International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 21, No.

5, SeptemberOctober 2008, 519535

Conceptualizing a critical discourse around hip-hop culture and Black male youth in educational scholarship and research
Darius Priera* and Floyd Beachumb
a

Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, Oxford, USA; bDepartment of Administrative Leadership, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA

(Received 30 April 2008; final version received 23 June 2008 )

Taylor and Francis TQSE_A_329947.sgm International 10.1080/09518390802297805 0951-8398 Original Taylor 2008 0 5 21 Mr. darius_prier@yahoo.com 000002008 DariusPrier &Article Francis (print)/1366-5898 Journal of Qualitative (online) Studies in Education

While much of mainstream qualitative research has focused on conventional methodology, in terms of axis of inquiry, epistemology, and approaches to ground the theory of its questions to construct knowledge, educational researchers have yet to conceptually develop an alternative praxis in our work which takes into account hiphop culture. More specifically, research which investigates the social reality of youth, particularly Black males. The authors give an historical overview of hip-hop culture, and examine the social, political and economic context from which the art form emerged. Second, they articulate why it is important to discuss hip-hop culture as the genre relates to Black male youth. Third, they explore the moral and ethical dilemmas in the wider public about hip-hop culture. Fourth, the authors give a critical discussion on the transformative and emancipatory possibilities in scholarship and research praxis regarding Black male youth and hip-hop culture in the contemporary moment. Keywords: hip-hop; urban education; youth subculture This is the vacuum, the gaping hole, for the record, that created hip-hop culture, a predominantly poor Black and Latino male-initiated art form, in Americas ghettoes right on the heels of the Civil Rights era in the late 1960s, early 1970s. And this is why hip-hop, to this day, with its contradictions notwithstanding, remains the primary beacon of hope for poor African American males. I cannot begin to count how many underprivileged Black males across the nation have said to me Hip-hop saved my life. That speaks volumes about what we as a society and as citizens are not doing to assist the less fortunate among us. (Powell 2006)

Introduction In the early twenty-first century, we, as educational scholars and researchers who are concerned with the plight of Black male youth, must challenge ourselves with how our work is relevant and relational to the contemporary everyday lived realities and interests of urban youth. Many of these youth center hip-hop as their main site of cultural politics to negotiate their identities, and make meaning of their social world. Dimitriadis suggested that young people are now using hip-hop texts to construct and validate notions of self and community; understand themselves and the world around them; and link shared notions of what it means to be Black and marginalized in the USA and around the world (2004, 2). If hip-hop is the main site where Black male youth negotiate their sense of self and identity, educational
*Corresponding author. Email: prierdd@muohio.edu
ISSN 0951-8398 print/ISSN 1366-5898 online 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09518390802297805 http://www.informaworld.com

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research and scholarship must engage hip-hop culture as an analytic tool to develop a critical conceptual discourse toward social change and transformation. This discourse takes into consideration the worldview, politics, ideology and culture of hip-hop within and between structures of domination that situates and socially arranges the everyday lived experience, identity and social world of Black male youth in unpredictable ways. Other peoples music: the plight and potential of hip-hop culture Fundamentally, we assert that the judgment and condemnation of hip-hop culture in the wider public has precluded a critical, conceptual analysis of Black male youths everyday experience and lived reality in the larger society, and by consequence their interactions in traditional, public schooling structures. Murtadha-Watts suggests that we must have a discussion of Black popular culture and hip-hop cultures with an emphasis on rap music to draw attention to the tensions and conflict with Black masculinity constructions within urban educational structures (2000, 51). We articulate why it is important to discuss hip-hop culture as the genre relates to Black male youth. Secondly, we explore the moral and ethical dilemmas in the wider public about hip-hop culture. Finally, we give critical discussion on the transformative and emancipatory possibilities in scholarship and research praxis about Black male youth and hip-hop culture in the contemporary moment. We offer that this work can be of use to those doing research and scholarship that is relevant and relational to the lives of inner city Black male youth in urban locals. Dantley contends that because many of the urban educational demands are shaped by ongoing social and cultural issues for addressing needs of African-American students, perhaps the answer in leadership changes lies in African-American culture (2005, 651). In this regard, hip-hop culture represents a significant segment of African-American culture for urban youth in a post-Brown vs. Board of Education era of the twenty-first century. Thus, examining the various social and cultural issues that shape the identity and agency of Black male youth within the urban context of hip-hop culture can be of use to educational administration and policy in urban school settings. It is crucial for educational administrators to become aware of how federal policies in education, steeped in supposedly, objective, neutral, apolitical, Taylorist, scientific management paradigms continue to suppress the identity and culture of youth in predominantly African-American populated schools in ways that affect academic achievement, and critical citizenship for democracy and social justice (Dantley 2005). Educational administrators, who work with urban youth, particularly Black males, on an everyday basis, need to have some working knowledge about a form of popular culture that significantly shapes these youths identities (Dimitriadis 2004). This challenge means understanding where youths resistance emerges from, that is often oppositional to the traditional school culture. It is also crucial that educational leaders understand where these youths motivations, desires and alienation lie within particular urban contexts of the social worlds they live. Finally, scholarship and research practices can inform empowering discourses and modes of transformative social action for educational administrators and Black male youth through the curriculum and pedagogy of hip-hop culture. For educational administrators and practitioners whose lived experiences are quite different from their students, hip-hop culture, if approached critically, can be the bridge that narrows the cultural void and dissonance between students, teachers and administrators (Kitwana 2002; Beachum and McCray 2008; Duncan-Andrade 2008). That is, a critical approach to hip-hop means that we are listening to the voices of urban youth, who give

