests, black producers "have a better sense of music, a better concept of music, of where it's going, of what it can do" (qtd in Rose 81). Refusing to take the producer at his word, Rose rejects Shocklee's appeals to his own ignorance. Instead, Rose argues, Shocklee
…is really referring to the differences between formal Western and black musical priorities as they are worked out, often contentiously, in the creative realm…Shocklee's innocence is his lack of Western formal training….He, too, employs "knowledge" and musical strategies, not innocent (value-free) ones, but strategies commonly found in black musical traditions that often involve different cultural priorities. When he claims that to understand or deal with rap music you must be innocent, he suggests that a commitment to formal Western musical priorities must be abandoned…(82)
If we extend Rose's recategorization of Shocklee's "innocence" as a rejection of "Western musical priorities," we discover a similar false ignorance in the music of The College Dropout. By narrating his experience as a "college dropout" over a remixed soundtrack of Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and Luther Vandross, Kanye articulates a new cultural canon in the place of the western canon he abandoned when he left school.
On "School Spirit," Kanye's lyrics criticize mainstream education even as his music curates a new canon. The opening chords of Aretha Franklin's original "Spirit in the Dark" have barely sounded when West calls out, "School Spirit, motherfuckers!" over the sped-up sample. I hear West's triumphalism as delight at the success of his signifying, brazen as it is played against the work of a revered master like Aretha. In Franklin's original, she sings of "getting the spirit in the dark." She asks, "Tell me sister, how do you feel? …Do you feel like dancin'? Then get up and let's start dancin'." The song encourages its listeners to move to the Spirit within them, to pay no heed to what outsiders may think. Franklin instructs us to "put your hands on your hips, and cover your eyes….with the spirit in the dark."
While Franklin preaches personal freedom, West's lyrics portray college students as zombies in a conformist dance of Greek life. "Alpha, step. Omega, step," he raps. "Kappa, step. Sigma, step." In a move that calls on Rose's frameworks of rupture and continuity, West doctors Franklin's vocals so that she sings under him of "People moving/in the dark." It's clear that for West, the "dark" is college and these blind, grasping figures are college students. The end of Franklin's "Spirit in the Dark" dissolves into a choral frenzy over speeding piano and banging tambourine, and West manages to parody her original even as he honors it. Ending "School Spirit" with mock Black Fraternity rituals, West parodies Franklin's composition: "I feel a woo comin' on, cuz, I feel a woo comin on, cuz. Woo! There it was." West's version relocates Franklin's religious frenzy into a fraternity setting, revealing the "spirit" in "school spirit" to be misplaced and absurd. By juxtaposing his own criticism against Franklin's religiosity, West's music expresses the complex revelation that spirit is personal, not institutional.
In "Jesus Walks," Kanye again draws on church and secular influences to triangulate an an inner-city theodicy. The basis of the"Jesus Walks'" beat is a looped sample of Arc Choir singing "Walk With Me"; the choir provides "Jesus Walks" with its familiar theology: "Jesus walk with me, with me, with me," and grants the track its pleading, earnest tone. The song's other lyrical sample is a very short vocal clip of Curtis Mayfield crying out, "Niggas!" With one word, West directs us in his music—and, if we are reading closely, his album credits—to Mayfield's "(Don't Worry) If there's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go, " from which the single shouted slur is lifted. Rose is helpful here when she characterizes sampling choices as a "paying homage" and a "(re)locating these 'past' sounds in the 'present.'" West is relocating Mayfield's "niggas" to present day Chicago, "the valley of the Chi where death is" ("Jesus Walks"). "Niggas" is like a hyperlink that guides us back to Mayfield's song, where we discover that "Jesus Walks" contains broad thematic parallels to "(Don't Worry)." While Mayfield also bemoans urban violence and ignorance, he is less optimistic than West regarding the possibility of salvation. By using sampling to point listeners to Mayfield and to gospel music, West affirms the continuity of African American experience and roots his production of knowledge in the wisdom of an honored predecessor and the faith of a religious community.
By remixing Black cultural sounds, icons, and tropes, West situates himself within the canon of his community and his choice. In his sampling, West proves himself a master signifier, highlighting irony and absurdity with single words while repackaging his musical heroes for a new generation of listeners. By creating content he moves from a student of black culture to a teacher. West schools us via an alternative model of education based in the study and citation of African-American cultural texts.
6. The N-Word
The comedian Louis C.K., in his relentless interrogation of white privilege, does a bit on language that offends him.
The thing that offends me the most is every time I hear the n-word. Not "nigger," by the way, I mean [he makes broad air quotes] "the n-word." Literally. Whenever a white lady on CNN with nice hair says "the n-word." That's just white people getting away with saying "nigger." That's all that is….When you say "the n-word," you put the word "nigger" in the listener's head. That's what saying a word is….You're making me say it, in my head! Why don't you fucking say it, and take responsibility for the shitty words you want to say. (C.K.)
In C.K.'s estimation, "n-word" is an irresponsible euphemism, a transparent stand-in that falsely absolves the speaker of dealing with grave and explosive language. His reference to an imaginary anchor on cable news network CNN highlights not just the ubiquity of this euphemism but also the prominence, in outline, of the slur which has been visibly removed from our view.
The answer to C.K.'s rhetorical question, "why don't you fucking say it?" is important, because the refusal to pronounce nigger aloud has become a cultural phenomenon of its own, most notably after 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was discovered to have owned a hunting lodge called "Niggerhead." Media reports, featuring seasoned news anchors in panic as they discussed Perry's racist ranch, "N-word-head" (e.g., see Stewart), seemed like comedy sketches C.K. wrote to make his point. "The n-word" is a three-syllable, two-word hyphenate that stands in for one word with two syllables whose power is affirmed when it is ignored. Like "f-word," "n-word" is juvenile and betrays its sayer's fear of transgression. "N-word" marks a site where white anxiety over one's own racism manifests as self-censorship.
Writing in GRANTLAND, Alex Pappademas describes pop singer Katy Perry covering the Kanye West and Jay-Z collaboration track "Niggas in Paris" by dubbing the title phrase "Ninjas in Paris." Describing Perry's "tee-hee transgression," Pappademas is inclined to applaud
a girl refusing to let this song's imaginary world of swinging-dick privilege be off-limits to her. But that's all that's happening here; [Perry] puts the word on like a piece of borrowed jewelry and parades in front of the mirror. Her flimsy white-girl voice doesn't reveal anything about the song's construction or its sentiments that Kanye and Jay's voices were covering up… (Pappademas)
Watching the video proves Pappademas right: despite Perry's Yankees cap and the deep lunges from which she belts Jay and Ye's lines, Perry's usual charisma and stage presence are absent. Her shout-out to her ninjas belies a larger unwillingness to take the song seriously, to rap it with her head up, to allow the transgressiveness of her own act fill up her chest and shoulders so that instead of suggesting (as Pappademas thinks her cover does) that her failed celebrity marriage "was as bad as being married to the legacy of centuries of racism," Perry's cover would have embraced genuine empathy for what it means to be noveau-riche and still discriminated against in the cultural capitol of the western world.
On the same tip, Rembert Browne describes a Jay-Z concert in Austin.
And then it happened. [Jay-Z began his song] "Jigga My N—-." … I did a quick scan of the room…Good lord, there were a lot of white people in here.… Once the chorus kicked in, this crowd had about six seconds to decide which direction they were going with the lyrics:
Crowd: Jigga
Jay: What's my motherfuckin name?
Jay: And who I'm rolling with, huh?
It is at this point that Jay-Z almost complicates the situation by gesturing to the crowd that he wants to hear us say "it." As a former sociology major, what happens in that room when the next lyric is "my n—-" is what I dream about… Some would never say it because they were raised not to and wouldn't dream of changing simply because it's a lyric, some will go from screaming the previous lyrics to mumbling "n—-" really softly, others will substitute it for another word like "jigga" or "friend" or "associate," and others will scream it at the top of their lungs because, quite frankly, it's a free country. (Browne)
First off, let's note the orthographic confusion that remains after "n-word" has been abandoned. Browne (or his editor) chooses hyphens to partially obscure the offending word, "n—–," though "motherfuckin" is spelled in full. Elsewhere in the same publication, Pappademas writes of Katy Perry's encounters with a heavily-asterisked "N**** in Paris." On the album materials for Watch the Throne, the song title appears as "Ni**s in Paris." The g's are not silent—there are no g's at all (too gangsta?); instead, asterisks are pronounced as g's, in which case "Niggas in Paris" may actually be a misspelling of the correct song title.
This confusion in spelling is sonically paralleled by the Jay-Z fans in Austin: asterisks or dashes, "jigga" or "friend"? Or just silence? While my students are not welcome to casually swear or slur in class, our classroom is a censoring-free space. Like the rap fans Browne describes, my students develop a variety of strategies for coping with this newfound freedom. When they want to quote an obscenity-laced line aloud, some students will side-step or make a little beep noise or substitute "guys" or "mmhmm" or "F." In his You Know My Steez, sociolinguist H. Samy Alim examines hiphop language usage in high school students. He notices with alarm the "ways in which educators attempt to silence BL [Black Language] in White public space by inculcating speakers of heterogeneous language varieties into…White ways of speaking" (xxiii). In small ways, respecting rap as literature in the classroom asks a "white public space" to respect otherized ways of speaking, and (more importantly) to reckon seriously with what those others have to say. Drawing again on Rose, we could read Jay-Z's procative placements of "nigga" as bifocal: a single word doubling as a shout-out to African Americans (or whomever else is down) and also a pointed challenge to outsiders. American media's wilful silence, powerful men and women almost literally putting their fingers in their ears to chant "n-n-n-n-n-n-n-word," is an evasion that sends confusing mixed messages to young people who want to talk about race in a relevant way. I'll never force a student to swear. But I hope that confronting sharp language instead of ignoring it at least invites students to consider what a centuries-old racial slur is doing at the center of an ongoing national linguistic debate.
