Tag Archives: black life and literacy

Impact of Baduizm: “On & On/…& On”

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baduPick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side

You need to pick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side

Well, If you don’t pick your afro, you gonna have one side hiiiiiiiigh…

That’s basically the trailer to Erykah Badu’s “On and On.”  When I hear those words, one image comes to mind: my undergraduate students.

Last spring, a student did a presentation on Badu using the video to this song.  The video is announced as a story that opens with the lines above. As soon as that third line hit, If you don’t pick yo afro daddy, you gon have one side hiiiiiiiigh, the class sang in unison.  And then everybody just started laughing.

Yes, I was cracking up too, but I was also surprised… now hold up, yall— yall was only 2 years old when this song came out.  What yall know about daddy’s afro being high?  They ignored me except, of course, Aysha, who came to my office (and still on many other occasions) to tell me I was EXTRA (I was always extra: extra with the homework, extra with the assignments, extra with the discussion topics, extra with the earrings…. just EXTRA… I have come to love this word!)  I get away with these kinds of comments as a college teacher, stuff I never got away with when I taught high school.  During lunch, I always turned on the old school at noon on HOT 97 (my hip hop station back then) so when students finished eating lunch, many would come to my classroom.  I should have known better but I was surprised when these students knew ALL of the lyrics to every and any Rakim or Sugar Hill or Roxanne or KRS-One song they heard, though many were not born at the time or, at least, they were still crawling in diapers.  When I expressed my surprise, they got all personal, snapped on me because I grew up in Ohio, and accused me of trying to learn to pop-lock when they just came out the womb knowing Hip Hop.  Yeah, they took it THERE.  I was not phased though and would describe, rather rudely (with reminders of what they just had for lunch), the kind of excrement they had in their diapers while I was grown, understanding what I was hearing, and able to wipe my own behind… in Ohio.    Not exactly one of my finer moments, I admit, but, hey, I wasn’t gon let them play me like that.  Sometime you gotta do what you gotta do.  Point is: there is a cultural apparatus and literate community here that recreates black experiences through music.

erykah-badu-feet-319487You 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.   With Badu, I see my students placing themselves into new aesthetic expressions, whether it be through body adornment, sound collaborations, or the crafting of one’s singing voice.  Badu even designs new AfroDigital experiences to go along with her opening lament of a lost love or with her choral request that someone simply clap for her and have her back  (see Badu perform “Window Seat” at the 2010 Soul Train Awards below).  We seem to notice, maybe even over-notice, when young people of Afrikan descent gravitate to meaningless or, worst yet, offensive commercial musicians who often have very little to contribute in content or talent.  When students start singing a song that came out in 1997 as if they have lived that moment with Badu (they were only 2 and 4 years old at the time), then, clearly, it is not accurate to think they are only gravitating to commercially successful artists who trade in poppy gimmicks for style, choose corporate branding over aestheticism and music, and pursue money rather than soul. I love when my students let me feel the ways that they are feeling those differences.

When I have students who are so deeply invested in a genre or musician that is literally before their time, I stop to notice these explicit ways that black communities  sustain culture, memory, sound, and history.  In this particular case, there’s a word for it: Baduizm.

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Impact of Lauryn Hill: Beyond Double Standards

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“I don’t know any black woman that could go out here and make a sex tape and get a cupcake line, a clothing line, a perfume line, and be touted around on the arm of an athlete like this is my girl, cuz you know when we do that kind of stuff we called Supahead… I’m [not] put on a pedestal like the other women.”  ~Sherri Shepherd

These were the words spoken by Sherri Shepherd on a panel discussing black men and women’s relationships.   I was struck by the relevance and accuracy of the sentiment but also by her ability to push this reality much farther than how we usually like to see and talk about such issues: as “double standards.”   This notion of “double standards” just doesn’t go far enough and stops incredibly short of any real analysis.  I prefer bell hooks’s terminology: “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”— a totalizing and interlocking system.  Strange as it may seem, there was something, or rather someone, in particular who triggered my memory of Sherri Shepherd’s words and my general disdain for every everyday discourse that names social violence on black women as “double standards”:  that person is Lauryn Hill.

lauryn-hill1Quite 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 (not unlike the many, many men Supahead so fabulously chronicled for us). The folk who are so curiously silent on these issues are the same fools who diss Lauryn.  Double standards?  Naw.  There’s more than just that going on here.Lauryn+Hill+PNG

Like what I recently said about Aja Monet, Lauryn Hill gets love from my students every semester.  I don’t even have to bring her name up— they will do the work.  I am noticing this more now as I close out a semester of teaching black women’s rhetoric.  I see my students’ embrace of Lauryn Hill as a way they combat a system intent on stealing a black woman’s light, a system that they too are up against.