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social and political critique about how dominant, institutional practices of the larger society have affected their lives. This critical approach re-situates and re-contextualizes hip-hop from contemporary, popular media forms that re-produce limited and distorted representations of the culture and genre of music (Dyson 2007). This approach also seeks a working theory-praxis resolution between competing interests of the traditional school culture, and that of Black male youth of the hip-hop generation. In this regard, having a working theoretical knowledge base and understanding about what hip-hop culture means to Black male youth who have invested in the culture can inform progressive, policy measures for critical, educational administrators in urban public schools. That is, theorizing about hip-hop culture, and the significance and impact it brings to the lives of urban Black male youth, can inform curricular, pedagogical and administrative praxis within institutions of urban, public schools. Giroux, as cited by Dantley, argues that leaders in urban schools especially should engage in serious deliberation with students, teachers, parents, and other community members focused on issues of epistemology and power, self-identity and curriculum, and pedagogical practices that work to transform curricula, liberate critical thinking, and coconstruct knowledge (2005, 653). In subsequent, we advocate for a critical, progressive educational perspective at a time when new and innovative discourses and diverse epistemologies are needed, especially in urban school leadership (Beachum and Obiakor 2005). In this way, we seek to construct a critical discourse for urban school leadership, mobilizing how intellectual work can center hip-hop culture to actively make meaning of, and redress institutional practices in urban contexts that encumber Black male youth in the larger society, and in turn, education and public schooling. In agreement with Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, we insist that we could utilize hip-hop music and culture to forge a common and critical discourse that was centered upon the lives of the students (2002, 88). This discussion boldly places the reality of hip-hop culture in the forefront, recognizing its value and potential in the lives of youth (Dyson 1997, 2007). We hope that the resulting discourse informs, challenges and engages educational leaders and policy-makers who may be removed from (or may not understand) the various cultural formations of hip-hop as a youth subculture. When we understand our students better, then we can be better advocates and educators, connecting our strategic plans to the city streets and other segregated segments of society. Historical overview of hip-hop and its influence on cultural values Hip-hops broader historical origins are a mixture of cultural and ethnic experiences, socioeconomic influences and innovative artistic expression. Some say that it has cultural connections dating back to Africa (Keyes 2002). Gilroy (1993) asserted that hip-hop evolved from the culture of the Black-Atlantic experience. Rose (1994) stated that hip-hop found its origins in the post-industrial economy. Dyson (2007) summarized much of this when he noted:
The origins of rap are black and Latino. And it wasnt simply a matter of African American youth, but black folk throughout the diaspora. DJ Kool Herc come over from the Caribbean, transporting with him that booming sound system that was common in particular spaces in West Indian culture. That revolutionized and reshaped the sonic landscape in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop. It was here that the four central elements of hip-hop emerged: break dancing, DJ-ing, graffiti, and rapping. (72)

Forged on the heels of the Civil Rights movement, hip-hops rhetorical vernacular and cultural aesthetic of artistic expression emerged from the margins of economic and social

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decay. Hip-hop largely found its beginnings in the Bronx, New York, among AfricanAmerican and Latino youth in the late 1970s (Adams and Fuller 2006). White and Cones (1999) noted, Hip-hop is a catch-all term for a contemporary, urban-centered youth lifestyle associated with popular music, break dancing, certain dress and hair styles, graffiti, and street language (96). Hip-hop culture has gone from primarily rapping, break dancing, dj-ing and graffiti to including dialects, attitude, expression, mannerisms and fashion (Kitwana 2002; Au 2005). According to Rose (1994), Hip Hop is a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutality, truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of African American and Caribbean history, identity, and community (21). This particular culture is of importance because youth are educated by values transmitted through hip-hop. Gause (2005a) maintains that hip-hop culture has the ability to sustain and maintain the cultures of materialism, violence and misogyny through the transmission of messages or values. In previous generations (e.g., 1920s, 1930s and 1960s), there was a greater propensity for Black youth to draw values from community strongholds: families, religious institutions and schools (Kitwana 2002; Guy 2004). In addition, Kitwana wrote:
Today the influence of these traditional purveyors of Black culture have [sic] largely diminished in the face of powerful and pervasive technological advances and corporate growth. Now media and entertainment such as pop music, film, and fashion are among the major forces transmitting culture to this generation of Black Americans. (2002, 7)