Facing Kanye's real language in class is preparation for writing about it at home; "nigga" is sometimes central to the meaning of a song. One early writing assignment asks students to compare two versions of Kanye's track "All Falls Down." Students always do a remarkable job cataloguing miniscule differences between the two versions, and the themes of "materialism and insecurity" appear frequently, but it's the deeper message of the song which proves elusive: that after centuries of white supremacy, black consumerism is a failed attempt at self-recovery.
It seems we livin' the American dream,
But the people highest up got the lowest self esteem
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings.
We shine because they hate us, floss 'cause they degrade us–
We tryna buy back our forty acres–
And for that paper, look how low we a'stoop:
Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga, in a [coupe/coop]. (West "All Falls Down")
My shrewd student readers notice this excerpt's painful final pun, as West suggests that not even a Mercedes can rescue his fellow African-American men from an echoing history of judgment and containment. But the closest readers begin to notice that the pun on "coop/coupe" actually creates a pun on "nigga." The Mercedes-Benz "coupe" implies the slur's contemporary intra-black usage, that is, what black men like West can call one another: "my nigga." But the "nigga in a coop" harkens to the originary usage of this word, that word which absurdly denoted property and was even more absurdly reappropriated by those possessions who were not.
In his "On the Question of Nigga Authenticity," critical theorist R.A.T. Judy links the linguistic shift from "nigger" to "nigga" with African-Americans' shifting place within the American economy: from forced labor to forced unemployment. In Judy's estimation, "nigger" was the potential for labor, bought and sold via the bodies of slaves: "The value of the nigger is not in the physical body itself but in the energy, the potential force, that the body contains…That force is the thing that the planter owns. It is the property of the planter that is the nigger. The nigger is that thing" (Judy 109). Judy's definition locates the nigger in the coop, as property held for its industrial force. But as the agrarian and then the industrial economy collapsed, so too did the value of the nigger; what replaced him was the nigga. Glossing rapper Ice-T, Judy situates the nigga in the present, in "the age of hypercommodification, in which experience has not become commodified, it is commodity"—these days, experience isn't what you're doing, but what you're consuming—"and nigga designates the scene, par excellence, of commodification, where one is among commodities. Nigga is a commodity affect" (111). Whereas nigger is a possession, "the thing that the planter owns," nigga is the feeling of being for sale, of being "among commodities," displayed among the other saleable goods. In the context of West's "All Falls Down," Judy locates the nigga in the Mercedez-Benze coupe. According to Judy, the authentic nigga is the nigga selling, not buying, nigga affect: the one who understands so well "the nature of experience in a global economy" that he can abstract his affect from his experience and sell it to other consumers. "That's why I'm not bitter," raps Ice-T: "cause everybody is a nigga to a nigga" (qtd in Judy 112).
Unlike Judy and Ice-T, however, West seems to believe in the communicability of affect through storytelling. In "All Falls Down," he struggles against his own commodification:
Man I promise, I'm so self-conscious
That's why you always see me with at least one of my watches.
Rollies and Pashas done drove me crazy
I can't even pronounce nothing, pass that Versazy!
Then I spent fo' hundred bucks on this
Just to be like, "Nigga, you ain't up on this!"
And I can't even go to the grocery store
Without some One's that's clean, and a shirt with a team
It seems we livin' the American dream…. (West "All Falls Down")
West's music fights against the hiphop precendent set by gangsta rap. In Judy and Ice-T's world, being "self-conscious" is valuable in that becoming concious of oneself allows one to package that self and sell it: "Nigga, you ain't up on this!" But West's lyrics push beyond simple affect into complex feeling: being a commodity "done drove me crazy" and is infringing upon his real life—he "can't even go to the grocery store." The nigga affect is not what West wants to sell. That package, with its watches and Nike Ones, proves illusory; it "all falls down." And pursuing that image isn't worth it, only "seems…the American dream": "Even … in a Benz, you still a nigga." Despite Judy's qualified celebration of the nigga affect as a genius act of self-commodification, West rejects that project with a sharp, simple pun. West rejects inhabiting the image of the "nigga in the coupe" because of "nigg[er] in the coop" he conjures. The men in the coupe and the coop are both trapped by definitions they did not devise, chained to a centuries-old capitalist enterprise which constrains and commodifies young black men.
Judy's study is limited to African-Americans, but it needn't be. He writes, "A nigga is what emerges from the demise of human capital, what gets articulated when the field nigger loses value as labor" (Judy 104). While African laborers were forced to America, Chinese, Mexican, and southern and eastern European bodies were also only welcomed for their value as labor. In the wake of deindustrialization, Ice-T names the last option for workers: the killing fields. "The killing fields, then," Judy writes, "are the place of non-work for complete consumption of needless workers" (104). We might expand Ice-T's killing fields—the violent inner city, where young black men murder each other—to various modern killing factories: the prison system, the war machine, the obesity industry. Near the heart of her novel Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich writes of a Native American man who keeps escaping from prison: "Gerry's problem, you see, was he believed in justice, not laws. He felt he had paid for his crime, which was done in a drunk heat and to settle the question with a cowboy of whether a Chippewa was also a nigger" (197). In Erdrich's fictional study of indigenous Americans, "nigger" marks the site where justice and laws diverge and racism divides the powerful from the imprisoned. In Gerry's case, that "he had paid for his crime" is irrelevant; his imprisonment proves the cowboy's insult. A "Chippewa is a nigger" as long as the laws grant his body to the prison.
All killing fields create capital through the destruction of bodies and therefore depend on language to prep bodies of color through slur and dehumanization: we should not be surprised at white Americans' creative use of nigger to describe a spectrum of African, Asian, and Arab bodies when American industrial practices of war and prison enact that disdain on foreign and American nonwhite bodies every day. Nor should we be shocked at nonblacks' reactive appropriation of nigga to describe themselves and one another. In fact, according Judy, nigga is a transcendant act: recognizing ourselves dehumanized but still human "liberates significance from experience" (105): we are more than the killing fields. In a post-work America, nigger and nigga are the linguistic indicators of a continued effort to normalize dehumanizing and destroying nonwhite bodies for capital gain. When West samples "Niggas" from Curtis Mayfield, (itseslf a relocation of a kind of pernicious slave word), West affirms that racism's ability to commodify and constrain young black men has persisted from Mayfield's time into our own.
9. Outro: Generation Hustle
In his essay "The African Writer and the English Language," which my students and I read near the end of our semester, Chinua Achebe writes of the surprising linguistic gifts of colonialism in Africa. The colonization of Africa, he writes, gave Africans "a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for sighing." At the end of his speech, Achebe quotes James Baldwin, who brings the conversation to the U.S.A.
My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter another way…. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test. (Baldwin qtd in Achebe 102)
For many of my students, this is their first introduction to a postcolonial worldview, one in which English itself is to be questioned. And English has surely given hiphop what Achebe calls "a tongue for sighing"—and for swearing, spitting, and storytelling. In hiphop, English can "bear the burden" of the African-American experience with the support of sounds, rhythm, and community. And in challenging English, to use Baldwin's words, hiphop has challenged not just American language but also culture aand consciousness to open itself up to the experience of the post-industrial inner city. For the open-hearted, hearing can be believing.
In the first verse on The College Dropout, Kanye raps,
Sittin in the hood like community colleges
This dope money here is Lil' Tre's scholarship.
Cuz ain't no tuition for having no ambition,
And ain't no loans for sitting your ass at home. ("We Don't Care")
Our classroom jury is still out on Lil Tre's designs: does he really need money for school, or is Kanye using the language of a financed education—scholarship, tuition, loans—for ironic effect, as Lil Tre tries to make something of himself in the hood? For my students, among whom loans are no metaphor, Kanye's figurative equivalence between the drug hustle and the college hustle cuts both ways. By comparing college with the hood, Kanye highlights the ubiquity of financial struggle in any modern young person's life. And by using Ivory Tower language to describe the block, West invites privileged listeners to empathize with another group of Americans striving, he insists, just as hard as y'all college kids.
