Three important notes about this file

*AFF METHODS*

Burn it Down

Violent revolution is key to empowerment and unity

Fanon 61- revolutionary, existentialist thinker (Frantz, “The Wretched of the Earth,” p. 51-52)

When it is achieved during a war of liberation the mobilization of the masses introduces the notion of common cause, national destiny, and collective history into every consciousness. Consequently, the second phase, i.e, nation building, is facilitated by the existence of this mortar kneaded with blood and rage. This then gives us a better understanding of the originality of the vocabulary used in underdeveloped countries. During the colonial period the people were called upon to fight against oppression. Following national liberation they are urged to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The struggle, they say, goes on. The people realize that life is an unending struggle. The violence of the colonized, we have said, unifies the people. By its very structure colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism is not merely content to note the existence of tribes, it reinforces and differentiates them. The colonial system nurtures the chieftainships and revives the old marabout confraternities. Violence in its practice is totalizing and national. As a result, it harbors in its depths the elimination of regionalism and tribalism. The nationalist parties, therefore, show no pity at all toward the kaids and the traditional chiefs. The elimination of the kaids and the chiefs is a prerequisite to the unification of the people. At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic, and even if they have been demobilized by rapid decolonization, the people have time to realize that liberation was the achievement of each and every one and no special merit should go to the leader. Violence hoists the people up to the level of the leader. Hence their aggressive tendency to distrust the system of protocol that young governments are quick to establish. When they have used violence to achieve national liberation, the masses allow body to come forward as “liberator.” They prove themselves to be jealous of their achievements and take care not to place their future, their destiny, and the fate of their homeland into the hands of a living god. Totally irresponsible yesterday, today they are bent on understanding everything and determining everything. Enlightened by violence, the people’s consciousness rebels against any pacification. The demagogues, the opportunists and the magicians now have a difficult task. The praxis which pitched them into a desperate man-to-man struggle has given the masses a ravenous taste for the tangible. Any attempt at mystification in the long term becomes virtually impossible.

Hip Hop Good

Rhetorically engaging the African-American body through Hip-Hop needs to precede any political discussion because politics REVOLVES around their oppression and liberation and is therefore necessary to understanding how politics FUNCTIONS which remains untouched under their articulation of the focus of debate

Cohen 2k6 [Cathy Cohen is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author of the book The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics and the co-editor of the anthology Women Transforming Politics.) "African American Youth: Broadening our Understanding of Politics, Civic Engagement and Activism ." Youth Activism . N.p., 7 June 2006. Web.18 Jan. 2012.<http://ya.ssrc.org/african/Cohen/>//liam]
Arguably more than any other subgroup of Americans, African American youth reflect the challenges of inclusion and empowerment in the post-civil rights period. When one looks at a wide array of some of the most controversial and important issues challenging the country, African American young people are often at the center of these debates and policies. Whether the issue is the mass incarceration of African Americans, the controversy surrounding Affirmative Action as a policy to redress past discriminatibn, the increased use of high stakes testing to regulate standards of education, debates over appropriate and effective campaigns for HIV and AIDS testing and prevention programs, or efforts to limit comprehensive sex education in public schools, most of these initiatives and controversies are focused on, structured around, and disproportionately impact young, often marginally positioned African Americans. In contrast to the centrality of African American youth to the politics and policies of the country, their perspectives and voices have generally been absent from not only public policy debates, but also academic research. As the presence of African American youth as policy targets or perceived threat in the public mind has increased, researchers actually have less systematic information on the political ideas and actions of this group than we did 30 years ago. Increasingly, researchers and policy-makers have been content to detail and measure the behavior and negative outcomes of young African Americans with little concern for measuring and analyzing their attitudes, ideas, wants, desires and politics. As researchers, it is time to recommit ourselves to understanding and exploring the politics, activism and political attitudes of African American youth in all of their complexity. While researchers and policy-makers may be paying less attention to the ideas and politics of African American youth, these young people continue to engage in both traditional and extra-systemic politics. The history of black youth activism personifies struggles among those disenfranchised to force the country to live up to its promise of equality and justice. Clearly, the work of young African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement is what most people reference when thinking about black youth activism; nearly all the leaders of this historic movement where young people under the age of 30. African American young people lead boycotts, freedom rides, voter registration drives and rallies across the south. African American high school students sacrificed their safety and often disobeyed their parent’s wishes as they engaged in civil disobedience, filling the jails with their young bodies. But no matter how important young African Americans proved to be to the Civil Rights Movement, they have been equally active and instrumental in other movements and politics. Whether it is the Black Power movement, the Anti-apartheid movement, or the organized mobilization against mass incarceration, African American youth have been and continue to be at the center of these efforts, providing leadership, analysis, and energy. We must, therefore, expand our understanding of when and where politics happens, pursuing the larger question of what is political and what counts as politics for young African Americans. For example, there has been a continuous debate in the hip hop community, among journalists and a few researchers, about hip hop as a cultural vehicle of politics for African American youth. In a series of focus groups I held with African Americans ages 18-21 in Chicago in 2004, there was general agreement among participants thathip hop culture was especially influential in the lives of younger African Americans and had the potential to be a significant political force. One participant proclaimed, “If just half the folks who listen to rap music could come together, this government wouldn’t know what hit them." Another explained, “Hip hop is where we can talk to each other about all the things done wrong to us.” Ironically, in the realm of politics, traditional researchers have been the last to take the political influence of hip hop seriously, focusing their work instead on traditional measures of politics, and the questions of whether young people vote and if they are engaged in standard forms of civic activity. And while I, as a political scientist, am interested in young African Americans and their engagement in traditional forms of participation (including voting), I am also interested in the evolving notion of hip hop as not only a cultural form, but also a significant mode of political expression. In the last presidential election, the presence of the hip hop community was visible. Whether it was P. Diddy’s “Citizen Change Campaign” that used the slogan “vote or die,” or Russell Simmon’s Hip Hop Summit Action Network, or even Eminem’s release of “Mosh” just weeks before the 2004 presidential election, all these factors could be hypothesized to influence the politics and activism of African American youth in ways that the Democrats and Republicans never approached. Moreover, beyond the electoral sphere, hip hop artists and cultural workers are to be found among those public celebrities and activists willing to lend their names and energy to issues such as AIDS, debt relief for Africa, and opposition to the prison industrial complex. Finally,the use of hip-hop across the world as a cultural form of rebellion is evident in countries such as Cuba, Brazil, and South Africa. Thus, as researchers,we would be negligent if we did not fully explore the connections being made by young African Americans between hip hop culture and politics. For example, does this group understand hip hop to be an alternative mode of political action, making visible their political, social and economic condition? To what degree do the themes evident in hip hop culture shape or influence the political thoughts and actions of African American youth? Empirically, does listening to certain forms of hip hop lessen or increase the probability that individuals will engage in politics, develop oppositional political attitudes, or feel greater alienation from the political system?