These views highlight the competing identity tensions for Black male youth within commodified forms of hip-hop culture, which can indeterminately affect the values of these youth within a market driven culture of consumption (West 2004). In recent years, conceptual and empirical work has emerged to give insight into the plight and possibilities of hip-hop as a legitimate area worthy of academic inquiry for those working within multiple disciplines, such as sociology, Black studies, English, linguistics, cultural studies, curriculum, urban studies, and as this discussion argues, educational leadership (Dyson 2007). In scholarship, hip-hop has been analyzed with regard to nostalgia and Black popular culture (Dyson 1997), its similarities and differences with the Civil Rights generation (Kitwana 2002), biographical accounts and narratives (Dyson 2001; Powell 2003) and conceptual underpinnings (Forman and Neal 2004). With regard to empirical studies, Tyson (2005) developed a tool to evaluate individual perceptions of hiphop lyrics. Gardstrom (1999) discovered that hip-hop music was preferred by youth who felt that it best reflected their realities. In another study of purposely selected college students, African-Americans had a more favorable view of hip-hop, had a positive view of its social empowerment potential and a less negative perception of violent and misogynistic elements of rap music than White and Hispanic American respondents (Tyson 2006, 220). Thus, hip-hop and the culture it has spawned is the subject of expanding scholarly inquiry and investigation that continues to probe into its effect and impact on youth perceptions and subjective identity formation. Therefore, it is increasingly important for educators, scholars and service providers to obtain a more nuanced understanding of urban youth who are in many cases inevitably immersed in or influenced by hip-hop culture. This is of great importance for educational leaders and policy-makers because as classrooms across the country become increasingly diverse, determining how to connect in significant ways across multiple lines of difference may be the greatest challenge facing teachers today (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2002 88). In this way, urban school leaders who consider themselves critical educators, as suggested by Giroux, must consider elements of popular culture such as hip-hop music as

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a serious site for social knowledge to be discussed, interrogated, and critiqued (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2002, 89). Perhaps the starting point for educational leaders who want further knowledge about hip-hop culture, for the purpose of critically engaging and understanding youth on their terms, is to probe the economic, social and political conditions that shaped its emergence. Subsequently, we now give a brief overview in situating the urban context of hip-hop culture to foreground its foundations and constitutive elements as a youth subculture. Understanding the urban context of hip-hop Much of the ethical and moral discussion on hip-hop is often removed from the racial, economic and social context which situates these realities. Lott (1999) suggests that the underclass status of rap, however, tends to conceal the fact that it has certain social and political dimensions that suggest that something other than pathology is occurring in black youth culture (121). Tricia Rose (1994) in the classic hip-hop text, Black Noise, states that the message and the meanings within the discourse of rap music emerge out of poverty, joblessness and social isolation of disenfranchised Black and Brown neighborhoods. Thus, Rose argues that the ghetto is the main signifier of authenticity within hip-hop culture. For example, the social history, housing patterns and contemporary policies and practices have determined the divisions and experiences of the poor and people of color in many U.S. cities. African-Americans, in particular, migrated from the rural South to large urban cities primarily in the Northeast and Midwest for jobs, opportunity, to escape racial bigotry and for a better way of life (Villegas and Lucas 2002). Many African-Americans were greeted with a few new opportunities and freedoms but also encountered new, more sophisticated forms of segregation and exclusion (Wacquant 1998; Guy 2004). According to Rothstein (1996), wherever they went however, they found the pernicious segregation system. This [system of segregation] affected where they went to school, where they worked, and the type of employment they were able to obtain (163). This situation denotes the deliberate separation of particular groups both geographically and socially. The poorest urban areas are frequently neglected. As Kenneth Clark (1965) observed, America has contributed to the concept of the ghetto the restriction of persons to a special area and the limiting of their freedom of choice on the basis of skin color. The dark ghettos invisible walls have been erected by the white society, by those who have power (11). These walls are still intact, even in the twenty-first century. According to Yeo and Kanpol (1999):
Segregation functions institutionally to link other racialized inequities by the synergistic concentration of effect in an isolated special/urban area More pointed, however, is the charge that the maintenance of racial segregation is intrinsic and rooted in U.S. culture. The minority enclaves of the inner city, ghetto, and barrio are part of modern U.S. society. They are maintained by a set of institutions, attitudes, and practices that are deeply embedded in the structure of U.S. life. (3)

Thus, the urban context creates an environment that inevitably affects youth in urban areas. Social-geographic isolation can inform certain attitudes, values and behaviors that seem to diverge from the mainstream. It is from within this urban context that a particular form of Black popular culture tends to originate. Damen (1987) states, Culture is learned and shared human patterns or models for living; day-to-day living patterns; those models and patterns pervade all aspects of human social interaction; and culture is mankinds primary adaptive mechanism (367). Similarly, Gause (2005b) noted that popular culture is the background noise of our very existence (336).

