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The 9/11 tragedy has inspired conflicted responses from African American scholars and artists. Marc Lamont Hill discusses how he uses popular rap texts in a high school Hip-Hop Lit class to teach literary interpretation and simultaneously engage students in complicated issues of race that have emerged in the aftermath of 9/11.
The 9/11 tragedy produced a multitude of powerful and competing emotions inside of me. As the World Trade Center was reduced to rubble and the body count of innocent citizens entered the thousands, I was at once angry, sad, and scared. Like many African Americans, however, I also recognized the tragic irony of the nation's collective indignation in response to terrorism. This sentiment is perhaps best characterized by Cornel West in Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism: "The ugly terrorist attacks on innocent civilians on 9/11 plunged the whole country into the blues. Never before have Americans of all classes, colors, regions, religions, genders, and sexual orientations felt unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated. Yet to have been designated and treated as a nigger in America for over 350 years has been to feel unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated" (20; italics in original). West's sentiments speak to the moral and ethical contradictions between America's antiterrorist fervor and hyper-patriotism on the one hand, and its simultaneous indifference to the conditions of its most vulnerable citizens on the other.
As an English educator, I learned that such observations are not restricted to professional pundits and trained scholars. On the contrary, students frequently articulated similarly powerful and insightful critiques of American democracy during classroom conversations and through their written work. These critiques are largely informed by the popular culture texts with which students engage (Giroux; Hill).
In this article, I describe how students in Hip-Hop Lit, a hip-hop-centered English literature course that I taught in an urban high school, used "A Ballad for the Fallen Soldier" by rapper Jay-Z as a point of entry for developing and articulating their critiques of post-9/11 racial politics. These insights highlight the possibilities of popular culture and the English classroom as spaces within which to view, discuss, and critique the lived realities of students.
Context
Hip-Hop Lit was taught at Howard High School (HHS;...