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy challenges traditional paradigms, while providing a framework to challenge systems that reproduce social inequality. Their belief that debate is a meritocratic educational system derives from a position of privledge.

Akorn 09 (A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009)

In this article I combine hip hop studies with critical pedagogy to introduce a new framework called CHHP. CHHP differs from hip hop pedagogy because it simultaneously (1) foregrounds race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of oppression; (2) challenges traditional paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the experiences of students of color; (3) centralizes experiential knowledge of students of color; (4) emphasizes the commitment to social justice; and finally, (5) encourages a transdisciplinary approach (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Embedded in this framework is a pedagogical approach that uses Freire’s problem-posing method and case study research as tools for helping student teachers to identity and name the societal and systemic problems students of color face, analyze the causes of the problem, and find solutions (Smith-Maddox & Solorzano, 2002, p. 80). This framework is important precisely because it challenges the role that schools play in reproducing social inequality. Schools use “hidden” and “official” curricula that promote the hegemony of the dominant class (Apple, 1990), and embrace pedagogies that devalue the voices and backgrounds of urban and suburban students of color (Friere, 1970; McLaren, 2002). School cultures and practices encourage students to believe that a meritocratic educational system exists, that students are responsible for their own failure (Akorn, 2008a, MacLeod, 1987), and that issues of racial inequality, hip hop, and social justice are not worthy of study inside or outside schools. CHHP challenges these assumptions by suggesting that transformative education for the poor and disempowered begins with the creation of pedagogic spaces where marginalized youth are enabled to gain a consciousness of how their own experiences have been shaped by larger social institutions. Undoubtedly, it is difficult, however not impossible, to change the tacit beliefs, understandings, and world views that institutions of “higher learning” often hold toward youth of color and low-income youth. However, I contend that by implementing CHHP it is possible to increase the space in the curriculum for students to unlearn their stereotypical knowledge of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other axes of social difference while analyzing, problem solving, and theorizing what it means to be part of a diverse population (Smith-Maddox & Solorzano, 2002)

Hip Hop as a liberatory practice functions within a historical and cultural manner that challenges the white education system

Akorn 09 [A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009 //liam]