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Michael Eric Dyson suggests that increasing social isolation, economic hardship, political demoralization, and cultural exploitation endured by most ghetto poor communities in the past few decades have given rise to a form of musical expression that captures the terms of ghetto poor existence (2004, 404). He states that although hip-hop is not limited to the ghetto, its major themes and styles continue to be drawn from the conflicts and contradictions of Black urban life (Dyson 2004, 404). When we consider the origin, expansion and influence of Urban America, we realize that its inhabitants are molded and shaped by history, experience and social-context. Black popular culture was born amidst social, cultural, political, and economic segregation initially as a vibrant expression of black political and cultural strivings (Guy 2004, 48). In this regard, hip-hop as the new Black popular culture is the public space where Black youth give voice and speak for themselves about the communities, conditions and neighborhoods in which they live. These youth communicate to the world about the social dislocation, isolation of poverty and pain and the warehousing of Black and Brown communities in neglected areas of inner cities. Hip-hop culture was developed in the midst of this segregation as a form of artistic and cultural expression. Hip-hop culture also tends to be an influential and catalytic factor in the lives of urban youth and African-American males in particular. Hip-hop culture and Black masculine identity formation For our purposes, we are succinctly focusing on how theoretically framing the study of hiphop culture opens up new spaces of inquiry in better understanding the plight, predicament and condition of Black male youth in urban education and public schooling. This is not to preclude or make invisible the similar struggles and problems as experienced by Black female youth. We agree with Dyson (2007) who asserted:
In a society dominated by men, women are assigned a lower niche of the societal totem pole. Men often step on the faces of women to climb up on the perch of masculine privilege. Our boosted sense of masculinity comes at the expense of womens lives, identities, and bodies. (107)

We readily acknowledge this tension, yet remain resolute in concentrating on the aforementioned foci. If we are concerned about the most pressing issues and concerns that affect Black male youth of the hip-hop generation, it cannot be lost on the genre that the overwhelming majority of the mainstream hip-hop artists in the media are Black males. Thus, the genre and cultural production of hip-hop is how many Black male youth from the ghetto make meaning and sense of their identities, develop their ideologies and are socialized through the wider social constructions of their image. Bakari Kitwana states, Today, more and more Black youth are turning to rap music, music videos, designer clothing, popular Black films, and television programs for values and identity (2002, 9). Kitwana further suggests that we live in an age where rap music, more than anything else, has helped shape the new Black youth culture. The claims stated above are not to ignore or deny that hip-hop is now a global enterprise, whose idiom and cultural aesthetic has moved beyond the locale of Black and Brown communities of New York City and the Bronx, who gave birth to the culture. However, it is to suggest that over time, space and history of the culture, the most pervasive image in mainstream media has consistently been that of Black male artists.
The contemporary generations of young street-corner males are exposed to various media products that constitute an urban street-corner soundtrack. That is, values, roles, and behavior

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associated with the streets are often depicted in hip-hop music videos and gangsta films and reinforced by lyrics and video images that tend to glorify life in the streets. (Oliver 2006, 924)

Therefore, the negotiation between artistic representation and signification of identity, Black masculine social construction, and everyday lived experience is crucial to understanding what is relevant and meaningful to the social world of Black male life. Although hip-hop will always be a culture forged and shaped from the fringes of society, the public image, idea, and meaning of Black male identity are pervasively visible in the public sphere of popular culture, and is now under the media microscope of mainstream popular culture. Popular representations of Black male identity in mass media have reinscribed stereotypical views of the Black male as a dangerous, criminal, psychopath, while occluding more complex, libratory and transformative representations. (hooks 1992, 2004; Lott 1999; White and Cones 1999). bell hooks (1992) suggests that representations of Black masculinity in popular culture are equated with brute phallocentrism, woman-hating, a pugilistic rapist sexuality and disregard for individual rights (102). She states that these representations go unquestioned and are largely informed by white patriarchy. hooks then argues, As a consequence they are victimized by stereotypes that were first articulated in the nineteenth century but hold sway over the minds and imaginations of citizens of this nation in the present day (2004, xii). Tommy Lott, in The invention of race: Black culture and the politics of representation, suggests that Black urban males have been depicted in mass media as the number-one criminal threat to America (1999, 120). He states that cultural signifiers have been used in the media to validate the time-honored myth of the Black male as a criminal (Lott 1999, 120). He further suggests that mass medias labeling of Black males as criminals has wrongly given justification to an anti-Black vigilantism. In response, Lott states that rap artists have re-articulated the crime metaphor in rap music to make visible mass medias ideological victimization of Black men (1999, 121). In his view, Black urban youth who have been excluded and relegated to the margins of mainstream society, co-opt the crime metaphor in rap music as form of political resistance. That is, he states that rap artists restructure their reality with quite deliberate opposition to mass medias representations as a way to counterpose the dominant alternative in media representation from which they have been excluded (Lott 1999, 122). Lott further argues that Black male urban youth consciously recode mainstream values by employing so-called negative images to communicate very powerful messages to each other about issues of self-respect (1999, 125). In Fugitive cultures: Race, violence, and youth, Henry Giroux (1996) posits how white middle-class communities socially construct and make meaning of Black male identity that is produced from Black cinema of the hip-hop genre. He states that classic urban films such as Juice, Menace to Society, Boyz in the Hood, New Jack City, Jasons Lyric, Clockers, and Sugar Hill had the unintended consequence of re-inscribing the stereotype that Black men are violent and crime-prone (Giroux 1996, 42). While each of these films underscores how Black masculinity is constructed and emerges from the devastation of a ghetto existence, Giroux argues that the larger social structures of systemic rejection which constrain agency and possibility for Black male youth are noticeably absent from the films context. He suggests that this absence of context within the larger social structure of institutionalized racism for many white audiences conflate effects as causes, and predetermines Black urban youth as pathological and naturally violent. While the production, intent, and how meanings are socially constructed from diverse audiences can always be contested, Girouxs critical analysis of how meanings translate into stereotypes about Black male youth in popular culture is noteworthy.

