Rethinking Hip-Hop ED Through Intersectional Collective Identities (original) (raw)

As a teenager, I recall routinely sitting in the group home living room. I was constantly surrounded by other black teenage residents who took pride in showing off their loose durags, fresh Jordans and fresh white tee's, while ecstatically watching hip-hop videos on the BET channel. In a day's time, this would go on for hours. That TV box which transmitted hip-hop sounds with moving images were venerated the same way religious relics were praised by priests, while dealing with the harsh reality of growing up without parents. For the same reason, not once did we question the messages in those hip-hop videos nor did we believe music corporations created these videos for our consumption in order to increase their profit. In school, the word " hip-hop " was never uttered by teachers and seemed dichotomous with the standardized exams we had to pass to graduate high school. Furthermore, it was through those hip-hop videos that Black identities were manifested and oftentimes made contradictory to other people of color equating hip-hop with being solely an African American genre. The contradiction created a lot of tension in the group home and in the neighborhood through gang rivalries and fights in schools where African Americans, Latinos, and Asians all wanted to claim hip-hop. Asian, Latinos and African Americans were displayed as different groups who lacked any relational identities and integrated histories of social activism. I was oblivious to the connection between the Civil Rights Movement and hip-hop's origins, which began in the Bronx by marginalized people from the Caribbean alongside African Americans. Little did I know that hip-hop was a recurrence, due to the fact that many Caribbeans (including the Hispanic Caribbean) had traveled to Harlem almost half a century before during the Harlem Renaissance and had contributed to jazz, bebop, cubop, and soul along other Black 67