In trying to make sense of the relationship between hip hop and critical pedagogy, I argue that the use of hip hop as a liberatory practice is rooted in the long history of the Black freedom struggle and the quest for self-determination for oppressed communities around the world. As early as the late 1970’s, hip hop artists, such as KRS-One, also known as “The Teacher,” criticized the educational system, its power, its practices, and its pedagogy. In particular, “The Teacher” was concerned about the role of an embedded Eurocentricity in the U.S. public school curricula and its impact on Black children and youth. In “You Must Learn” (KRS-One, 1989) “The Teacher” flows: “It seems to me in a school that’s ebony, African history should be pumped up steadily, but it’s not and this has got to stop.” In another rhyme that sounds like it is straight out of a Black History Class, KRS-One (1989) further elucidates the importance of our “real” history: No one told you about Benjamin Banneker, a brilliant Black man (who created an) almanac... Granville Woods made the walkie talkie, Louis Latimer improved on Edison, Charles Drew did a lot for medicine, Garret Morgan made the traffic light, Harriet Tubman freed the slaves at night. By using Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) as a form of literacy for freedom, KRS-One paved the way for a younger generation of critical hip hop pedagogies. For example, New York Based Hip-Hopers, dead prez, draw on Malcolm X, Carter G. Woodson, and other Black freedom fighters in “they schools,” while offering a scathing critique of the ways in which Black folks remain mentally incarcerated if and when we rely on a Eurocentric education system rather than developing curriculum that reflects our own culture, history, socioeconomic, and spiritual realities (Alridge, 2005). According to dead prez (2000): They schools can’t teach us shit. My people need freedom, we trying to get all we can get… Tellin’ me white mans lies straight bullshit. They schools ain’t teaching us what we need to survive, they schools don’t educate, they teach people lies Through the use of “imagining”—a term Alridge (2005) describes as “the process by which Hip Hoppers reproduce or evoke images, events, people and symbols for the purpose of placing past ideas into closer proximity to the present” (p.229)—they “they schools” (dead prez, 2000) video is able to illuminate both symbolic and active forms of racism by equating the image of the noose with the ways in which the U.S. educational system means a slow death for too many students of color (Tatum, 1997)

Current structures of education lead us to being passive receptacles ready to replicate the current oppressive educational system

Akorn 09 [A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009 //liam]

The elements that form the basic core of CHHP draw on YPAR, Freirian pedagogy, and critical race theory to challenge racism and other intersections of social difference in order to prepare young people to be prospective teachers inside and outside of urban and suburban schools. Freire’s work, in particular, provides us with the foundations for a theory of democratic schooling that is linked to serving the most marginalized groups in our society. His critical praxis starts from the premise that all education is political, and thus schools are never neutral institutions (Smith-Maddox & Solozano, 2002). Freire (1970) firmly believed that one of the ways that schools maintain and reproduce the existing social order is by using the “banking method of education” (p.71). This approach often leads to: (1) students being viewed as passive receptacles waiting for knowledge to be deposited from the teacher, (2) mono-directional pedagogical formats whereby students do not feel their thoughts and ideas are important enough to warrant a two-way dialogue with teachers; (3)”cradle classrooms,” in which students are dependent on teachers for the acquisition of knowledge; and (4) students viewing schools as key mechanisms in the reproduction of inequality rather than places where education is seen as a practice of freedom, a place to build critical consciousness, and social mobility (Ginwright &Cammarota, 2002)

Hip Hop helps fight racism by invading the homes of the white youth

Reid 09 [Shaheem, MTV News ‘Hip-Hop Has Done More Than Any Politician To Improve Race Relations.’ March 20, 2009 //liam]

Jay-Z believes the influence that he and his peers have had on society goes beyond simply entertaining and showing people fresh new dances, the fliest clothes or high-priced luxury items. In the new issue of Best Life magazine, the Brooklyn-born mogul speaks about the powerful effect hip-hop has had on the country. "[Hip-hop] has changed America immensely," He is quoted in the magazine as saying. "Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations." "Racism is taught in the home ... and it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg," Jay continued. "It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?' "

They look at Hip Hop through a lens of homogeneity. Not all hip hop is bad, it can be revolutionary

Akorn 09 [A. A. Akorn, San Francisco State University, “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis, 2009 //liam]

Even though for generations Black people have successfully undertaken the task of educating our own children and youth, teachers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been slow to critically engage with hip hop as a viable discursive space full of liberatory potential. I am not suggesting that all forms of hip hop are emancipatory, revolutionary, or even resistive—many forms are not—and some are quite the opposite. However, I am suggesting that given the long history of socio-political conscious hip hop as a tool for illuminating problems of poverty, police brutality, patriarchy, misogyny, incarceration, racial discrimination, as well as love, hope joy—academic institution’s under-utilization of hip hop’s liberatory potential in the classroom is surprising.