Put Tupac on the SAT Exam

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Tupac's handwritten poem "The Rose that Grew From Concrete," via cleeclothing.com

Tupac’s handwritten poem “The Rose that Grew From Concrete,” via cleeclothing.com

Imagine what would happen if Tupac’s “Changes” appeared on the SAT Reading exam:

  • Every high school in the country would scramble to start teaching its students to close-read rap songs
  • Rappers would suddenly be acknowledged as writers of poetry, whose lyrics contain the same poetic, narrative, and rhetorical devices–metaphor, irony, anaphora, character, apostrophe, setting, motifs, anecdote, allusion–as other canonized literary texts
  • The SAT would have to acknowledge dialect diversity, preface its “Complete these sentences correctly” section with “Using Standard English…,” and critical language awareness would suddenly appear in high school English curricula
  • Curriculum planners and students would see contemporary writing as worthy of study 

Continue reading →

Shame and Shamelessness: What I’ve Been Reading This Week

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In National Journal, NPR’s Michel Martin brings race to the gendered discussion of “having it all” in her nuanced “What I’ve Left Unsaid.”

On her tumblr Rebgold, my day school classmate Rebecca’s beautiful images and words about the current crisis in Gaza, centering on the universal image of “Mayim-Agua-Water-Wasser.”

In the New York Times Magazine, Nicola Twilley’s fun and thoughtful “What do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do with Global Warming?”

On Open Democracy, an interview with philosopher Judith Butler about her controversial, anti-violence position on Israel-Palestine.

Shuhada Street, via theAtlantic.com (Nayef Hashlamoun/Reuters)

Shuhada Street, via theAtlantic.com (Nayef Hashlamoun/Reuters)

On BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen’s “Down and Dirty History of TMZ” and its founder Harvey Levin.

In the Atlantic, Megan Garber talks the capitalistic genius of Kimmy K in “Kapitalism and Kim Kardashian”–and I’ll have more to say on this one soon, I think.

On HNN, U of M history professor Juan Cole’s post on the geopolitical history of Israel-Palestine, in response to a skirmish on theAtlantic.com between Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg spurred by an earlier blog post by Cole.

Also in The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky interviews @FeministaJones on her anti-harrassment campaign #YouOkSis, which centers black women’s experiences in this conversation.

Finally, in HaAretz, Amira Hass’s “Israel’s Moral Defeat Will Haunt Us for Many Years,” and in the Atlantic, Ayelet Waldman’s “The Shame of Shuhada Street.”

These Ears Ain’t Loyal

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Kanye Kendrick lookalike wannabe GGgggrrrrrrr, via theroot.com

Kanye Kendrick lookalike wannabe GGgggrrrrrrr, via theroot.com

I need to make a confession: I love the song “Loyal.” I’m thrilled every time it comes on the radio, and I don’t have to pay Chris Brown to hear it. It tastes like candy in my ear holes. I just want to listen to it on repeat, its ringtone rhythms pouring sugar down my spine.  Continue reading →

YOU ARE HAIR: Pixie Cut Mania

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I am SO excited to share this.

In March, I presented in the film podcast Bonnie and Maude‘s live show, YOU ARE HAIR. Yes, it was all about hair. Now you can watch the clip, interspersed with my visuals, below. (You *should* watch the whole thing. But to watch mine, select “Playlist” in the upper-left-hand corner and choose video #3.)

In my talk, I discuss the winter wave of celebrity pixie cuts, focusing specifically on Beyonce and Miley Cyrus–how they debuted their cuts, and how they were constructed in their music videos. Enjoy–and he sure to check out the rest of the night’s program here! Special thanks to Kseniya and Eleanor for hosting and producing these clips!!

Katching Up With The Kardashians…Season 1

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Last night I told myself I would post every day for 10 work days, so I’ll start my POWER 10 with a confession…

I watched the first season of Keeping Up With The Kardashians last week. (They’re 21 minute episodes, in my defense!) I have become a total stan for Kimye in the last two years and thought watching Kimmy K’s show would be a fun way to indulge my new obsession even further.

via celebuzz.com

via celebuzz.com

I also imagined that the 9 seasons of KUWTK would keep me company for much of my second year of my PhD program, which starts in August–but given that I’m well into the second season now, I’ll be lucky if this lasts me through the end of 2014.

The first season was shot and debuted in 2007, right after Kim’s sex tape came out, and seems to depict a family at a crossroads: do we leverage our daughter’s smutty 15-minutes of fame into something bigger, or do we keep our heads down and try to stay “classy,” a word that hilariously and apparently earnestly recurs during the first season.

