I always tell my teachers that we begin by recognizing that teaching is a revolutionary act. If you take the job to teach, your job is not to follow instructions but rather to hack the system. If somebody’s telling you that you need to pass the assessment, fine. Your task is to meet those needs by any means necessary. Sure, there’s pressure for the students to pass a test—do something different to get there. It’s not about changing the goals of schooling right now, it’s about changing the path to meeting those goals. I think those goals need to be expanded, but it’s about the path, not the destination.
Do you feel like youth education has changed since you were in school?
Oh yeah! I mean, I’m so optimistic about where education is going. Right now, with COVID-19, we’re in a period of flux: we’ve lost people, there are really dumb decisions being made about opening schools. But, COVID-19 has revealed to us that the notion of traditional assessments is stupid. If New York City can suspend all the Regents Examinations because of COVID-19, they can also suspend the Regents Examinations because, you know, kids are suffering from the virus of racism. What this moment has taught us is that a lot of the things that we’ve been tethered to didn’t really matter much anyways. We didn’t need assessments. We didn’t need curriculums. Kids could pick their own classes! We could have asynchronous learning. Learning can happen online! This moment is revealing to us that a lot of the things we were aligned to, thinking they were the only ways to do it, were actually just ideas that didn’t mean anything anyway. So I think the shifts that have happened, even in the midst of a pandemic, is showing us other opportunities. It has been a positive thing. Also, we’re in this moment now—and I’m thankful that my work has contributed to it—where there’s a newfound focus on culture, and a newfound attention on anti-racist schooling. Even as we critique systems and we talk about how bad it is, we also have sight of amazing new possibilities that have emerged.
Do you think that the Black Lives Matter movement will change youth education?
Absolutely. Black Lives Matter not only could change education, it has changed education already. There are students right now, high school students and middle school students, who have been to protests, who are on social media recognizing that for the first time ever that there has been an awakening to our values, to centering Black voices and to centering Black empowerment and to centering Black experiences. Most importantly, they recognize that there are critiques to established structures that have done violence to Black bodies. I think that the natural evolution from critiques of state-sanctioned violence, the police, is the critique of state-sanctioned violence that plays out in the classroom against young people. As we march for Black Lives Matter in the context of the criminal justice system, the next frontier is Black Lives Matter in another system that has devalued Black lives, which is the classroom.
Do you see this movement changing your own work?
Absolutely! The thing about my work, and the work of any scholar or thinker or revolutionary or teacher or activist, is that the work is never static. We are always responding to the phenomena that exist in the world. Anti-racism, for example, has been something that people have called for in education but has always been an undercurrent, and right now it’s so much more prominent. But yes, my work will evolve, my work is always evolving. I used to focus a lot on 90s-centered hip hop music as an anchor of the feeling around my work, and now I’m listening to Lil Baby, and his work is speaking to social justice activism and being a young boy, and sort of the dichotomy between his vernacular self and his thoughtfulness. The hip hop educator’s work is never static, it is always responding to young people and also to what’s happening in the world writ large. Mos Def once said that what’s happening in hip hop is what’s happening to us, what’s going on in the world. My work will be more focused on Black Lives Matter. My work will be more focused on state-sanctioned violence. My work will be more focused on centering Black voices and Black women’s voices, because that’s where society is.
What have been some of your best experiences working with Hip Hop Ed?
Oh man. From my work, I have the gift of seeing magic happening in real time every day. A student of mine who was part of Science Genius was, just a couple years ago a high school student. I’ve had the opportunity to see her graduate from Brandeis University and enter into graduate school at Teachers College at Columbia University. I’ve gotten the gift of witnessing the arch of her from a student to potential teacher because of something that I helped to create. There’s nothing more magical than that. Sometimes, you know, I’ll see a Tweet from a young person I worked with that shows that they’re looking at the world through a critical lens. I have students I’ve taught who are now teachers.
The gift of being a hip hop educator is that you don’t grow old. You increase in years, but you always have your finger on the pulse of the culture, you’re always connecting to young people.
A lot of your work calls out the fact that students who are born into poverty or live in poorer communities are often told that poverty is bad, and if you are poor you are bad, and the only way to live a meaningful life is to overcome that. What would you say is the counter-narrative to that type of “rags to riches” narrative?
First of all, that “rags to riches” narrative is antithetical to everything I believe in. I think it is the worst of narratives to share with young people. There is magic and beauty in every single human being, and there’s a particular magic and beauty in communities that folks have identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Poverty gives birth to possibilities. Not having wealth gives birth to the richness of thought and imagination and creativity. I find that not having money leads to richness in spirit. You can be ratchet, you can be from communities of color, and still be deeply academic and brilliant. You shouldn’t have to make a decision between being yourself or being smart or being an intellectual. You can do both at the same time. Human beings who are both hood and intelligent and academic are able to navigate multiple worlds. Those who can only navigate the academic world are disadvantaged because they don’t step into communities of color and find the richness and beauty of those spaces. For me, it’s like, there’s no more “rags to riches,” there’s no more “find your way out.” There is only who you are and where you are and recognizing that there are infinite possibilities of who you could be and who you should be when you embrace all of who you are. That’s what I try to do with my work and that’s what I try to do as a human being. I always try to operate from an authentic self. I’m not just, like, a Columbia University professor, I am also someone who loves rap and performing ciphers and hip hop. All those things are pieces of me. I don’t have to leave my hip hop self at the door to have value. My value is actually rooted in my hip hop self. I want every young person and every young artist to understand that their magic is in the places that they come from, that the magic is in embracing your ratchet and raw and unapologetic and non-acceptable self. When we learn to embrace our raw self, we can reach the height of our genius.
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For more information, please visit the #HipHopEd website.
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For more information about Dr. Emdin and his work, please visit Dr. Edmin's website.
All images courtesy of Lincoln Center.