I am confident today that my students have a substantial, new body of knowledge on black women’s history, that they even know some rhetorical theory as well as black feminist thought.  But what I am most impressed with is the way they fight for black women’s lives: they fight to let. black. women. live.  That’s what I see them doing with Lauryn Hill against an “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that intends to obliterate her.  I stand with my students on this one: much love to you, Lauryn! 

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Impact of Aja Monet: “Is That All You Got”

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Last week in class, we finished unit six.  In that unit, I asked students to hear, see, and draw a line of connection between black women in 1970s Black Power Struggles, Black Arts Movement, and contemporary spoken word artists.  I received an email one night from one of my beloved students, Karina, who asked that I include what she saw as one of Aja Monet’s most impactful poem, “Is That All You Got?,” in the list of Monet poems that I offered.  Here is that poem:

I was actually introduced to Aja Monet, the youngest national poetry slam winner, through my students, not through New York City’s poetry events.  I can honestly say that I have never had a class of young people where someone did not know Monet’s work and this spans quite a few years of my teaching now.  I am only now realizing that Aja Monet ‘s words and visions visit my classroom in each semester that I teach undergraduates.  It speaks to me about what Monet is speaking to these young black men and women.  In fact, Karina’s one request as a high school graduation gift was Monet’s book of poetry, a book I have now added to my own shelves. There are certainly a set of go-to essays and other texts that re-circulate back into my classroom and I know now to add Monet’s poetry to this set.

I have listened to this poem over and over this weekend, hoping to hear my students better.  Mainly what I hear now is that they have been through some things, are looking back on it, and are seeing just how and why they are going to make it through because as Monet puts it: “Is that all you got? What the f**k is you broken for?” It’s a reminder that I am also thankful for.

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My Father’s Black Working Class Consciousness as an Academic Necessity

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My Father as a Young Man

My Father as a Young Man

When I have heard white working class people talk about becoming academics/joining the academy, they seem to often talk about an estrangement from peers, neighborhoods, and, especially, from family.  I hear black academics sometimes talk this way also, usually in reference to the brothas and sistas on the block who no longer accept them.  I just don’t get it. I just don’t have these issues, never have, and don’t imagine I will in the future either. The older that I get, the further “ahead” (in years, I mean) that I move into the academy, the more I seem to be able to talk with and relate to my father.

My father is a retired heating and air conditioning mechanic and seems to be able to fix any motor/engine/system on the planet.  As is always so startlingly true of the discarding of black bodies, talent, and genius under white supremacy, in another world, my father could have been an engineer and inventor (I won’t even go into the everyday assistantship I have had to provide on his homemade barbecue grills and electric traps to catch squirrels and critters that eat the garden’s tomatoes).  His garage is the 21st century version of Fred Sanford’s junkyard/frontyard with anything that you could ever need to fix anything that is ever broken.

Sanford and Son

Sanford and Son… Now Insert Me as Daughter

For most of my life, my father worked as custodial staff for the federal building.  Today, he gets hassled daily for any odd job that any black person in that part of Ohio seems to need done, so much so that he never answers his phone anymore, forcing me to buy him a cell phone and put it on my account in order to talk to him (preachers seem to be his arch-nemesis for trying to get free or cheap work done).  As a scholarship student at an elite high school, my high school peers were the sons and daughters of lawyers and judges so they knew my father from their parents’ frequent visits to the federal building where my father worked.  To my peers, I was the janitor’s daughter and it didn’t seem to make a difference that my father was not the janitor at OUR building, he was just a janitor out there somewhere and so that was his and my only identity.  I won’t lie and say that I didn’t feel like an ugly, unwanted, poor black girl for most of my high school years— it was what that culture engendered— but I wasn’t estranged from my father’s class consciousness and had a full-blooded, full-bodied critique of elite and upper middle class white people.  Today, as a recently tenured professor of English, I relate to my father even more by nature of the work and white supremacy that I navigate daily in the academy.  What on earth would make anyone think that it would look any different for me than it did for him?

Being raised in a (very) large, black working class family is what I count as my greatest blessing and asset today.  The language and vernacular that redefines and plays, the ability to read whiteness and its violence, the knowledge that pleasure and sustenance won’t come from work, the explicit naming of unfairness in everyday banter, the transformation of the mundane (fish fries, the electric slide, etc) into the sacred have sustained me in ways that are beyond even my conscious awareness.

Last week, I mailed to my father one of the first copies of my first book.  When he received it, he called me and was stunned that it was 336 pages and DONE!  The thing he kept saying, over and over again, was this: “uhn, uhn, uhn, this is a whole lotta work, baby.”  He told me that it was time to rest now before I get back up and get back at it.  It was the best recognition of what I had done and the best advice for what I need to do next that I have received to date!  I knew he would understand just what I was feeling, down to the core.

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