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Hip Hop and Social Justice Education: A Brief Introduction

While rap music has been castigated in the popular media for its controversial lyrics, we seek to locate hip hop as a transformative element in the development of critical teaching and thinking. Although not considered a mainstream element of popular culture at its inception during the late 1970s, hip hop music and culture have developed into an international phenomenon critically centered in youth—and arguably adult—popular culture. As teachers concerned with developing critical learning search for innovative ways to introduce educational relevance, hip hop should be located in the range of approaches. The purpose of this special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education is to provide educational administrators, faculty, students, and practitioners with a series of articles intended to facilitate conversations and raise awareness of how hip hop can serve as a useful tool to bring student voices into the classroom, and to inform and influence curriculum, pedagogical practices, and the construction of knowledge. Since its inception, hip hop has been and continues to be a constructive and contested space for the historically oppressed and marginalized to both resist and challenge social ideologies, practices, and structures that have caused and maintained their subordinate position. These silenced voices have creatively and strategically utilized hip hop as a vehicle to showcase their views and experiences to the world regarding the social, political, and economic barriers that limit and often prohibit access to resources for social advancement. From the early days of rhyming on the street corners of the South Bronx in the middle to late 1970s (and arguably going back even further to artists, such as Gil Scott-Heron) to the multi-billion dollar industry of today, hip hop has always told the story of the “other America.” Hip hop was born of dilapidated conditions and a culture of poverty, which sparked creative modes of sharing with the rest of the world what was transpiring not only in the Bronx but also in other urban spaces across the country (Light, 1999; Rose, 1994). These modes of sharing have come to be known as the four elements of hip hop (b-boying/breaking/dancing, dj-ing, graffiti art, and mc-ing/rapping) (Forman & Neal, 2004). As hip hop evolved and has been taken up by various regions of the country, it has further cemented its multi-lingual and multicultural status as a result of the various dialects, terms,