The Miseducation of Hip-Hop - discrimination in education

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 7, 2000 by Jamilah Evelyn

Are Today's Faculty and Administrators Simply Out of Touch? Or Has Today's Popular Music Truly Corrupted the Minds of a Whole Generation?

NEWARK, DEL.

When Jason Hinmon transferred to the University of Delaware two years ago from Morehouse College in Atlanta, the 22-year-old senior says he almost dropped out his first semester.

He says that for financial reasons, he came back here to his hometown. But in many ways, he had never felt so abandoned.

"I came to class and my professors didn't know how to deal with me," he says, between bites of his a-la-carte lunch. "I could barely get them to meet with me during their office hours."

Dark-hued, dreadlocked and, well, young, he says many of his mostly White professors figured they had him pegged.

"They took one look at me and thought that

I was some hip-hop hoodlum who wasn't interested in being a good student," he says.

But if Hinmon represents the "good" students with grounds to resent the stereotype, there are faculty who profess there's no shortage of young people willing to live up -- or down -- to it.

"You see students walking on campus reciting rap lyrics when they should be reciting something they'll need to know on their next test. Some of these same students you won't see back on campus next semester," says Dr. Thomas Earl Midgette, 50, director of the Institute for the Study of Minority Issues at historically Black North Carolina Central University.

"These rap artists influence the way they dress," he continues. "They look like hoochie mamas, not like they're coming to class. Young men with pants fashioned below their navel. Now, I used to wear bell-bottoms, but I learned to dress a certain way if I was negotiating the higher education maze. I had to trim my afro."

The difference between today's students and their parents, faculty and administrators is marked, no doubt. Technology's omnipresence -- apparent in kids with little patience for anything less than instant meals, faster Internet information and cellular ubiquity -- is certainly at play when it comes to explaining the divide.

But what causes more consternation among many college and university officials is a music form, a culture and a lifestyle they say is eating away at the morals, and ultimately the classroom experience, of today's college students.

Hip-hop -- brash, vulgar, in-your-face hip-hop -- is indisputably the dominant youth culture today. Its most controversial front men floss mad ice (wear lots of diamonds and other expensive jewelry), book bad bitches (usually scantily clad, less than the take home kind of girl) and in general, party it up. Its most visible females brag about their sexual dexterity, physical attributes and cunning tactics when it comes to getting their rent paid.

With college completion statistics at an embarrassing low and the Black-White achievement gap getting wider by the semester, perhaps it's time to be concerned whether the culture's malevolent message is at play.

But can atrocious retention rates really be linked to reckless music? Or do university officials underestimate their students? Is it that young folk today have no sense of history, responsibility and plain good manners? Or are college faculty a bunch of old fogies simply more comfortable with Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" than Little Kim's sexual prowess?

Is this no different than the divide we've always seen between young people and their college and university elders? Or do the disparities between this wave of students and those charged with educating them portend something more disparaging?

THE GAP

At the heart of the rift between the two groups is a debate that has both sides passionately disturbed.

Young people say they feel pigeonholed by an image many of them don't support. They say the real rub is that their teachers -- Black and White -- believe the hype as much as the old lady who crosses the street when she sees them coming.

And they'd like their professors to consider this: They can listen to the music, even party to it, but still have a response just as critical, if not more so, than their faculty and administrators.

Others point out that the pervasiveness of hip-hop's immoral philosophies is at least partly rooted in the fact that the civil rights movement -- the older generation's defining moment -- surely did not live up to all its promises for Black America.

And further, they say it's important to note that not all hip-hop is irresponsible. In fact, some argue that it's ultimately empowering, uplifting and refreshing. After all, when was the last time a biology professor sat down with a Mos Def CD? How many can even pronounce his name?

Older faculty, administrators and parents alike respond that the music is downright filth. And anyone associated with it ought to have their mouths and their morals cleansed.

That there's a real problem when a marijuana-smoking ex-con named Snoop Doggy Dog can pack a campus auditorium quicker than Black historian John Hope Franklin. When more students deify the late Tupac Shakur and his abrasive lyrics than those who ever read the great Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.