Cosby's at it again.
In using Cosby's rant to move passed Civil Rights politics Cobb's on the right track. But during the ensuring conversation an elderly sister notes that in many cities there exists a core group of folk who are escaping hiphop culture and embracing academic achievement culture. Now it is evident that this sister knows about identifying programs that we should model.
But it isn't quite clear she knows anything about hip-hop. Yes I'm a househead. But I wouldn't be where I am without hip-hop. Cobb talks a great deal about NSBE but I'm willing to bet that nothing but hip-hop is played at their national conference.
I've mentioned before that I wouldn't be here without the knuckleheads. It was the knuckleheads that taught me the dozens--the value of using wordplay as a means of attack and defense. The knuckleheads taught me to stand up for what I believed in. The knuckleheads taught me what it meant to be confident in myself when all around me doubted. And it was the criminally minded knucklheads that taught me the value of having game even as they gave me strong anti-role models.
Cosby can't feel that, because I'm not sure he ever needed a knucklehead. But those of us NOW in institutions like Michigan owe a great deal to them, because I'm not sure we are in those spots without them.
As an aside below are a couple of stories that exemplify the problems we encounter when we juxtapose an embrace of hip-hop against an embrace of academic success:
One of the afrofuturists (don't recall which one) dropped them on me.
You know as I approach middle age I'm going to have to revisit what I think of as "elderly" and I apologize...I just wanted to juxtapose conceptions of youth culture with real concerns of age.
I use the phrase "sister" to describe women in general. Sometimes I'll use a racial adjective for non-blacks, but most times do not. One of the few positive things I've picked up from Cornel West.
Been reading Raymond Williams (an old school British social theorist) about how language shifts as a response to social context. Has an interesting piece on the development of "standard english" that I have to gnaw on.
Posted by: Lester Spence at July 7, 2004 07:53 AM
elderly? aieeeee! sister? If you are meaning, a woman of color, I'm not. About as WASP as you can get.
You are correct about hip-hop--I'm lame when it comes to discerning one type of music from another (even back in the day)....help me figure this out. I'll read the links you sent me tomorrow.
Knuckleheads? Cosby's wrong--I think. I'm pretty much a pure Fillmorean on that debate:
"http://www.cal.org/ebonics/ebfillmo.html
The OUSD school board has made an important proposal: that the work of helping speakers of black English to learn the language of the school will be easier and more effective if it is seen as building on a home language whose properties the children are encouraged to examine, rather than as an endless process of "correcting mistakes." If that's all the new policy achieves, it will have been worth it. If teachers can attain precise understandings of the nature of that language, that will be even better. If all of this discussion encourages everyone involved to make whatever other changes need to be made to improve the school performance of African American students in the district, Oakland will achieve a new and more welcome kind of fame."
There are other cultures where a minority speak a dialect other than the standard recieved--low German comes tomind--perhaps we could learn from elsewhere how to do this thing.
I was going to say some more stuff about the bling culture--and it isn't black folks who are driving the bling culture--the flash for now and devil take the hindmost is the motto of the bling culture...
but I'm going to take my elderly self off to make sense another day.
Posted by: liz at July 7, 2004 12:06 AM