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White Empathy and The Educational Neutralization of Hip-Hop: Albert Stabler, Ph.D. Illinois State University
White Empathy and The Educational Neutralization of Hip-Hop: Albert Stabler, Ph.D. Illinois State University
White Empathy and The Educational Neutralization of Hip-Hop: Albert Stabler, Ph.D. Illinois State University
ABSTRACT
There are many reasons why the rich popular tradition of hip-hop culture
has become attractive to teachers as a means of engaging students, and
many classroom experiments with hip-hop have surely met or surpassed
the teacher’s curricular expectations. The political implications of such
pedagogical appropriations are worth considering, however. I reflect in
this article on my own experiences as a white art teacher and hip-hop
enthusiast working with students of color in a large city. Drawing on Black
Studies theorists associated with a tendency known as “Afro-pessimism,”
I make larger connections between the philanthropic aspirations of white
teachers like myself and the experiences of Black and brown students in
American public schools, as well as the troubled history of sentimentalist
anti-racist white mimicry in education and American culture more
generally. While I used graffiti art in several lessons over the years, my
most meaningful classroom encounter with hip-hop was whimsical and
accidental, when a sound project took an unexpected turn. Using this
experience as an informative example, I contend that the sensuality,
humor, and resistance that appears throughout much of Black popular
culture, while fascinating to non-Blacks in and beyond the U.S., remains
inaccessible to an anti-Black institutional gaze. It seems to me that hip-
hop thrives in Black and brown public schools via infiltration, rather than
through an instrumentalization that, in its politics of respectability, seeks
to negate the pleasure that gives it life.
Funk lessons1
I love hip-hop culture and I love working with young people. I am a
white man who grew up in a white suburb in the 1980s listening to
Run-DMC and the Fat Boys, among others, and became a young adult
in the 1990s listening to A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang Clan,
among others. Around that time, in the late ‘90s, I also became an art
teacher in a large Midwestern city, working with groups of Black and
brown young people. My teaching drew on ideas expounded in Bomb
I don’t mean that I was a poser for loving hip-hop music and culture.
Anyone can be a fan, of course. But the bar for authenticity is high
when a teacher invokes a living cultural form in the classroom, and
it’s way higher for a white teacher working with students of color. I
don’t share the under-represented history of communal resilience and
resistance that my students shared; I inhabit the historic position of
free whites who have been granted advantage, visibility, and power
through implements of law and culture, founded on and maintained
by institutions that enacted violence, deprivation, and neglect
upon nonwhites. This is worth dwelling on, not in order to devalue
the enjoyable play with expressive materials and cultural forms
happening in classrooms or anywhere else, but, when borrowing or
Wokeness on snooze
4 This paper runs the risk of falsely suggesting that Latinx communities (who
clearly suffer under xenophobic white supremacy) were and are less than cen-
tral to the development of hip-hop culture. A postcolonial critique of hip-hop
education drawing on Latin American scholars could productively overlap
with this one focusing on Afro-pessimism.
White Empathy and Educational Neutralization | 237 |
“teachers, missionaries, and plantation managers strived to inculcate
a self-interested ethic that would motivate the formerly enslaved to be
dutiful and productive laborers” (p. 128).
5 Terrenda White (2016) examines and addresses the direct effect that Teach
For America has had on the declining numbers of Black teachers working in
public schools.
References