Apparent in that effort are some early fissures in Kris and Bruce Jenner’s marriage, which now seem prophetic. But who knows if they were always there or if the terms of Kardashian fame were itself the problem. In the first season, Kris lies repeatedly to Bruce, and always because of the girls’ sexualized business arrangements: once to cover their trip to Puerto Vallarta to pose for Girls Gone Wild’s swimwear line, and another time to hide that Kim may be posing for Playboy. But it’s easy to see from Kris’s goading that she knows that selling her sexuality is Kim’s only open path to fame. Kris seems like Kim’s fluffer as she encourages her to strip down for Hef.

One thing’s for sure about the first season: Kim seemed different back then. She had a sense of humor, and potentially a slightly lumpier nose.

This is the first time I’ve ever really watched a non-competition reality show, and so I find myself wracked with the question of scriptedness: did Kris and her daughters really lie to Bruce? did he really just hop on a jet and fly down to them in Mexico? Did these events happen in this order? How much did the producers say? Did they edit out the weird stuff that Khloe and Kourtney must have said to the cameramen?

I guess I”ll never know. But I can’t wait until the girls start wearing skinny jeans.

“All of us were promised a speaking part”: weeks and weeks of what I’ve been reading

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In Alternet, Soraya Chemaly’s “The Words Every Woman Should Know,” on gendered speech privilege and disparity.

In Vox, Jeff Chang speaks with Kelsey McKinney on the Beats-Apple deal

Continue reading →

“Hip-Hop’s New New York”: What I’ve been reading this week

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photo by Jessica Lehrman, via NYTimes.com – see below

In the New York Times, Jessica Lehrman’s photo essay “Hip-Hop’s New New York” 

In the Zinn Education Project blog, Sudie Hoffman’s “Rethinking Cinco de Mayo”

In io9, Annalee Newitz’s “How Iran Became One of the World’s Most Futuristic Countries,” on reproductive health freedom and education in Iran

In Buzzfeed, Anne Helen Peterson’s “Zac Efron Bros Down to Grow Up”

In Grantland, Molly Lambert’s “The Visor and the Beret”

In Elle, “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” – Tavi Gevinson interviews Miley Cyrus

In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist”

And some listening for ya: tracks from Music Band’s “Can I Live”

Literacy in “Awkward Black Girl”

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[this is an excerpt from a final-paper-in-progress called “’Write the story yourself’: Literacy as Social Practice in Hiphop Feminist Art, Scholarship, and Activism”]

In her “Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” L. H. Stallings points to the way that Issa Rae, the creator and star of the web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, has her protagonist J “strap on hip hop” as an outlet for her righteous anger (136). Stallings is referring to those moments when, in fits of frustration, J sits down on her bed and writes furious, explicit, gangsta-inflected rhymes. In her text, Stallings focuses on J’s male-oriented gender performance to explore the queerness of what she calls the “Black Ratchet Imagination.” But we might also see J’s scenes writing raps, one of which appears in the series’s first episode, as a complex literacy event* that not only queers J’s gender identity (a theme brought up in other parts of the episode) but also queers, or questions, her middle-class status, her participation in the information economy, and professional rappers’ processes when writing ridiculous, shallow, expletive-laced lyrics. Continue reading →

“Not exactly hollow, but a little haunted”: what I’m reading this week

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20140428-145257.jpg

In Noisey, Questlove’s “When The People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America”

In The Nation, Alexandra Hootnick’s “Teachers Are Losing Their Jobs, But Teach for America is Expanding. What’s Wrong With That?”

OnBuzzfeed, Syreeta McFadden’s “Teaching the Camera to See My Skin” and Jarett Wieselman’s “How Judy Grier Became Americas Most In-Demand Best Friend”

In Citypages, Jessica Lussenhop’s “Inside the multi-million dollar essay-scoring business”

In The Jerusalem Post, Jacob Magid’s “Occupation – That word makes me uncomfortable, too”

On Sounding Out!, Regina Bradley’s “‘Take Em to Chuch’: OutKast and the Sounds of the Southern Black Church”

In The Chronicle, John Fraire’s “Why Your College Should Dump the SAT”

…and everything about Donald Sterling

iDialogues: on racism, the Clippers, and what to do now

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[like you, I’ve been obsessively following this story for the last two days. what follows is a text message conversation I just had with a friend and major sports fan, supplemented with some of the texts we reference. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments. -TB]

Embedded image permalink

via @BuzzFeedNews: “Clippers Turn Warmups Inside Out Before Playoff Game After Owner’s Racism Controversy”

https://twitter.com/tessalaprofessa/status/460492328541511680 https://twitter.com/tessalaprofessa/status/460492482136924162 photo1

Continue reading →

What I’m reading this week

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From Salon, “Gentrification’s Insidious Violence: the Truth About American Cities,” by Daniel Jose Older, and Brittney Cooper’s “It’s not about you, white liberals: Why attacks on radical people of color are so misguided”

From Colorlines, “Gentrification Report: Black and Latino Displacement is remaking the Bay Area” by Julianne Hing, and

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed, “The Moral Panic in Literary Studies,” by Marc Bousquet, about how growing numbers of English department jobs are in comp/rhet and media studies, verses literature.

