Finding Hope in Hip-Hop

READINGS FOR Engaging All Kids across the Spectrum: Reaching the Marginalized AP Language Student

Carlos Barrera

Walton High School

Finding Hope in Hip-Hop

by Laura Hall

lLaura Hall works at a garment factory and takes classes at Brigham Young University. She volunteers with the National Allianceon Mental Illness, leading classes for family members of people who suffer with mental illness. Hall lives in Provo, Utah.

“No matter how tired or hopeless I am feeling, hip-hop helps me look beyond my own circumstances to find the determination I need to move forward.”

Tell Me More,May 22, 2008 · I believe in hip-hop. And being a white girl born and raised in the whitest conditions, it surprises me that I've come to this belief — especially since I used to hate this music. My husband, Adam, would try to play it in his car while we were dating, and I hated it so much that I would give him the silent treatment.

But nine months after we married, Adam was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. To take care of him, I dropped out of college to work a factory job that provides mental health insurance coverage. My American dreams of an education, job, house and kids dissolved. My working-class life began.

One Saturday I sat alone on the floor in our tiny apartment, piecing a quilt, when the CD changer switched to a MosDef album that Adam had been listening to a few days before. What had once sounded like a muddle of words to me took form and my belief in the message of hip-hop began, and this is what I heard:

All over the world hearts pound with the rhythm
Fear not of men because men must die
Mind over matter and soul before flesh,
Angels hold the pen, keep a record in time

I listened carefully to the entire album and actually heard what MosDef was saying. I heard his call for self-reliance and his cry for equality. But more than that, the music let me feel the struggle of another person's life experience.

Because I haven't achieved my own rise from struggle to success, I rely on other peoples' stories to revitalize my hope. And I find that some of the most compelling come through hip-hop. I believe in the rhymes of socially conscious M.C.'s who rose from difficulty and used their success to address societal ills and their desire for change, artists like Blackalicious, Jurassic 5 and Bahamadia.

I believe in the story of the genre itself. Hip-hop was created in the housing projects of the Bronx by people whose struggle was more severe than anything I could have imagined before. But they were brilliant and innovative enough to rise above it.

Hip-hop is my gateway to their lives and learning about African-American history. References to people and events in songs have me searching at the library through books and documentaries where I've discovered inspiring people who were never mentioned in my all-white schools.

Now I like hip-hop more than Adam does. It's what gets me through my day. Working with the beats helps me move faster, increasing my piece-rate pay by a dollar an hour. My dream is to help those who suffer with mental illness. I want to fight the problems of inaccessible treatment, incarceration, stigma and homelessness all resulting from mental illness. The only problem is that I work in a factory all day, everyday, just to pay for the medications Adam needs to get by.

But no matter how tired or hopeless I am feeling, hip-hop helps me look beyond my own circumstances to find the determination I need to move forward.

Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe by Paula Gunn Allen
And how many times did I pluck you
from certain death in the wilderness –
my world through which you stumbled
as though blind?
Had I not set you tasks
your masters far across the sea
would have abandoned you –
did abandon you, as many times they
left you to reap the harvest of their lies;
still you survived oh my fair husband
and brought them gold
wrung from a harvest I taught you
to plant: Tobacco. It
is not without irony that by this crop
your descendants die, for other powers
than those you knew take part in this.
And indeed I did rescue you
not once but a thousand thousand times
and in my arms you slept, a foolish child
and beside me you played,
chattering nonsense about a God
you had not wit to name;
and wondred you at my silence –
simple foolish wanton maid you saw,
dusky daughter of heathen sires
who knew not the ways of grace –
no doubt, no doubt.
I spoke little you said.
And you listened less.
But played with your gaudy dreams
and sent ponderous missives to the throne
striving thereby to curry favor
with your king. I saw you well. I
understood the ploy and still protected you,
going so far as to die in your keeping –
a wasting, putrifying death, and you,
deceiver, my husband, father of my son,
survived, your spirit bearing crop
slowly from my teaching, taking
certain life from the wasting of my bones.

AP-Style English Language and Composition Essay

Carefully read the following autobiographical narrative by Malcolm X excerpted from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). In a well-constructed essay, identify the author’s purpose, and intended effect and analyze the rhetorical strategies and techniques he employs to achieve this.

I kept close to the top of the class, though. The topmost scholastic standing, I remember, kept shifting between me, a girl named Audrey Slaugh, and a boy named Jimmy Cotton.

It went on that way, as I became increasingly restless and disturbed through the first semester. And then one day, just about when those of us who had passed were about to move up to 8-A, from which we would enter high school the next year, something happened which was to become the first major turning point of my life.

Somehow, I happened to be alone in the classroom with Mr. Ostrowski, my English teacher. He was a tall, rather reddish white man and he had a thick mustache. I had gotten some of my best marks under him, and he had always made me feel that he liked me. He was, as I have mentioned, a natural-born "advisor," about what you ought to read, to do, or think -- about any and everything. We used to make unkind jokes about him: why was he teaching in Mason instead of somewhere else, getting for himself some of the "success in life" that he kept telling us how to get?

I know that he probably meant well in what he happened to advise me that day. I doubt that he meant any harm. It was just in his nature as an American white man. I was one of his top students, one of the school's top students -- but all he could see for me was the kind of future "in your place" that almost all white people see for black people.

He told me, "Malcolm, you ought to be thinking about a career. Have you been giving it thought?"

The truth is, I hadn't. I never have figured out why I told him, "Well, yes, sir, I've been thinking I'd like to be a lawyer." Lansing certainly had no Negro lawyers -- or doctors either -- in those days, to hold up an image I might have aspired to. All I really knew for certain was that a lawyer didn't wash dishes, as I was doing.

Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He kind of half-smiled and said, "Malcolm, one of life's first needs is for us to be realistic. Don't misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you've got to be realistic about being a n(-word). A lawyer -- that's no realistic goal for a n(-word). You need to think about something you can be. You're good with your hands -- making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don't you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person -- you'd get all kinds of work."

The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind.

What made it really begin to disturb me was Mr. Ostrowski's advice to others in my class -- all of them white. Most of them had told him they were planning to become farmers. But those who wanted to strike out on their own, to try something new, he had encouraged. Some, mostly girls, wanted to be teachers. A few wanted other professions, such as one boy who wanted to become a county agent; another, a veterinarian; and one girl wanted to be a nurse. They all reported that Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged what they had wanted. Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine.

It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn't, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.

It was then that I began to change -- inside.

Excerpt: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

PROLOGUE
The Woman in the Photograph (Read excerpt)

Carlos Mencia and Conversations on Immigration

Hip-Hop Artistry Knows No Borders

Peter Singer’s The Singer Solution to World Poverty

Will Smith as Muhammad Ali—speech

Julie Taymore on Frida

2005 TEDPrize winner Bono on TEDTalks

Sheryl WuDunn: Our century's greatest injustice

Surviving Katrina

(audio) (transcript)

Film Chronicles High-School Debate Teams

Walkout: The True Story of the Historic 1968 Chicano Student Walkout in East L.A.

Kate Braverman“The Incantation of Frida K”

Kate Braverman has written a contemporary novel, The Incantation of Frida K., based on the life of Frida Kahlo. The passage below is the opening of the novel. Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay in which you define the narrator’s attitude towards her husband and towards her legacy and show how she directs the reader’s perceptions with such stylistic devices such as imagery, diction, allusions, syntax, repetitions, and choice of specific details.

I was born in rain and I will die in rain. Know me as river, as harbor. They will say I was a slut with a brazen sailor’s mouth. They will not remember my elegance and restraint. They will say they looked in my eyes and counted one hundred forty-six pelicans flying in a wavering line into a marina at sunset.

Men don't have the vocabulary for such eyes. A brown, calculating and predatory. Men lack the spectrum, the palette. It is not the eyes themselves, but rather what they contain, the vision. Diego Rivera is like that, with his compulsion to categorize. Men prefer primitive bodies outlined with hard black edges like the Maya painted.

I resist the obvious borders. For this heresy I have been categorically penalized. Did you know they sealed me into a cast for one entire year? It was a premature burial where I kept breathing under dirt. They did this repeatedly, gathered my crushed bones like wildflowers and used plaster as a vase. They sought to make an object of me. There was no composition. It was vandalism.

I learned, in a hospital, in one solitary confinement or another, that it is still an era of barbarism. In surgery and convalescent rooms, laminated by electric light, I recognized their limitations. They are bloated with ambition, but their methods are inadequate. This knowledge is an illumination that burns. It is the essence of genius and affliction.

In this way I transcended them. I defied gravity. I should have died in the gutter like a barren dog, a hit-by-trolley-car bitch. I should have died in Diego's overwhelming shadow, curled into its shallows and currents. Its bloodstained coral reefs. Who but a water woman could have navigated his mined ports? He was a lady-killer. He murdered me slowly. It took him decades of sabotage. But wind and infection outwitted him.

This is the reason for the grief he will flagrantly display. He will mourn, but it will be with a theatrical and unsettling ambiguity. He will recall my parrot cage torso and nights of sleeping on razors and barbed wire. He will find the place where they sawed off my leg. He will dream it, how it smelled like decayed meat in a dirt alley at noon in a region of drought and plague, dust, piss of goats, rot of hibiscus. Diego will recognize the trolley car has stopped. He may mistake my absence for freedom.

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages and loved morphine and Demerol, tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

Their grafts and amputations, the casts and operations, are without limit. They will not complete their excavations, for surely I am an archaeological site now, not a woman, not a human, not anymore. When you have survived the withering disease, when you have dragged your polio leg like an anomalous branch scratching the pavement behind you, when you have continued breathing after they left you for dead on a city boulevard, when you have lived with Diego, when you have looked into your face and seen your third eye, you know death is a reward.

When they have skinned me completely, I will be as water women freed of their unnecessary bodies. Men prescribe these structures, these female forms, for pleasure and convenience and the perpetuation of sons. They invent laws and rituals to enforce this. I have taught myself to become deaf to them, oblivious. Of course, it's been a mutual decision. Mine has not been a typical exile but rather a negotiated settlement. I left the world as it is ordinarily known and it left me. When they cease the medieval procedures they call medicine, progress, and technology, I will float like a leaf, a delinquent maple beginning to curl, to turn to tissue to be painted on. I could etch the surface. I have the tools. I am as intelligent as they are and more subtle.

Yes. I am screaming. It’s time for morphine. I hear cathedral bells through rain. It’s the hour for amnesia and invisibility I call being saved. Nurse better come.

Antithesis

Simile

Repetition

Anaphora

Allusion

Rhetorical Question

Alliteration

Fragment

Metaphor

Parallel structure

THEME FOR ENGLISH B

By Langston Hughes

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am___1_____, ______2_____, born in ______3______.
I went to school at_____4______, then here
to this high school on the hill above Smyrna.
I am the only ______5______student in my class.

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at ______, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Marietta , I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear Atlanta too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to _____1_____, ______2______, _____3_____, and be in _____4______.
I like to ____5____, ______6_____, _____7____, and understand _____8_____.
I like a ______for a Christmas present,
or MP3s---___1_____, ____2___, and _____3_____. (3 music choices).
I guess being ______doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be ______.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are ______---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and ______---
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

1