Punk Studies Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Racism is a manifestation of hate woven into the fabric of US American society. Fischer et al. state that “hatred is a hostile feeling directed toward another person or group that consists of malice, repugnance, and willingness to harm and even annihilate the object of hatred” (2018, 311). They further construe “hatred as the desire to harm, humiliate, or even kill its object—not always instrumentally, but rather to cause harm as a vengeful objective in itself”. Criminology scholar, Hall (2011), tells us that feelings of hate and hate-fuelled action stem from prejudice. He further asserts that hate crime refers to any crime “perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice” (2011, 11). Crucial in this view is that an action or attitude need not be of hateful intent in order to be hateful. Hate is the expression of prejudice, and hateful action comprises treating anyone “as an object of disgust, contempt, or disdain, as a lower kind of being merely in virtue of belonging to a group that is for some reason disvalued” (Kauppinen 2015, 1720-1721).
One of the most overt historical manifestations of hate as racism in Northern America is the 250 years of slavery and White Americans’ invention of the negro as category of subhuman (Baldwin 1962). While Black Americans have been legally free since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the presumed innate superiority of White people over people of colour is fundamental to US American culture and is reproduced as hegemony through policy and the resultant societal hierarchy (Kendi 2019). As hip-hop[1] education researcher, Love, writes, “racism is indelible to the Black body and the spirit, and the physical and spirit murdering of Black bodies is unfortunately part-and-parcel of America’s history. It is, in many ways, what makes America, America” (2016, 24). To reduce talk of race to “Black” and White” is arguably as clumsy as it is clearly incomplete, but it is helpful for the purposes of this chapter, since, writer and activist Baldwin tells us, “color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality” (1962, 104). Following the groundbreaking sociological work of Du Bois (1903), contemporary sociologist, Dyson (2017), notes that “the black-white divide has been the major artery through which the meaning of race has flowed” in the US (p. 5), calling the United States of America “a society that hates black folks in its guts” (p. 27).
The phenomenal economic growth of the US as a young nation in the 18th and 19th centuries, leading to the nation’s global economic domination today, was possible in large part due to slavery (Anderson 2016; Baptist 2014). As Leonardo (2002) notes, “a close relationship exists between economic exploitation and racial oppression” (30); this was nowhere more true than in the US. Critical racial and social justice scholar, DiAngelo, underlines how “American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants” (2018, xiii), which has led to the contemporary US social milieu in which “Black and white people… seem to occupy different universes, with worldviews that are fatally opposed to one another” (Dyson 2017, 3). These opposing perspectives and sets of experiences are a manifestation of “white America [operating as] as syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control [Black] bodies” – power without which “‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons” (Coates 2015, 42).
Whiteness is a fabricated and violently maintained ideology that privileges White people above all Others, and at any cost to those Others – “civilization secured and ruled by savage means” (Coates 2015, 32). Whiteness “protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect [Black Americans] with the club of criminal justice” (Coates 2015, 17-18). The ideology of Whiteness perpetuates the false and pernicious idea that to be White is to be racially neutral; this notion is central to colourblindness, a key component of hegemonic Whiteness which “pretends that racial recognition rather than racist rule is the problem to be solved”, and in doing so “reinforces whiteness as the unmarked norm against which difference is measured” and understood (Lipsitz 2019, 24).
Whiteness and White privilege are fundamental in maintaining systemic racism in the US. These terms speak to White people experiencing life (albeit often unconsciously), and being perceived, as individuals who represent the racial norm in relation to which Black people and others are construed as deviant or Other (Diangelo 2018; Eddo-Lodge 2017; Gallagher 1994; Martin et. al. 1996). White privilege is “the fact that if you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it”; at best, it is “dull, grinding complacency” (Eddo-Lodge 2017, 87) regarding the pervasiveness of systemic, racist injustice. Cooper (2019) notes accordingly how White America is “not compassionate, only polite, not good, but well-behaved” (361). Throughout this paper “White” and “Whiteness” are capitalized to reflect these meanings. “Black” and “Blackness” are also capitalized to refer to the experience and perception of people of colour being Othered as not-White and as less-than-White.
This power imbalance in America society is controlled and power wielded by the state and its agents, including the police, to whom I turn more below, creating of African Americans what civil rights law professor, Alexander (2010, 190), refers to as “a racial undercaste – a group defined wholly or largely by race that permanently locked out of mainstream society by law, custom, and practice”. The institution of schooling serves aso to maintain this racial hierarchy (Hodge 2018; Love 2012, 2016; Urbach 2019). Journalist and author, Coates, reflecting on his own experience in public school, notes that “schools did not reveal truths [about race], they concealed them” from children (2015, 27), and hip-hop scholar, Peterson (2016), illustrates how policy has prioritized criminalizing and incarcerating Black Americans over funding their education. Given that it costs almost nine times more to imprison a person for a year than it does to teach them in a public school (Peterson 2016, 32), it is difficult to imagine this reality as the result of anything other than ideology and deliberate intent. After all, education, which is always, fundamentally, political, is about who has and who controls knowledge, and by whom that knowledge is valued (Freire 2000; Giroux 2001; Illich 1970).
Love asserts her conviction that “dark people have never truly mattered in this country except as property and labor” (2019, 7). As Baldwin explains, for African Americans:
This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means they are superior to blacks (intrinsically that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared. (Baldwin 1962, 25-26).
As Akitunde observes, “racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every aspect of our reality”, calling racism a “multilayered syndrome” (1999, 2). What is presumed and enacted as normative and for White people in the US as just being, or being American, or being patriotic, is often felt by people of colour as “racist dehumanization” (Coates 2017, xv).
Following a short statement on my own positionality in relation to the US, racism and whiteness, I outline the theoretical lens of punk pedagogy. I then present a short description of my research method before entering into a brief discussion around punk pedagogy in rap music, providing examples of songs. I close with some concluding thoughts on rap, racism and punk pedagogy, urging music American music educators to do more to address the institutional racism at the core of US society.