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Also, African-American males, especially teenagers, often struggle with the definition and role of authentic manhood. Long held beliefs of Black manhood have revolved around a real man being emotionless, stoic, a protector, a disciplinarian and/or benevolent patriarch (Powell 2003; hooks 2004; Adams and Fuller 2006). These are but a few of the roles and scripts supported and accepted by society. When we factor in the isolation of urban areas, we begin to see other related roles. Many of these roles are related to what many call the streets. Oliver (2006) defines the streets as:
Public and semipublic social settings including street corners, vacant lots, bars, clubs, after hour joints, convenience stores, drug houses, pool rooms, parks and public recreational places in which primarily lower and working-class black males tend to congregate. (919)

Thus, the streets begin to take on new meanings as an alternative institution (as opposed to the family, church, school, etc.), object of affiliation and dedication, and significantly impact the shaping of masculinity.
The cumulative effects of intergenerational exposure to historical and contemporary patterns of racial and gender oppression directed against Black males has served as a catalyst leading many marginalized Black males to socially construct masculine identities these identities or roles include that of the tough guy/gangsta, ladies man/player/playa, or hustler/balla. (Oliver 2006, 921, 928)

Of course, these roles/identities are not the only ones that exist for Black male youth. Historically, Black male youth have had a number of role models in their communities. There were everyday Black males who were community activists, working professionals and fulltime fathers (Kunjufu 1996; Dyson 2005). In the years after the American Civil Rights Movement and as integration began to take root, many whites moved away from central city areas to homes in the suburbs (Lipitz 2002; Obiakor and Beachum 2005). Eventually, people of color who could afford homes in suburban areas also moved, leaving behind neighborhoods that are now known as the hood (Kunjufu 1996; Dyson 1997, 2005; Powell 2003; Ginwright 2004). Positive male role models were fewer as these areas buckled under the pressure of political isolation, social stigmatization and a growing underground (drugfueled) economy. The problems associated with these roles or combinations of these roles could include disconnection from employment opportunities, disruption of family life and responsibilities, incarceration, and interpersonal conflict and violence to name a few (Kitwana 2002; Oliver 2006).

Urban schools and hip-hop culture The street soundtrack does not stop at the schoolhouse door. Students from these communities that embrace the streets, and students, Black males in many cases, find themselves at odds with the middle-class value systems of the schools and the professionals who run them (Kunjufu 2002; Beachum and McCray 2008). Many urban areas across the nation are plagued with all types of social and community problems. Kozol (1992) detailed the segregation, poverty and inequity found in such schools in his pivotal book, Savage Inequalities. Noguera (2004) posited, In poor communities, the old, persistent problems of overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating facilities, and an insufficient supply of qualified teachers and administrators remain largely unaddressed (176). The situation in far too many schools is one of despair, poverty, isolation, and distress (Obiakor and Beachum 2005, 13). The

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attitudes of urban youth of color begin to reflect the structural inequities that create their environments. At the same time, this situation has resulted in the increasing pseudo-police state found in many urban areas (Wacquant 2001) as well as feelings of alienation and nihilism (Rothstein 1996; Yeo and Kanpol 1999). These are but a few of the numerous challenges that many of these schools and sometimes districts encounter. These challenges proliferate when students themselves come to school ill-equipped, unresponsive, apathetic, or defiant. The extent to which some of this can be linked to streetcentered value systems and hip-hop culture remains unexplored by educational researchers. In fact, there is little dialogue between students and adults in this area; most conversations are dominated by adults who feel negatively about hip-hop culture who use their bias to further denigrate youth who ascribe to the art form, thereby alienating these youth even more (Dyson 1997, 2007; Kitwana 2002). Understanding how hip-hop culture is intricately woven into the lives of youth is the key to understanding their worldview. Given the existing dialectical tensions between Black male youth who identify with hiphop culture, and the ardent anti-hip-hop effort mounted by teachers (Murtadha-Watts 2000), youth are attempting to re-appropriate their own form of cultural capital through hip-hop culture. Cultural capital is traditionally associated with various institutions, such as schools and networks within particular communities who possess high status knowledge that is granted particular forms of power within the dominate culture of society. Given the political economy and value of particular cultural knowledge forms, disenfranchised youth, such as Black males, remain marginalized from this type knowledge along social, class, and we add, racial lines (Wacquant 2001). Pierre Bourdieu (1983/1986) explained cultural capitals importance in the development of individual and group identity. He asserted:
Because the social conditions of its transmission and acquisition are more disguised than those of economic capital, it is predisposed to function as symbolic capital, i.e., to be unrecognized as capital and recognized as legitimate competence, as authority exerting an effect of (mis)recognition. (245)

Lamont and Lareau (1988) expanded notions cultural capital stating that it also has institutionalized, i.e., widely shared high status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods and credentials) used for social and cultural exclusion (156). These cultural signals are played out in schools everyday.
Cultural capital is used to position people in a particular status hierarchy among their peers. Furthermore, it acts as a criterion for setting up boundaries and determining who is legitimate or authentic in a setting, excluding those that lack legitimacy. (Clay 2003, 1349)