From The New York Times, “10 Courses With a Twist,” by Laura Pappano, a list of popular college classes each with a long enough explanation to enlighten.

From GQ: “Ryan McGinley: Naked and Famous,” by Alice Gregory

From Dissent, “The University and the Company Man,” by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Veronica Mars and the Bummer Patriarchy

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Last night I watched the first episode of Veronica Mars and it blew my mind. I have never felt a need to write an episode recap so badly as I did watching that pilot last night. I mean, holy shit, one of the first shots of the episode is of Veronica cutting a black classmate down from a flagpole to which he’s been duct-taped, naked, her face at about waist-height.

Granted I’ve been studying lynching, but these are loaded opening shots for a girls’ after-school special. Continue reading →

On Ethos (or, White Woman Writing Kanye West)

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I recently published an essay in The American Reader, “Yeezy Rising,” which related mainstream media’s persistent mockery of Kanye West to historical discourses around lynching, a public media spectacle which celebrated the dehumanization and murder of outspoken, upwardly mobile black men. The piece was generally well-received, especially, I noticed, by other white academics. Despite my promotion of the piece and my social media connections with scholars of color, however, I also noted that writers and thinkers of color generally didn’t seem interested in my article. I found myself wondering if I had mishandled my subject or if it was somehow offensive or distasteful to a more sensitive and discerning crowd.
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One comment at the end of the piece offered some insight. Continue reading →

A Tough Love: “Beyoncé,” Mutuality, and the Dirty South

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In a previous post, I discussed some of the lyrics on R. Kelly’s new album, “Black Panties,” alongside the words of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in his essay “The Body’s Grace.” Looking at the lyrics to “Marry the Pussy” alongside similar lyrics in songs like Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Miguel’s “How Many Drinks,” I noticed a similar ability to disguise male desire and male need in the trappings of celebrating women. Each of these three songs is about what a male agent wants, and each of these three songs denies or obscures the agency of the women they’re sung about or to. But in making women (or women’s body parts) the objects of desire, these songs lull critics into thinking they are pro women, so that Jezebel calls “Marry the Pussy” a “magnificent ode to pussy,” and another source I can’t find calls rapist R. Kelly’s album “sex-positive.”

still from "No Angel" -- Bey's homage to Houston

still from “No Angel” — Bey’s homage to Houston

Continue reading →

“We are pleased because we are pleasing”: Black Panties and The Body’s Grace

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Image

via Pitchfork.com

Last weekend, in the car with two besties from Chicago, I asked a really buzzkill question when one of them started talking about R. Kelly’s new musical proposal, “Marry the Pussy.” Echoing the kind of infamous celebration of the new album that appeared in feminist publication Jezebel a few weeks ago, my friend insisted that “Marry the Pussy” was a celebration, what Jezebel writer Isha Aran called “a magnificent ode to pussy.”

“But,” I asked, the mood dying around me already, “…does the pussy have any agency?” Continue reading →

#WeCantStop Appropriating Blackness: A Bibliography

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Y’all, it is a bull market out there for appropriating Black culture. Sell, sell, sell, ’cause folks are buying. You got twerkers on hand? Set them around a white lady and open the auction. Miley was just the beginning. It’s a bonanza out there.

a still from Miley's video "We Can't Stop," via vimeo.com

a still from Miley’s video “We Can’t Stop,” via vimeo.com

For a few months now people have been asking me when I’m gonna blog about Miley Cyrus–her VMAs performance, her recent music videos, her appropriation of ratchet cultural signifiers–it all seemed so in my cultural wheelhouse. There was only one thing standing in my way: I don’t like Miley Cyrus, and I don’t like her music. No special offense, really, to Miley. It’s just, I’m a busy lady, so when I blog about something it’s because, even if I find it problematic, I am attracted to the music or the star enough to spend my free time researching, listening, and writing around them. Continue reading →

Grades, Schmades

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Last week I started to have this funny feeling, a feeling I had never had before. My students were e-mailing each other the first drafts of their Unit 1 Blog Posts, and I was reading with such glee how much this whole literacy-based inquiry had captured their interest. Every Single One of them engaged their personal literacies in the service of some kind of argument about what literacy means or how we teach reading and writing today. Every Single One of them challenged a traditional portrait of literacy that only values alphabetic, academic reading and writing. That is to say, every single on of them did, to some extent, what I asked them to do on their assignment sheet, and what I really wanted them to do. They engaged.

