Dr. Venus E. Evans-Winters
Between sweeping and breakneck industry changes, and recent data showing more than 300,000 Black women exiting or stated differently, being pushed out of the labor market, this structural and environmental dissonance has compounded and exacerbated a crisis of confidence in many scholars and administrators who have been forced to rethink their positionality within the field. We are suffering from an increase in anxiety and a decrease in the ability, capacity, or interest to think creatively and proactively in our roles. Our confidence and sense of agency are being eroded and undermined.
Having been schooled in academic professionalism, many scholars who grew up in urban America or in the heart of hip-hop culture have lost everything that makes them “them” and us, “us.” Many of us in the academy have lost our “swag,” in the face of erasure and apartheid-like conditions in higher education. By swag, we mean our collective sense of power that is derived from our love for rhythm (and blues), improvisation, and a boldacious confidence to speak truth to authority without fear of punishment.
Dr. Norris Chase
Recently, I (Venus) walked out of a learning space with students and colleagues present, where I felt welcomed, but not familiar. Despite the visible racial diversity, I know that I was still the “other” in the room. I left the convening confident in my message, but only later to be informed that I made a student who was not a minoritized student “uncomfortable.” Upon receiving the message from someone who also did not look like me or come from where I come from, I needed a soundtrack to navigate my complex emotions of rage (in receiving the message) and disappointment (in the messenger). My nervous system needed to be comforted. I yearned for a sensory experience that would make me feel safe in my body, and simultaneously, like I had the right to take up space in the world. There are times that I leave campus, and I have the urge to be more expansive-- spiritually and culturally. That’s what Hip Hop offered my generation.
Years ago, I (Norris) was talking to a Black student from Chicago who shared a simple but profound revelation about how his music choice helped him persist in college. As an engineering major, isolation, code-switching, and cultural shape-shifting were normal to him. As a coping mechanism, he listened to hip-hop music to ground and inspire him to look beyond the challenges of the current environment and forward to the rewards of completion. Unable to fully articulate his “fly in the buttermilk” experience of navigating a culturally isolating and intellectually challenging academic experience, this student’s musical selection illustrates how impactful, powerful, and inspiring hip hop can be as a framework and praxis in coping, creating, and navigating hostile environments.
Hip Hop has become one of America’s most significant exports and music genres. It offers us an authentic acceptance and recognition that higher education can provide an embodied framework for re-centering culture, creativity, and critical consciousness in teaching and research. In institutions of higher education, I (Venus) am Black, and I am a woman as well as a product of blue-collar America (born to people who are Indigenous to the Southern parts of America and Africa). These academies do not know or fail to see that many scholars of color embody the dualism of knowing that we are contributing to and upholding the knowledge economy while simply trying to express our creativity and talents, and understanding that education is a tool for personal and collective liberation. Hip hop as a form of expression and a way of life expresses this dualism most articulately and yet subversively.
As a Black woman and man with years of experience in higher education as faculty and administrators, we are used to being perceived as different or as existential threats to the status quo. Feelings of not belonging or systemic threats (i.e. microaggressions) many times can only be neutralized with music. Not any music but Hip Hop. Maybe rap? Maybe trap music? In moments of threats to our physical or intellectual presence, we do not want pop, neosoul, or blues; We need a sound, a beat, a rhythm, that promises to activate our spirit and to remind us that we yearn for a war cry (Akoben)! We need a sound that reminds us, “It’s bigger than you.”
…I rap 'bout what I know, what I go through
What I been through, not just for no dough
Even though the rent due, what I'm into ain't for no dough
Or just no fame, everything must change, nothin' remains the same
Sick of the same ol' thang, it's bigger than bling bling
~Dead Prez, 2000
In the above lyrics/stanza, excerpted from “It’s bigger than hip hop,” replace the word rap with teaching (or research or publishing). Hip hop offers us an authentic acceptance and recognition that higher education can provide an embodied framework for re-centering culture, creativity, and critical consciousness in teaching and research. In the midst of a representation crisis in higher education, many scholars of color embody the dualism of knowing that we are both interrupting knowledge apartheid and contributing to the status quo of education as cultural imperialism. Hip hop as a form of expression and a way of life expresses this dualism most articulately and yet subversively.
Reclaiming “Swag” as Intellectual Posture
“But I can’t teach you my swag
You can pay for school but you can buy class”
~Jay-Z, 2008
The representation crisis is asking us to leave our swag at the door; our connection to our respective communities, imagination, and to the radical possibility of knowledge production and liberation.
Hip Hop reminds us that our socio-political condition as the “other” in academia is not personal; we are a part of, and represent, a collective of peoples, histories, and stories that are yet to be realized in the eyes of the knowledge-class. There are people who exist who not only find our existence not palatable, but also the knowledge that we have to offer as dangerous.
During these challenging times in higher education, when any person or entity dares to mention or acknowledge diversity, intersectionality, and race, they are in real danger of becoming materially (i.e., faculty of color receive the most threats of violence) and economically (Black women have been pushed out of the labor force at higher rates) “disposable.”
The question we pose here is: In the face of a representation crisis in higher education, can our swag save us? We view hip hop as spiritual and ontological armour. Just when we want to give up, we are reminded that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. And our music calls us back home in ways that most cannot even imagine.
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Dr. Venus E. Evans-Winters is Director of PhD Programs and a Professor in the Department of Learning and Teaching & Department of Leadership Studies in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego.
Dr. Norris Chase is the Director of First-Generation Commitment, LSA Undergraduate Education in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.