In their book Decoded, Jay-Z and dream hampton declare that "hustling is the ultimate metaphor for human struggles" (18). Hustling may be universal, but it feels especially relevant to my generation (Smith). We hustle to get into college, to get good grades, to maintain social position, to get a job, pay rent, secure health insurance. As Jay would say, "If I'm not a hustler what you call that?" (10). If Jay-Z is right, the universality of the hustle may be a major entrance point for all contemporary young people into the empathetic universe of hiphop. "Seventy percent of… students at the University of Michigan receive some form of financial aid" ("Frequently Asked Questions") and, as Kanye says, "ain't no loans for sittin yo' ass at home" ("We Don't Care"). Absurdity, commodification, self-consiousness, the fear that "it all falls down"—these anxieties are permanent features of postmodern existence, available to every American with a credit card and TV. Privilege is relative, hustling is essential, and hiphop has heard it all before. And it has lessons to teach us, if we'll listen.
Achebe, Chinua. "The African Writer and the English Language." Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. Anchor Press (1975): New York. Print.
Alim, H. Samy. You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community. Ed. Ronald R. Butters. Annual Supplement to American Speech, no. 89. Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society (2004): United States. Print.
Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. W. W. Norton & Company (2000): New York. Print.
Brown, Tessa. (8 January 2012). "You white bitches, cont'd." Hiphopocracy. Blog Post. https://hiphopocracy.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/you-white-bitches-contd/
Browne, Rembert. (13 March 2012). "SXSW Recap: An Awkward Moment at that Jay-Z Concert." Grantland. Web article. http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/45677/sxsw-monday-recap-an-awkward-moment-at-that-jay-z-concert
C.K., Louis, director. (2000). Chewed Up. United States: Image Entertainment. DVD.
Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Orbis Books (2009): Maryknoll, New York. Print.
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. Harper Perennial (2009): New York. Print.
Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc (2000): New York. Print.
hampton, dream (@dreamhampton). "may come to be more important that rap itself. It's a continuing of privileging culture w/written texts over those whose impt texts are oral". 7 January 2012, 8:21 AM. Tweet.
— "One of my conflicts with writing Decoded was contributing to this growing idea that hip hop can be canonized in books, that books abt it +". 7 January 2012, 8:19 AM. Tweet.
— "Zora occupied language. She occupied the front porchers of storytellers. She was a listener. She privileged our oral traditions." 7 January 2012, 8:22 AM. Tweet.
Jay-Z. Decoded. Spiegel & Grau (2010): New York. Print.
Mayfield, Curtis. "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go." Curtis [Original Recording Reissued, Original Recording Remastered]. Rhino, 2000. Audio CD.
Pappademas, Alex. (20 March 2012). "Ninja: A Short History of a Less Troublesome Word." Grantland. Web article. http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/46020/ninja-a-short-history-of-a-less-troublesome-word
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown (1994): Wesleyan University Press. Print.
Smith, Mychal Denzel. (25 September 2011). "How Jay-Z Inspired a Generation of Hustlers." Good. Web article. http://www.good.is/posts/how-jay-z-inspired-a-generation-of-hustlers/
Stewart, Jon. (3 October 2011). "The Amazing Racism." The Daily Show. Web video clip. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-3-2011/the-amazing-racism .
"Frequently Asked Questions." University of Michigan Office of Financial Aid. Retrieved 2 November 2012. http://www.finaid.umich.edu/TopNav/AboutUMFinancialAid/FrequentlyAskedQuestions.aspx)
Watch the Throne (Jay-Z and Kanye West). Audio CD Album Booklet. Watch the Throne. Def Jam, 2011. Print.
West, Kanye. "All Falls Down." The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. Audio CD.
—"Get Em High." The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. Audio CD.
—"Jesus Walks" The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. Audio CD.
—"School Spirit." The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. Audio CD.
—"We Don't Care." The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. Audio CD.
Posted in Writing Sample	| Tagged antiracism, aretha franklin, college writing, critical pedagogy, curtis mayfield, decoded, dream hampton, James Baldwin, James Cone, jay-z, jon stewart, kanye west, katy perry, louis CK, louise erdrich, marxism, native american fiction, paolo freire, r.a.t. judy, racism, The College Dropout, Tricia Rose, watch the throne, white people, whiteness	| Leave a reply
Sam Jackson says, "Wake the Fuck Up!"
Posted on September 28, 2012 by tessalaprofessa
Most obviously, this video is a funny repurposing of Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep for apathetic political times. However, by popping up in a white family's various bedrooms, Samuel L. Jackson also recasts black rage as black engagement, thereby recontextualizing an angry "Fuck!": from "Fuck the police" as "Say hell no, motherfuckers!"
And to that we can all say: righteous.
Posted in Politics	| Tagged adam mansbach, Election 2012, engagement, politics, rage, Samuel L. Jackson, video, voting, white people	| Leave a reply
And Now, Back to Navel-Gazing
Posted on March 20, 2012 by tessalaprofessa
(While the rest of the relevant Twittersphere writes about Trayvon Martin's death, I am going to keep writing about white people saying the N-word. Not because I am not following Martin's story, or because I'm not heartbroken by it, but because I have nothing to add to the coverage and momentum that are already changing the trajectory of this case.)
And now, back to navel-gazing.
This morning a friend sent me this article from Grantland about Katy Perry covering "Niggas in Paris." Of course, unlike what I just did there, Alex Pappademas titled the song "N***** in Paris" and focused on Katy Perry's "tee-hee trangression" of sing-rapping about "ninjas in Paris." Clever! According to Pappademas, Perry's cover constitutes
a girl refusing to let this song's imaginary world of swinging-dick privilege be off-limits to her. But that's all that's happening here; she puts the word on like a piece of borrowed jewelry and parades in front of the mirror. Her flimsy white-girl voice doesn't reveal anything about the song's construction or its sentiments that Kanye and Jay's voices were covering up…
Despite Perry's Yankees cap, despite the deep knee lunges from which she belt-sings Jay and Ye's lines, despite my congratulatory impulses, I have to agree with Pappademas here: Perry's shout-out to her ninjas belies a larger unwillingness to take this song seriously, to rap it with her head up, to allow the transgressiveness of her own act to fill up her chest and shoulders so that instead of suggesting (as Pappademas thinks her cover does) that "Being married to Russell Brand was as bad as being married to the legacy of centuries of racism," Perry's cover could have embraced genuine empathy for what it means to be a nigga in Paris.
But more important than Pappademas's story is one he links to, "An Awkward Moment at That Jay-Z Concert," in which author Rembert Browne reflects on the various audience responses when Jay-Z (accidentally?) invited his largely white SXSW crowd to sing along at a touchy moment. Mostly because I agree with him, I'll quote Browne at length:
The more recent and obvious example of this is last year's debatable song of the year, interestingly not titled "Ball So Hard," but instead "N—– in Paris." As soon as this Jay-Z/Kanye instant hit was released, the way the lyrics of this song were handled by the public could be documented in a very lengthy dissertation. From people referring to it as "Ninjas in Paris" to radio stations simply calling it "Paris" to the fact that the entire song is a buildup to the line "Got my N—– in Paris, and they going gorillas" makes this, again, another case where one of our popular culture's least-discussed yet most-uttered and thought-about words gives people a very interesting decision to make.
My personal beliefs on the matter are irrelevant, but if you insist, I guess I'll say that the action by some of our more famous, influential black celebrities to aid in the okayification (or "deconstruction," if you must) of the word by launching it to the forefront of the pop culture sphere is something I believe to be a good thing. What's problematic, however, is the process of pretending like the word doesn't exist. Trust me, it's real. The decision to say it or not say it is very much up to the person, and I respect that, but it's real and if you are one who has no issue with it being a part of your own vernacular from time to time, you really haven't a right to censor anyone else.
That, there: that the word(s) nigga(er) are "one of our popular culture's least-discussed yet most-uttered and thought about word." Yes. Yes! This is the thought I kept thinking when the most recent iteration of racist gibberish against Obama made its rounds–that our refusal to say this word preserves its most enshrined space at the blotchy center of our national amnesia. "Least-discussed yet most-uttered and thought about word"–you know, like white news anchors all across the television-scape faulting Rick Perry for his "N-word-head" ranch. Maybe my willingness to pronounce and inscribe the actual true syllables of nigger or nigga out loud and on the Internet with my identity attached is a willingness to take responsibility for the fact that what I'm doing here is controversial–unlike Katy Perry, who as Pappademus terms it is "somebody get a transgressive thrill out of (basically) saying a forbidden word in public without actually putting her adorkability on the line." Thank you, Rembert Browne: "What's problematic…is pretending like the word doesn't exist. Trust me, it's real." I guess that's what I'm hoping for when I allow this word into our classroom space: a reckoning with the persistence of racist language. How can we fight racism when we pretend it's gone?
Then again, Katy Perry is a rock star and I'm just a self-involved adjunct lecturer blogging from Michigan.
I have this one student, a freshman, who keeps wanting to talk about what the hell white people are doing in hiphop–as fans, as rappers, as witnesses. Near the beginning of the semester he told me, "I just got into hiphop music last year, and I really like it, but I didn't know what I was doing because I am just. so. white. Like a small town white guy from Michigan. But then I signed up for this class, thinking it would be kind of weird, but then YOU walked in" (paraphrase). That is, me, TB, white person. White girl, plagued by the same problem of authenticity that he is. So who's gonna legitimize anyone in this room?