Students who embrace hip-hop culture can include or exclude peers on the basis of cultural signals. In certain instances, with Black males, the cultural signals are intertwined with the roles of tough guy, player and/or hustler (Clay 2003; Oliver 2006). Adults too have the power to include or exclude in their interactions with youth, with serious and dire consequences, since adults who work as authority figures in schools have the power to sanction and discipline youth. What is needed amongst educational researchers and practitioners is an in-depth understanding of youth culture aside from the hype and stereotypical imagery that pervades mainstream media. Since the power of modern mainstream media has the ability to insert itself into all aspects of our lives (Perry 2003, 96), educational leaders and policy-makers (like everyone else) are inevitably impacted (Tatum 1997; Harro 2000). Unfortunately, the dominant message in far too many instances: (1) portrays hip-hop culture as deviant,

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belligerent and/or morally bankrupt (Dyson 1997, 2005, 2007); (2) supports a subtle (yet time-honored) theme of African-American intellectual inferiority (Kailin 2002; Perry 2003); (3) thinks visual representations, dominant discourses, and message bombardment, continually asserts the notion of white superiority (Roediger 1991; Lipitz 2002; Dyson 2004; Mizialko 2005). The dispositions and beliefs of scholars, educational leaders and policy-makers are of extreme importance and crucial to the success of Black male students in urban academic settings. Educational leaders who consider themselves critical pedagogues must begin rethinking and challenging how the current technical practices, policies and curricular measures have excluded and marginalized empowering and transformative education that can be most liberating and relevant to the lives of Black male youth. Too often, policy mandated curricula and administrative practices are seen separate from, as opposed to being a part of, affecting youths learning, academic achievement and their investments (or disinvestments) in public education. The unnecessary bifurcations between technical practices of educational administration and the broad scope of contemporary curriculum studies (Pinar et al. 1995) have limited creative possibilities and resolutions between course content and administrative policies in urban public schools. Such a radical reconstruction, especially of schools in United States urban centers, can only take place as local school leaders and central office administrators begin to see schools in a much broader social and political context (Dantley 2005, 671). In addition, the fate of urban school children largely rests in the hands of educational professionals who may not share the same cultural backgrounds as their students (Kunjufu 2002; Landsman and Lewis 2006). Therefore, it is critically important for these individuals to understand social context, appreciate differences and champion change for social justice on behalf of marginalized, students of color, such as Black male youth (Irvine 2003; Madsen and Mabokela 2005). Sometimes, the problem is cultural, where the culture of educators clashes with that of their students, thereby creating a phenomenon called cultural collision (Beachum and McCray 2008). By critically examining and understanding youth culture, educators can gain educational insight and make meaningful connections with students, which could help reduce many of the problems urban youth face in schools. Educational researchers should develop meaningful relationships as they gain access into these communities, interact with residents and educators, and interpret results. Deeper understandings can help to lessen the unfair characterization of urban schools, their educators and their students. Discussion: moral/ethical dilemmas and possibilities Clearly, the moral and ethical dilemmas of hip-hop culture have been obfuscated by the following set of circumstances: ethical and moral dilemmas are largely removed from the racial, economic and social context of hip-hop; the negation of understanding how media consumes Black male identity in the wider public discourse; and the general misunderstanding of the postmodern Black aesthetic of hip-hop culture as an art form. These set of circumstances have rendered Black culture into a monolithic, homogenized conglomerate of being problematic to the status quo mainstream public (West 2004). In addressing the moral and ethical dilemmas in the wider public, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has often said that hip-hop is a reflection of the contradictions of the larger society. The contradictions between get an education for social mobility versus protractible underemployment rates of Black males, sexism and misogyny versus the existence of sexism and misogyny in mainstream America, violence in hip-hop music versus the