Zen, Motorcycle Maintenance, and a Crashed Crop Duster in the Background

Zen, Motorcycle Maintenance, and a Crashed Crop Duster in the Background

And for the first time ever I had this crazy little feeling like, I didn’t want to give them grades. Continue reading →

A Holiday D’Var Torah for Syria

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On Thursday morning I attended Rosh Hashana services at a Conservative synagogue in Dewitt, NY, neighbor to my new home of Syracuse. While it was odd to attend a new synagogue by myself, I appreciated this congregation’s open services policy and far preferred it to the option of visiting the Hillel on the University campus where I am a graduate student.

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a still from Emad Burnat and Guy David’s “5 Broken Cameras”

Before the Torah reading, the woman who would be reading gave a short d’var Torah, or commentary, on that morning’s reading: Genesis 21 through—27? 28?–, which covered the birth and binding of Isaac. In her short speech, the woman reflected on the moment when the matriarch Sarah, finally a mother, tells her husband Abraham to cast out his slave Hagar and their son Ishmael. She compared this moment to those columns in magazines which proclaim, “Stars: They’re just like us!” According to this shul’s Torah reader, it was reassuring to see the stars of the Torah behaving in imperfect ways. As a mother, this woman said, she understood Sarah’s selfish desire to save all her husband’s wealth for her own son, and send her husband’s first son and son’s mother, their slave, packing into an unforgiving desert.

As the woman chanted this fundamental story from the Torah, I read through the passage in English. And I was struck, not by Sarah’s relatability, but to her cruelty at a time of family celebration. Continue reading →

SCHOOLED [the first three pages of my imaginary Comp/Rhet book]

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[for the first meeting of CCR 611, history of composition, we were asked to write the first three pages of our future first book in the field– pure whimsy, of course, since we’re all first and second years. Here’s what I came up with.]

Rap is a referendum on America’s failed schools. In a moment too reminiscent of our own, urban youths stood outside the walls of schools with no budget for art class and made a whole culture out of the detritus of the society which had discarded them. From spoken language the rapper spat verse; the DJ scratched the break beat into vinyl; writers painted reclaimed language on subway cars; postmodern dancers fashioned studios out of cardboard; all of these children, artists and intellectuals, dropping the sweet science of hiphop. Continue reading →

I spent 900 days in TA orientation and All I Got Was This Lousy Blog Post Idea

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Q: Why, oh, why do we blog?
A: So that the Internet will remember all the ephemera that otherwise get written in notebooks, lovingly stored and transported around the country with every move, and never opened again!

Here is what I learned in six days of TA orientation. Continue reading →

My 100th Post!

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In honor of my 100th post on Hiphopocracy, I would like to throw down the gauntlet and say that so far the best thing about Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience has been the increased radio play of the better songs from all of his other albums. I also would like to place my bet now that, out of both volumes of this album (we hear a second part is to be expected), “Mirrors” will be the only really good song, with two additional decent singles of “Seniorita” quality.

via People.com

via People.com

(Have you noticed how all of these songs are about falling in love, but JT doesn’t sound like he’s fallen in love? Just like how those People magazine wedding photos look so staged? Paging Anne Helen Petersen. What happens when a million-dollar star image doesn’t *stick*?  ) Continue reading →

Part II, Chapter 2

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Lakewood Park, ca 1952, by William A. Garnet. via designobserver.com

Lakewood Park, ca 1952, by William A. Garnet. via designobserver.com

I am shouldering my way through this discombobulating book of essays by Joan Didion, Where I Was From, reading it with a dedication dedicated to trying to understand this discombobulated place I moved to, California (which is, incidentally, Where She Was From), when finally, in Part II, Chapter 2, it all clicks in: Lakewood. Lakewood, a planned city of 17,500 homes south of Orange County, surrounded by defense contractors on all sides, a town built around a mall, supported by income flowing from the military-industrial complex, a happy town which as the defense jobs shuttered in the early 90s found itself on the national media stage for the vagrancy and alleged rapes committed by a clique of its post-adolescent males, the Spurs.

And I think, this essay is so good. Continue reading →

The Word You’re Looking for is “Excoriated”…Or, In Which I Win at Bad Ally Bingo

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via @NanticokeNDN

Yesterday I got schooled by two feminists of color on twitter, @NanticokeNDN and @thetrudz. It was kind of like being workshopped at life. You get a ton of criticism really fast, and it stings going down, and some of it’s useful and some of it’s not. Thinking through that critique, and implementing it, is helpful and important. Continue reading →