And this student keeps returning to that same question, which I originally answered by saying that the answers I'd heard and read were unsatisfactory, but which after multiple negative definitions still is in need of a positive. See, the question is, Why do white kids love hiphop? And, no disrespect to Bakari Kitwana, but this question has not been answered, it has only been mitigated. White fans and rappers have been derided as imitators, co-opters and thieves; our purchasing power has been termed a necessary evil, a sort of redistribution of wealth from our parents to rappers' pockets; the statistics have been denounced as misrepresenting actual listens, since The Source is read thirteen times for every purchase, or whatever it is.
But my student asks me again: Why do white kids love hiphop?
And for once, as a white kid, it's my experience that's valuable here. Here is the question that I am actually entitled to answer, the instant when my participation in hiphop as a white kid is an experience of value. I love hiphop because the bass drum hits my chest as hard as it hits yours. I love hiphop because I love literature and rap is. I love hiphop because it rode the airwaves into my bedroom radio as a kid, because it featured prominently on the soundtrack to Chicago I grew up with. I love hiphop because I am also angry and proud and filled with curse words and swagger and bitterness and hope. I love hiphop because it's funny. I love hiphop because it's true. I love hiphop because it's critical and because I am trying to be better at being critical every day. I love hiphop because I believe what it articulates about the government, the police, the new world order, the legacy of white supremacy, the persistence of misogyny, the ineffability of spirituality in a materialistic society, the end-all-be-all of a hometown, the importance of community, the subjectivity of the individual. The power of language and a beat.
Posted in Teaching & Learning, White Girl Spitta	| Tagged bakari kitwana, katy perry, louis CK, n-word, watch the throne, white people	| Leave a reply
Thou Shalt Back That Azz Up
Posted on February 3, 2012 by tessalaprofessa
And verily, when I was a freshman at Lincoln Park High School, there came a time when I could not turn a corner without hearing someone singing "Back that Azz Up." Yeah, those were heady times, as I had just finished eighth grade at a private Jewish school where my classmates and I sang "Bling, Bling" without knowing what the helleth we were talking about. And oh, how I remember loving that voice at the end of "Back that Azz Up": "After you back it up then stop, then drop, drop, drop drop it like it's hot, drop drop it like it's hot." And yeah, I knew not that this was the tween Lil' Wayne.
And so it was, when I went to my homecoming dance, that all of the young people were juking in a mass unlike any my innocent Jewish eyes had ever seen: to the windows, as well as to the wall. Also on the floor. And so it was that in the future, before dances, the student council president had to make an announcement during homeroom that "Wall juking, floor juking and aerial juking will be have you dismissed from the dance." Yeah, seriously. But lo, the great class of '04 was not stopped from naming Juvenile's "Slow Motion" the unofficial song of our prom.
And lo, in the year 2012, a Canadian bar-mitzvah boy came to pass as a rapper, and his name was Drake. And when, with great hubris, he dared to cover Juvenile's opus, he put a thick dime in his music video for "Practice," and her name was Kyra Chaos.
And so it was, that in 2012 when yours truly became a media studies nut, she found herself going back to watch the Juvenile video from 1999, which she had not watched when she was fourteen. And she saw, despite the imperative tense of the title, that the video for "Back that Azz Up" showed a large concert, and joyous people of color, and the deep greens of the Bayou, and some girls from around the way. And in "Practice" she saw the prodigious behind of Kyra Chaos, and her cut off sweatshirt, and her homegirl hat, and thought, "In the universe of this video, this girl is making a movie for the guy she loves. Yeah, she has been practicing. And it's cool he take her word that 'those other guys were practice.'" And yeah, isn't it interesting how between the nineties and the twenty-teens the portrait of intimacy has shifted from the huge public concert venue to the privacy of a digital video connection. But lo, that was dorky. And so it was that the wannabe media theorist was still just a white girl watching the others juke, talking to her friends to distract herself from how fun that all looked.
Posted in Theorizin(g), White Girl Spitta	| Tagged drake, hiphop, juvenile, lil wayne, lincoln park high school, white people	| Leave a reply
"Malcolm, Malcolm. You white bitches done killed Malcolm."*
Posted on January 5, 2012 by tessalaprofessa
When I was a sophomore in college, I applied for and received a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which consisted of a sizable cash stipend and summer research funding aimed to help me pursue my expressed goal of becoming a professor. Being an MMUF fellow at Princeton also involved monthly meetings with other undergraduate and graduate fellows, casual talks with professors of color, and a fancy annual banquet in which some professor or other reiterated every year how miserable the PhD process is, and enjoined upon us to keep on keepin' on.
The goals of MMUF are as follows; it was my job as an aspiring sophomore to convince my school's committee that I met them:
The fundamental objectives of MMUF are to reduce, over time, the serious underrepresentation on faculties of individuals from minority groups, as well as to address the consequences of these racial disparities for the educational system itself and for the larger society that it serves. These goals can be achieved both by increasing the number of students from underrepresented minority groups who pursue PhDs and by supporting the pursuit of PhDs by students who may not come from underrepresented minority groups but have demonstrated a commitment to the goals of MMUF. (mmuf.org)
That's me, at the end: "students who may not come from underrepresented minority groups but have demonstrated a commitment to" these goals. The irony of it all was that MMUF, which had previously been a fellowship for minority students, was forced by anti-affirmative action legislation (I believe under the Bush II administration) to broaden its selection criteria from racial to ideological.
Six years later, I'm an MFA holder teaching hiphop studies to college freshmen (but still a white woman with an ambiguously ethnic name). Last semester, after one of my sections was in a classroom after a white man teaching a course on jazz and before another white man teaching a course on African cities, I turned my attention to novelist Cecil Brown's Dude, Where's My Black Studies Department? The Disappeareance of Black Americans from Our Universities (2007). The book opens to the author wandering across the greens of his alma mater, UC Berkeley, and wondering, like "one of the characters in the film Dude, Where's My Car?" (ix), Dude, where are all the black students?
I was interested in this book not only because of my own experience as a white woman teaching Black subject matter to largely white and Asian students, but (more importantly) because Mr. Brown taught a course at Stanford called "From Homer to Hiphop," and a peruse of this book's Table of Contents online revealed that the author professed to have rediscovered Black Studies in the streets, among the hiphop heads. I was keen to read his arguments about the rifts between written and oral cultures of information.
I empathized with Mr. Brown's statistics on the erosion of affirmative action policies in the last few decades–my courses are as much a commitment to diversity as an expression of my own interests. And many of his arguments were provocative, like his suggestion that while "special programs are established to help [Asian and Asian-American students] with their writing and speaking skills" (94),the same effort is not made to bring other students of color up to speed.
But what ultimately disappointed me about this book was Mr. Brown's blanket dismissal of genuine white interest in hiphop music, an exasperation I see again and again in black writers' work on hiphop. Brown suggests "rap music helps white youth deal with their fear of girls" (99), and that "White attraction to Black pimps are…symptoms of an unconscious desire to escape the structured life of the mechanical world" (102). But he's never open to the possibility that white listeners empathize with rap's critique of a racist and hypocritical society. I was reminded of Tricia Rose's seminal Black Noise, where the author sneakily suggests her bias:
Jazz, rock'n'roll, soul, and R&B each have large devoted white audience members, many of whom share traits with Norman Mailer's "white negroes," young white listeners trying to perfect a model of correct white hipness, coolness, and style by adopting the latest black style and image. Young white listeners' genuine pleasure and commitment to black music are necessarily affected by dominant racial discourses regarding African Americans, the politics of racial segregation, and cultural difference in the United States. Given the racially discriminatory context within which cultural syncretism takes place, some rappers have equated white participation with a process of dilution and subsequent theft of black culture. Although the terms dilution and theft do not capture the complexity of cultural incorporation and syncretism, this interpretation has more than a grain of truth in it. (5)
Look how Ms. Rose deftly undercuts the possibility of "young white listeners' genuine pleasure and commitment" and then invokes the terms "dilution and theft" without taking responsibility for them.
Some of the only welcoming language I've seen is in the introduction to (Asian-American) Jeff Chang's wonderful Can't Stop, Won't Stop, where he declares of the hiphop generation: "Whom does it include? Anyone who is down" (2). Even the provocateur Nas, after calling out to all his "kike niggers, spic niggers, Guinea niggers, chink niggers," reminds his posturing audience, "They like to strangle niggers, blaming niggers, shooting niggers, hanging niggers, still you wanna be a nigger too?" ("Be A Nigger Too," Untitled).
In Cecil Brown's 1969 novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, the titular protagonist sits with the only Black woman he's found in Copenhagen and lays his hand to her pregnant form:
He felt the small lump running smoothly under his fingers as she brought his hand smoothly over her brown hot belly.
"That's a baby," she said.
"Really," he said. He was scared stiff.
"A white baby, " she said.
"Does it make you feel a little bit disgusted?"
"Yeah, I think so." (124)
* from Cecil Brown, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, 105.
Posted in Book Reviews, White Girl Spitta, Writing Sample	| Tagged Cecil Brown, Dude Where's My Car, hiphop studies, Jeff Chang, MMUF, Nas, teaching, the academy, Tricia Rose, white people	| Leave a reply