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violence of a current war-laden country are some of the common arguments presented by major hip-hop moguls, icons, artists, and scholars alike in the field (Kitwana 2002; Powell 2003; Dyson 2005, 2007). While conservative critiques of Black culture have rightly argued that negative images in the media as well as certain language of the profane have the power to influence a people in negative fashion, the conversation has fixed a set of rigid good vs. bad binaries that has become one-dimensional and out of touch with the everyday lived realities of urban youth. Tricia Rose (1994) poses the following questions that address hip-hops competing ethical and moral dilemmas within the larger public: Can hip-hop have contradictions on its meaning, message, and purpose, yet have a collective ethics about what hip-hop culture is, what it should be, or what it represents? Is hip-hop culture a postmodern contradiction, rather than an expression of long-standing social and political inequalities and beliefs? She makes the point that hip-hops internal contradictions are central to the articulation of hip-hop, and popular culture in general. Dyson (2004) states that while a major segment of rap music evokes anger, aggression, and cynicism in response to racial oppression in American culture, the stakes are too high for moral neutrality (407). Subsequently, he suggests that while describing the everyday lived experiences of urban devastation is invaluable, rap artists must also develop a moral and ethical perspective that critiques state repression and gang violence as mutually destructive to the life chances of urban youth (Dyson 2004). In terms of the moral dilemmas of accountability, we portend that wider institutional powers have largely placed ownership and accountability squarely on youth who are vulnerable to the conditions in which they live and understandably distressed within deindustrialized neighborhoods in which they reside. We suggest that Black male urban youth have to confront material conditions such as mis-education in urban schools, poverty, chronic and rampant police brutality, underemployment, while combating the affects of systemic joblessness, incarceration, destabilization of the family unit and drug-infested communities on an everyday basis. These conditions and contradictions to American equality, as by-products of systemic rejection, alter the social reality (from its normative conceptions) of urban youth who desperately seek a way out of the hood. We further argue that sometimes our own relativistic moral positions as scholars and researchers blinds us from digging deeper into the larger lived realities affecting youth. This is not to presuppose that we do not have a moral outlook. However, we center our notions of moral purpose in scholarship and research within a critical and spiritual capacity to understand deeper realities affecting urban youth. And, while seeking a critical and moral efficacy for social change and empowerment, we reject notions of being pejorative and selfrighteous, or condemning a lived reality that the mainstream public has yet to understand. Therefore, we encourage scholarship and research that rigorously seeks to make meaning of, and understand Black male youth through hip-hop culture in order to assist with transformation in public education and the larger society. Toward a research praxis of emancipation in hip-hop culture In this section, we take up hip-hop culture as an emancipatory scholarship and research praxis in ways that best serve democratic and social justice ends for Black male youth. All scholars of color need to acknowledge the salience of popular culture in shaping our research and scholarly agendas, for it is in the popular that our theories and methodologies become living, breathing entities (Ladson-Billings and Donner 2005, 292). We take up Billings and Donners challenge in CRT to break out of cookie-cutter approaches to scholarship and

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research, and break new epistemological, methodological, social activist, and moral ground (2005, 291). In following their call to action, this is an attempt to center hip-hop culture as the point of inquiry to engage the everyday lived experience of Black male life in a way that is socially just and transformative in action. Critical race theory suggests that the nature of race and racism is organized through the social structure of society and agrees on the following major points: race is a social construction (Ladson-Billings 2000, 259); social experience of racial oppression is endemic and collective for people of color; the experience of racism is historical, political, social and contextual; critical race discourse critiques liberal and conservative race-blind political discourses; critical race discourse is also emancipatory in its critique of knowledge and aims toward social justice in research practice; CRT centers a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse as a central feature of epistemological construction; social experience of racialized others is measured against and by the dominant culture as subordinate in the power differential between human relationships and institutions (Lopez and Parker 2003; Beachum et al. 2008). For the purposes of this work, we tentatively explore the use of hip-hop culture as a way of life for marginalized populations of color, the social construction/anti-essentialism thesis of race and the construction of hip-hop as a democratic public space for the empowerment and self-actualization of Black male youth. In situating hip-hop culture as a way of life, Black male youth, as organic intellectuals, are enabled to organize everyday democratic practices engaged in what West (2004) calls prophetic truth telling. As opposed to being merely consumers of market-driven hip-hop, youth are producers of their culture, actively engaged in artistic projects that draw from their experiences in the streets; and actively pursue measures toward social justice (West 2004; Ladson-Billings and Donner 2005). These particular considerations in scholarship and research practice may serve as fertile ground when re-conceptualizing new epistemologies and methodological practices through hip-hop culture. Ladson-Billings and Donner state, scholars who choose to ignore the trenchant pleas of the hip-hop generation will find themselves increasingly out of touch and irrelevant to the everyday lives of people engaged in the cause of social justice (2005, 294). They further suggest that in being critical and relevant with the concerns of young folk, we need to consider how our scholarship, research agendas and methodological practices in critical race discourses connect with hip-hop culture (Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2005). As cultural workers and activist researchers, politically and socially connected to the hip-hop community, require us to have new creative visions (Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2005) about how theories and curriculum can emerge from everyday folk of the hip-hop generation. The concerns of everyday lived culture in hip-hop, and the ways in which we make meaning of these realities, should, in some way, be tied to social and political praxis in research and curricular agendas (Ladson-Billings and Donnor 2005). First, researchers and scholars who are using hip-hop culture as a way to better understand and engage with Black male youth must be political and strategic, and explicit about the intent and purposes of a research project. That is, if scholars and researchers are pursuing social justice ends in working with youth and hip-hop culture, inquiry must engage the culture as a way of life for young people, which centers their struggles and experiences in an oppressive society. In studying hip-hop culture as a way of life, we are talking about marginalized people who use hip-hop to subvert, resist politically through organized mobilization for a particular cause that may shape policy; or discursively, through the cultural practices of rap music (particularly the social and political form), of what Cornel West calls thin forms of opposition to the dominant culture. Understanding the ways in which urban

