In the past few posts, I have been reflecting on the artists, issues, and themes that represent recurring patterns in discussions, presentations, and writings amongst students of Afrikan descent in the college classrooms where I have taught. I have called these recurring patterns an intellectual-political canon and plan to continue this line of thinking until my semester ends. The seriousness of what I mean by that is heavier than what I can probably articulate. Obviously, I am not tracing all of these issues and themes here in this space, nor am I assuming I ever could. However, I am intentionally moving away from discussions about “popular culture” and its influence on young people today. For the most part, I find these discussions gimmicky and anti-theoretical based, in part, on the post-modernist/post-structuralist/wanna-be-antiessentialist hustle that will not call “popular culture” what it is: BLACK CULTURE. Unsurprisingly, you can go much further if you reduce everything to the “popular” in commercial academic marketing (the wanna-be-theoretical-chic and their use of “hybridity” works here too). As I continue this stream of posts, I have two things in mind: 1) to locate the political apparatus in black communities, especially amongst black women, that shape these recursive memories; 2) to push myself to think more deeply about how my teaching needs to respond more critically.
I am not as fully conscious always, for instance, of how and why Erykah Badu/Amerykah has so significantly been a lens for students of Afrikan descent to talk about black women, aesthetics, and identity. Obviously, I can do more historical linking with students. Even when my students talk about Nicki Minaj’s dynamic stage performances (most of my black female students especially do not care for her, so let’s not overstate her influence), I tend to agree with them, but I just don’t see how Minaj could be regarded as particularly new or unique within black culture’s over-the-top stage dramatics. You could only think such a thing if you have forgotten about or don’t know Parliament, Earth Wind and Fire, Cameo, and any other host of black artists (I didn’t even go that far back for those examples). Nicki Minaj aint inventing nuthin new within black culture here and that’s the thing about black culture: you don’t need to invent that kind of thing… you just sustain it. Point is: I need to do a better job of following through on my students’ conversation aesthetically, historically, and politically.
It’s pretty common to speak of “Western culture” and the “classics” as having a canon or set of texts and histories that students need to know in order to fully understand what they are in now. Although it might be a surprise to many, there is a black canon of aesthetic and historical experiences that students need to fully grasp to enter their current worlds also. Tropes, strategies, and lesson plans related to “popular culture” just ain’t cuttin it. I have known how and why to stay away from all that foolishness in how, what, and why I teach, but I haven’t been as thorough in articulating the obvious alternative.
Though I always loved that young people were influenced so positively by the song, the song seemed rather trite and, to me, stopped short on analysis (I had been a die-hard Latifah fan on the first two albums, not really this third one). If a man calls me a bitch or hoe, Ima check him and get at him. That just seems like a rather casual fact-of-life to me. I was actually teaching high school at the time when the record dropped and even witnessed a young black woman beat the hell out of a boy who wouldn’t stop calling all girls in the school bitches; they ironically became good friends after that and, not ironically, he stopped using the B-word. So this argument and request that black men stop calling black women bitches and hoe sounded like a simple-enough position to me. Queen Latifah (as femcee, that is) is hardly the most “aggressive” or in-yo-face personality my students meet in the course of a semester. In fact, I would argue that Shirley Chisholm gave the folk the business even tougher this semester. But yet, these women of the past are not perceived as a threat to white students who authorize themselves to publicly devalue black women, even in a college classroom that is 95% filled with educated black women whose academic records and abilities far exceed theirs (I am a writing teacher and grade the papers, so you can trust me on THAT one). This is why I need the classroom to remind me just how thick this ish can get. Apparently, what I see as a pretty simple and straight-forward request on Latifah’s part ain’t easy to digest at all, not even 19 years later from the song’s release date. Black men targeting black women (or some of them, as the apologists, from Tupac on down, like to say about not saying all women are bitches and hoes, as if that’s different) is VIOLENCE, plain and simple, and it is very regularized and normal. When I forget that, all I have to do is listen when someone references U.N.I.T.Y. and watch white students, both male and female, do their best to deny Queen Latifah’s right to name and define herself outside of bitch and hoe!
Pick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side
You don’t need to have been alive when Badu first came on the scene with that first album, Baduizm, (and every album thereafter) for it to make its impact on how you understand your life and the ways in which you understand being a black woman. 
Quite frankly, with the exception of my classrooms that enroll large numbers of young black women, most of what I hear black folk— men and women alike— discuss in relation to Lauryn Hill is her mental and emotional collapse after her album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Between the emotional abuse she has obviously endured from her partner, the inability to perform with her original music and hence the bands she deploys, the legal tax issues she faces, and the allegations of mental breakdown and drug use, she gets dissed all around. And yet, every time I see Bobby Brown or Q-Tip, I suspect the crackpipe is not far away. In the words of Rick James, cocaine is a helluva drug! I always (secretly, I admit) wonder when Busta Rhymes is going to leave the steroids alone because something just ain’t lookin right (I say the same about L.L. Cool J and Botox). Wesley Snipes still ain’t figured out what taxes are. I am also amazed by the way we enshrine Eazy-E without nary a word that the brotha died of AIDS with seven children from six different women. Needless to say, that brotha was clearly into some shit (