You are here: Home / Homestead / Why Should You Make Your Own Soap?
Store-bought soap is cheap and gets you clean. It comes in fun fragrances, has lots of bubbles, and the packaging is pretty. So why on earth would you deal with making your own? Especially when everyone talks about how dangerous it is? Let's discuss the many reasons you should try soap making… and a few reasons why you shouldn't.
Let's attack these one at a time and see how soap-making stacks up.
Does making soap save you money?
Well, it depends. (How helpful.). A bar of Irish Spring soap is one dollar at Walmart. Even fancy Dove soap is about $3 a bar. Not so bad, right?
Homemade soap, in contrast, is about $7 per loaf to make. This accounts for the cost of the oils and lye needed. This can vary wildly, but I calculated the cost of one of my favorite recipes, which includes a good amount of more expensive oils and butters. To add fragrance and color, add about a dollar per loaf. This will make 8 good sized bars. So less than a dollar per bar. Interesting.
However, you can't buy supplies for one loaf. The oils have to be purchased in relatively large amounts, a few pounds at least. You will also need a stick blender, a digital food scale, and a mold, at the bare minimum. These tools will be between $50-$100 all together. Let's spread the cost over a few batches and say that the price between homemade soap with nice oils and store-bought Ivory Spring is exactly the same.
Conclusion: making nice soap is the same cost as buying cheap soap at the store. Making basic soap is cheaper than buying it.
Is homemade soap a superior product to store bought soap?
Now for the fun part. First of all, what you are buying at the store is probably not soap. Like how Kraft Singles are pasteurized cheese product… Dove is a beauty bar. Real soap is the result of lye and oil. That is the definition. If it doesn't say soap on the package, it is likely a detergent bar.
This means it has things in it to mimic "soapyness", like lathering agents and surfactants (these simply reduce the surface tension of water). Add in some fragrance and you are wet, smell good and are clean. It still works. But its not soap. It's like a mild laundry detergent in bar form.
So why should you care and why is homemade soap better than a detergent bar?
Well when real soap is formed by combining lye and oil, one natural byproduct is glycerine, a natural moisturizing compound. It is a major ingredient in commercial lotions. But it is not found in store-bought bars. They will be happy to sell it you separately though! We have very rarely needed body lotion since using homemade soap, and many people have that experience as well.
I am not going to get hysterical over the chemicals in store-bought bars and body wash.
(I mean, lye is a chemical that can literally blind you, so…), but if you are concerned about that type of thing… homemade soap allows you to control it. You can research the fragrances and colors you are comfortable with, you can leave them out, you can search for organic oils. It is entirely in your control.
Conclusion: homemade soap is a superior product to store bought detergent bars.
Well, I think so! If you like baking, you will LOVE soap making. They are very similar in my mind. You start with a basic recipe and can customize the color, design, and fragrance. As you get more comfortable you can tweak recipes and then develop your own from scratch. Best of all, you have a practical product at the end that you can either use yourself or give as a gift.
So designing a soap is fun. The actual making of it… not as fun. (But I still like it.). You have to be very precise, weigh your ingredients exactly, and you have to be VERY careful. At many stages of the process you could injure yourself or someone else if you aren't paying attention.
Of course there is nothing like the pride and satisfaction you get at the end of a project. And unlike sewing, it can't hang over your head for weeks. You mix up your batter, it sets overnight, and in the morning you cut your bars and you are done. The sense of accomplishment from soap making is high, and that is fun.
Conclusion: soap making is fun for certain people.
Why should you not make your own soap?
If you are in dire financial straits, do not take up soap making as a way to save money. The upfront costs of the tools are a real consideration. It is still cheaper (short term) to buy the world's cheapest soap.
People with small children who do not nap should not attempt to make soap. If you leave a glass of lye water to cool and don't put it up high enough, it can be knocked over and blind or severely burn a child. If you are distracted, stressed out, or in a hurry, things will start to go wrong. When things go wrong while you are making soap, you can easily ruin the batch or hurt yourself.
If you like to make up things as you go and get crazy in the kitchen (I do not understand this), you probably won't enjoy soap making. You need to follow the recipe exactly, even if it's one you created yourself. Creating one yourself involves math and research. (Just a little!). So if that all sounds horrible to you, I totally understand.
So what do you think? Will you be trying soap making? If you are ready to get started, I have a printable mini book you can download here. It has my five favorite soap recipes in a printer-friendly format.
I won't be taking the time to make my own soap but I do think that it would be really cool to be able to.
We have a local company that makes "Artisinal" soaps and other types of personal care products. I love her soap and buy a bar whenever I need one. Yes, I am paying extra but I am supporting a local company and I can buy a different one every time if I wish. Check her out she sells on line too http://www.soapbin.com it's Molly's Apothecary in Medway, Massachusetts.
I was going to start soap making years ago when most of my kids were small. An older friend with a large family even showed me how and set me up. Then, it was as if God stopped me. I had bought some goat milk from a friend and the jars busted in the freezer and then suddenly I couldn't find the lye, it was as if it disappeared! My friend then encouraged me to wait a few years when I didn't have so many little ones running around, that maybe it wasn't the safest thing. I am at a different place now, and my oldest daughter is super interested in making soap. We have done the melt and pour and given it as gifts, maybe we are ready for the real deal now!
This was super interesting, Katie!! And I loved the cute interruptions! I have never made soap but it does sound like a super fun activity!!