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youth resist and subvert the dominant culture, through counter-narratives or political mobilization around certain interests should be an important consideration in a scholarly or research project of social justice (Delgado and Stefancic 2001; West 2004; Ladson-Billings and Donner 2005). Second, when we understand hip-hop as a way of life, rather than just a form of marketdriven entertainment, we break out of the myopic provincialism that narrowly characterizes hip-hop in limited ways. Narrow, essentialist, biological constructions of Blackness in hiphop, associated with a negative set of meanings, would be characterized by CRT scholars as the social construction thesis. The social construction thesis explains how Black identity has been stereotyped within pathological discourses and cultural deficit theories over the time and space of history, particularly within popular culture (Delgado and Stefancic 2001). Jackson (2006) states that the hyperawareness of negative inscriptions associated with the Black male as criminal, angry and incapacitated is exacerbated in popular cultural portrayals (McCall 1995; Belton 1996; Jackson 1997; Orbe 1998; Orbe and Hopson 2002). Typically in hip-hop culture, most people have accepted a set of distortions and stock narratives of Black males as thugs, gangstas, menaces to society, and crime-prone deviants that have become commonly associated with hip-hop culture in mass media. Perhaps the best example of this occurred when political pundits and commentators associated the Michael Vick case and the underground world of dog fighting with hip-hop culture. In the postmodern sense, just as in all art, hip-hop represents forms of play and pleasure, rebelliousness and resistance, truth and fiction, and prods and unsettles our consciousness. The larger public rarely sees the multiple complexities of hip-hop. Subsequently, given the medias over-sensationalism of select and distorted images, and social constructions of Black life, it is crucial to clarify how we are studying hip-hop because of these normative, essentialist conceptions. Critical race theory scholars suggest that this allows us to unearth and subvert the set of stock narratives which distort reality, and often advantage the perspectives of the dominant culture. This is critical because hip-hop means so many different things to so many people. In this way, one avoids ambiguity of multiple cultural associations about how the researcher is defining hip-hop within a particular context for certain research purposes. Given that hip-hop culture is rooted as a Black idiom (Rose 1994), it also allows us as Black researchers to name and define the culture for ourselves. As Billings and Donner state, this is necessary to the project of self-determination (2005). Third, it is important to understand that hip-hop community centers are important sites of inquiry and investigation. Rarely in conventional research practices is the space of hiphop seen as its own form of radical pedagogy and curriculum, where education for meaning, relevance, and the struggle for social justice take shape in the everyday lived experiences and identity formation of Black youth. Carlson and Dimitriadis suggest that we must identify those unrecognized local public free spaces (2003) such as hip-hop community centers, where many urban youth, espouse a social-political consciousness, who critically speak from the margins, and have a desire toward transformation. This is particularly critical for Black male youth who have been marginalized through processes of institutionalized racism and see schools as oppressive sites, and respond by dropping out of them implicitly or explicitly (Carlson and Dimitriadis 2003, 30). In consequence, hip-hop community centers are public spaces where these students may engage in developing affirming identities in dialogue and interaction with others, and where they engage in the active production of meaning (Carlson and Dimitriadis 2003, 30). The notion of hip-hop community centers as public spaces can be seen as sites of learning, critical reflection, and transformative knowledge production. Within these public spaces, it is our contention that there are hopeful possibilities of Black male youth in re-presenting a

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counter-hegemonic narrative within and between these power-culture relationships in hiphop. That is, there are democratic practices of what Dolby defines as cultural citizenship, where oppositional and resistance discourses have agency, and can transform hegemonic cultural relationships (2003). Spaces of democratic practice and critical, progressive education can take shape through a public curriculum of hip-hop, where there is a negotiation between the current historicized identity of Black male youth in relationship to the political, historical, context of a de-colonizing Black consciousness. We assert that there is also a moral rationale for engaging these students (it is the right thing to do). When we truly invest in the academic achievement of all of our students, then we get closer to the reality of leaving no child behind as opposed to constantly regurgitating overused impotent educational rhetoric. We are advocating for the venue of hip-hop as a means to gain understanding into the way that many students make meaning of their lives and the world around them. This approach has been under-researched and pushed to the periphery of practice in education, but in many schools, it has become a part of the schools culture because it is a part of the students culture. Duncan-Andrade (2008) wrote, If indeed, urban schools hope to advance the spirit of critical pedagogy and the multicultural education movement, then they would do well to listen to young people and make better use of youth cultural literacies in their pedagogy and curriculum (140). This is also a clear message for educational researchers, practitioners and policy-makers. Conclusion We suggest that scholars and researchers might think about how we can position an antiessentialist discourse about hip-hop culture within and between a critical discourse that is transformative in praxis. We might think about deconstructing provincial interpretations of hip-hop culture, and at the same time advocate a future trajectory that is critical yet transformative about the means and ends of struggle and survival in our research. The notion of struggle and survival is both in material and conceptual terms. On the one hand, we advocate the struggle to make meaning through interpretive research and scholarship of how Black male identity is constructed through blighted urban communities bereft of resource acquisition. In turn, how do these constructions impact social interactions between Black male youth and traditional structures of education and schooling? On the other hand, the authors advocate a struggle for research practice and scholarship that unearths new selfdefinitions of image and identity from Black males themselves. This form of emancipatory praxis aims to empower youth in positive trajectories of hope and possibility. In this way, the epistemology of hip-hop is at the axis where structure meets social conception and thought to inform new possibilities of where research practices might go.

Notes on contributors
Darius Prier is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include critical pedagogy, cultural studies, critical race theory, popular culture, and social justice education. He has taught courses in social-cultural foundations of education in a teacher education program. Floyd D. Beachum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Administrative Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He teaches courses in organizational change, leadership in educational organizations, leadership in multicultural organizations and urban educational issues. His research interests include: urban school leadership, education for social justice, and moral and ethical leadership.

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