text:
Q: The scanf is not reading the values Hey this is the entire code.
I m a beginner in C, I was trying to make a code which has a structure mall and takes into input the name, number of items shopped , the name of each item and the cost of each item.
* For small programs like this i fix the max size of the structure object
But the program cant take the input in the manner desired.
#include<stdio.h>
struct mall

{

    char name[50];
    char obj[10][30];
    float price[10];
    int numb;
}b[50];

void main()

{

    int m; // number of persons who shopped at the mall

    scanf("%d",&m);

    for(int i=0;i<m;i++)
    {
        num=0;
        scanf("%s",&b[i].name);
        scanf("%d",&b[i].numb);
        printf("%s\n%d",b[i].name,b[i].numb);
        for(int j=0;j<num;j++)
        {
            scanf("%s",&b[i].obj);
            scanf("%f",&b[i].price);
        }
    }
}

For the input :
1
Ram 2 bread 50.00 jam 25.00

I m getting the output as
2500

A: Your code has many small mistakes:

*

*scanf("%s", &b[i].name); does not need &

*num=0; is not necessary; remove it

*Nested loop condition should use j < b[i].numb as its condition

*Nested loop is not using j. It needs to add [j] to both obj and price.

Once you fix these problems, your code runs as expected as long as the input is correct (demo).
However, this is not enough to make your code robust: you need to add error checking to ensure that invalid input does not cause undefined behavior:

*

*Add limits to string format specifiers in scanf to avoid buffer overflows (e.g. %49s to read name[50]),

*Add a limit to the outer loop in case m is above 50,

*Add a limit to the nested loop in case b[i].numb is above 10,

*Add checks of return values for scanf.

A: *

*num is undeclared.  The program does not compile to executable.  See below.

*Don't pass &b[i].name to scanf(3), as the %s format requires a char * and the &b[i].name is not that type (it is, indeed, char *[50], while compatible, it is not the same type, while b[i].name is)

*change num by b[i].numb in the inner for loop.  This is the proper number of items.  You have to check for array sizes also, as you have hardwired them in the code.  If you don't you can overrun

*Use inside the inner loop b[i].obj[j] for the object name as the reference to scanf(3)

*Use inside the inner loop &b[i].price[j] for the j-esim price.  You have forgotten it here and in the point above.

*you have to add code to print the individual objects (the inner loop has no printf(3) at all.

A valid (but not completely correct, as array sizes are not checked) could be:
#include<stdio.h>
struct mall {
    char name[50];
    char obj[10][30];
    float price[10];
    int numb;
}b[50];

int main()
{
    int m; // number of persons who shopped at the mall
    scanf("%d",&m);
    for(int i=0; i<m; i++) {
        scanf("%s",b[i].name);
        scanf("%d",&b[i].numb);
        printf("* name = %s\n"
                       "  numb = %d\n",b[i].name,b[i].numb);
        for(int j=0; j < b[i].numb; j++) {
            scanf("%s",b[i].obj[j]);
            scanf("%f",&b[i].price[j]);
                    printf("  * obj = %s\n", b[i].obj[j]);
                    printf("    price = %.2f\n", b[i].price[j]);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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text:
Home » Star takes shine to Coastal
Star takes shine to Coastal
Chai, Paul
Daily Variety;5/31/2006, Vol. 291 Issue 42, p10
The article reports on the film distribution deal signed by Southern Star International with Coastal Productions. Southern Star executive Catherine Payne stressed that the alliance can give benefits to both parties. As part of the deal, Coastal Productions aims to produce more movies and television dramas. The movies produced and co-produced by Coastal includes "Take Me," "Blind Ambition," and "Unconditional Love."
PRODUCTION LISTINGS. // Onfilm;Feb2008, Vol. 25 Issue 2, p30
A list of films, television programs and video recordings under production in New Zealand as of February 2008 is presented, including the horror short film "Prey," the animated children's television program "The Adventures of Voopa the Goolash" and the documentary "Red on Black."
Ontario film, TV prod'n hits record $369 million. Vlessing, Etan // Hollywood Reporter;1/3/95, Vol. 335 Issue 22, pI-3
Reports on an increase in film and television production activities in Ontario, Canada for 1994. Increase in foreign production in the province as compared to the 1993 figures; Total number of feature films, movies and television programs shot in location.
THE GREEN LIGHT. // Televisual;Jun2003, p9
Presents news briefs related to film and television production in Great Britain, as of June 2003. Writer Russell Davies' selection to write a script based on a game show scandal; British Broadcasting Corp.'s order for a second series of the television series 'State of Play'; Initial's...
SHOOTING SCHEDULE. // Televisual;Jan2014, p25
The article reports on the scheduled production of several television programs and films in Great Britain which include "Star Wars: Episode VII," directed by JJ Abrams, "Fury," directed by David Ayer, and "Dancing on Ice."
THE BACK LOT. Bart, Peter // Daily Variety;08/07/2000, Vol. 268 Issue 45, p14
Reports on the increase of television and film production in the United States. Stand of guilds and unions; Empathy of Rupert Murdoch toward guilds or unions.
War dents L.A.'s off-lot production biz. McNary, Dave // Daily Variety;5/6/2003, Vol. 279 Issue 21, p42
Reports on a decline in off-lot production activity in Hollywood, California during April 2003. Ways in which concerns over the war in Iraq appeared to ease concerns about shooting projects overseas; Projected filming activity in May 2003; Decline in local feature production activity in the...
POST PRODUCTION. // IBE: International Broadcast Engineer;Sep2000, Issue 310, p57
Investigates development on post production in broadcasting. Availability of systems and types of facilities for post production; Use of compressed storage; Nonlinear online systems offering multi-format working; Move toward information technology-based solutions.
Ontario prod's shows oomph. Punter, Jennie // Daily Variety;2/19/2010, Vol. 306 Issue 34, p8
The article reports that the film and television productions in Ontario had increased by 4 percent in 2009 and contributed 946.4 million Canadian dollars to the provincial economy of Ontario.
FED STUDY: RUNAWAY COSTS BILLIONS. McNary, Dave // Daily Variety;01/19/2001, Vol. 270 Issue 35, p72
Reports on the acceleration of runaway production of film and television programs to foreign locales. Impact of the trend on domestic production activity in the United States; Incentives proposed to lure producers back.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
15 Countries that Are the Biggest Contributors to Global Warming and Climate Change
October 17, 2017 Zsuzsanna Pengo
So what are the countries that are the biggest contributors to global warming and climate change? Follow us and you'll get to know more about it. Insider Monkey has recently published an interesting article about this topic. Environment protection is one of the burning topics nowadays and I firmly believe that every each of has to do the best. Regarding the global warming sometimes I really don't know what to think. Many scientists say global warming is frightening, and it darkens our present. But others claim it's not global warming at all, becuase it's nothing else but the end of the ice age…. and it's all natural what is happening in our age. I dont know…. Either the former or the latter we do have to take responsibility of our beautiful Globe.
Now without a further ado let's see what Insider Monkey has investigated for us. We have picked three countries that are the biggest contributors to global warming and climate change.
The first one is United Kingdom. The UK is one of the major contributors towards global warming, and needs to change its ways fast to mitigate the expected damage which will occur in the forthcoming years. The country is bracing to face a significant increase in windstorms as well as risks of flooding due to climate change. The second country is India. While India is attempting to become a superpower, the rules regulating various industries in the country are not as stringent as in more developed nations, which is why India is among the countries that are the biggest contributors to global warming and climate change. Further, a lack of awareness regarding the effect of global warming means little action has been taken to counter this threat. The third country should be Kazakhstan. At least some of the countries in this list of countries that are the biggest contributors to global warming and climate change have recognized the impact of their actions, which is why Kazakhstan has enacted lwas to counter the growing emissions of greenhouse gases. At last, but not least let's see Germany. Germany is among the countries that are the biggest contributors to global warming and climate change although it's one of the European countries which has shown great commitment towards the reduction of emission of greenhouse gases, with 78% of the country' electricity being produced through renewable energy resources.
For any further useful information, read Insider Monkey's article about 15 countries that are the biggest contributors to global warming and climate change


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Friday. We changed hotel rooms then walked into town, saw Pauline and had an early lunch. In the afternoon we visited Max briefly where Noel took the opportunity to have a go on the play equipment.
We then had a snooze and about 5.30pm Pauline joined us and we sat on the Masonic's balcony and had some wine and nibbles.
Getting hungry, we went to the Masonic's Emporium restaurant and had a lovely meal.
We really haven't fallen off the wagon and started eating too much since the wedding! Yeah, right!


text:
Sultanahmet and Beyond: Things To Do in Istanbul's Old City
Whether it's walking ancient city walls, haggling in historic bazaars, absorbing the sanctity of Ottoman mosques, sipping beer on a rooftop bar, watching the sun go down on the Golden Horn or relaxing in a Turkish bath, there's always something more to do in Istanbul's Old City, a place aptly known as 'the city of the world's desire'.
The heart of Istanbul remains its fascinating Old City, home to some of the most historic sites of this vibrant megapolis. Dramatically located on a peninsula pointing across the Bosphorus Strait to Asia, Sultanahmet was formerly the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.
The heart of Istanbul remains its fascinating Old City © Fred Pinheiro / Alamy Stock Photo
Walk the ancient city walls from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn
The mighty Walls of Theodosius kept the city safe from everybody from Attila the Hun to the all-conquering Muslim Arabs for a thousand years before falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Running some 6.5 kilometres (four miles) across the spine of the peninsula from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, these late-Roman walls have survived remarkably well. Walk through neighbourhoods virtually untouched by tourism, past hole-in-the-wall restaurants, smoky tea shops and cottage gardens in the wall moat. Key sights include the Church of St Saviour in Chora (Kariye Museum), famed for its mosaics, the beautiful Ottoman Mihrimah mosque and the former palace of the Byzantine emperors, Blachernae (Tekfur Saray).
Pro-tips: For safety, avoid walking the walls at dusk. Reach the southern end of the walls by using the Marmaray metro line. At the end of your walk, catch a ferry down the scenic Golden Horn from Ayvansaray.
Cleanliness is an integral part of Islam © Images & Stories / Alamy Stock Photo
Steam-clean yourself in a hammam
Cleanliness is an integral part of Islam, and in the days before most homes had their own water supply, the hammam (Turkish bath) played a key role in the life of the city. Endowed by sultans, huge domed temples to hygiene arose amongst the city's largely wooden houses. Visitors today flock to get the hammam experience, lounging on the warm marble, sluicing themselves with warm water from elegant copper bowls or surrendering to the pummelling and scrubbing of an expert masseuse. The Hürrem Sultan, Cağaloğlu and Çemberlitaş are just three gems in the Old City.
Pro-tip: The three hammams above have separate sections for men and women – for a mixed-sex session, try the Süleymaniye hammam.
Stroll the colourful cobbled streets of Balat © damla karacabay / Getty Images
Stroll the streets of Balat and Fener
The narrow, cobbled streets of these two districts, tumbling down the hillside to the Golden Horn waterfront, were once the preserve of the city's Jewish, Armenian and Greek communities. Some of the crumbling late-19th-century European-style terraced houses are being bought up and gentrified, with a plethora of new vintage-style cafés springing up around St George Greek Orthodox Cathedral. It's a great area to just wander, but don't miss the recently restored and quirky cast-iron Bulgarian church of St Stephens.
Pro-tip: Ferries run from the pier at Karaköy (easy to reach from Sultanahmet) and stop at both Fener and Balat.
Dive into the maze of the Grand Bazaar © petekarici / Getty Images
Get lost in Istanbul's biggest bazaars
The Grand Bazaar with its 4,000-plus shops and the more intimate Spice Bazaar may be touristy, but these domed temples to late-Medieval consumerism still draw plenty of visitors. Dive into the maze of the Grand Bazaar for everything from fake designer jeans and handmade Turkish rugs to leather jackets and traditional gold jewellery. The Spice Bazaar does exactly what it says on the tin – in addition to dried fruits, nuts and the ubiquitous Turkish delight.
Pro-tip: Exit the spice bazaar via its western gate and wander up bustling Hasırcılar Sokak ('street of the strawmakers') to revel in hole-in-the-wall shop after shop selling everything from straw brooms to plump pistachios, all the while smelling the delicious aroma wafting from Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi, one of Istanbul's premier coffee roasters.
Have a rooftop drink and get a stunning view over the Old City © Tetyana Kochneva / Alamy Stock Photo
Enjoy a rooftop drink with sprawling city views
There are exceptions, but Istanbul's Old City is not noted for its nightlife. Hotel bars, however, present some of the best options for an evening drink in the area. Try the terrace of the Hotel Arcadia Blue at sunset for breathtaking views across the domes and minarets of the Old City, or check out the rooftop of the nearby Pierre Loti Hotel.
Pro-tip: It's not a hotel, and it serves tea, Turkish coffee and traditional fruit sherbet drinks rather than alcohol, but the views across the Galata Bridge and up the Bosphorus from the multiple terraces of the Ağa Kapısı café, hidden on a narrow street beneath the Süleymaniye Mosque, are sublime.
Visit the Süleymaniye Mosque at sunset to see how the Golden Horn gets its name © Ayhan Altun / Getty Images
Explore the Galata waterfront at sunset
Head down to the busy market area spanning Galata Bridge at sunset to see how the Golden Horn gets its name. Look up to the silhouette of the cascading domes and slender minarets of the Süleymaniye Mosque atop the city's third hill, and grab a cold beer in one of the myriad café-bars built into the bridge itself.
Pro-tip: Take care walking along the parapet of the bridge for photos – it's lined with local anglers casting their fishing hooks into the inlet below.
The Hagia Sophia is one of the world's truly great buildings © Emad Aljumah / Getty Images
Discover the iconic Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque
Over a thousand years of history separates these two monumental and iconic buildings, rising proudly some 500 metres (1,640 feet) apart in the heart of Sultanahmet. Start with the Hagia Sophia, or Church of the Holy Wisdom, built in 527 at the behest of Justinian (an important emperor of the Byzantine Empire). Today a museum, it is one of the world's truly great buildings, with its awe-inspiring central dome and gold mosaic-covered interior. A short stroll across a green and fountain-adorned square brings you to the domed Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii), built deliberately opposite the Hagia Sophia to emulate the wonders of the earlier structure. It gets its name from the largely blue Iznik tiles, over 20,000 of them, that adorn its interior.
Pro-tips: Make sure you visit the square between the two buildings at night to see their architectural beauty enhanced by subtle lighting.
Stock up at the Çarşamba market © Leyla S Ismet / Alamy Stock Photo
Buy vegetables for the week at Çarşamba (Wednesday) market
The city's oldest, largest and most vibrant street market has given its name to an entire district: Çarşamba ('Wednesday' in Turkish). Sprawling for what seems like miles along the streets radiating out from the imperial Fatih Mosque, there's stall after stall heaped with fruit, vegetables, household utensils and clothes. Çarşamba is noted for its conservatism, so expect to see plenty of shoppers dressed in traditional clothes, and come dressed modestly yourself.
The Topkapı Palace is in fact a whole series of buildings © Michael Harris / Alamy Stock Photo
Visit Topkapı Palace, the nerve centre of an empire
The Topkapı Palace is a whole series of buildings set amongst gardens, rather than a Versailles-style edifice, and a half-day visit is barely sufficient to do it justice. From here, assorted Ottoman sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to Arabia and from North Africa to Crimea. There are tiled kiosks, pleasure gardens, armouries and vast kitchens to explore – and the views across the Bosphorus to Asia are second to none.
Pro-tip: For a discounted, fast-track entry to the palace (and many other museums, including the Hagia Sophia), get a five-day Museum Pass Istanbul (this can be purchased online, from many hotels or at the museums themselves).


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