LOS ANGELES–So check it. On the white board in a Crenshaw High School classroom were the words: “Man vs. Ho.”
English teacher Patrick Camangian wrote the phrase to get his students talking about the lyrics by the late Tupac Shakur: “blaze up, gettin’ with hos through my pager.”
It worked. A lively discussion ensued about sexism, racism and how degrading terms such as “ho”–slang for “whore”–can be used to dehumanize and divide people. In hip-hop terms, the students were feelin’ it.
Teachers nationwide are using rap–the street-savvy, pop-locking, rhyming creations of Shakur, Geto Boys, Run-DMC and others–to teach history and English. Some colleges are even training future educators to weave rap into high school lessons.
“In order for students to understand anyone else’s poetic language, they have to first understand their own,” Camangian said.
To some parents and teachers, the idea of mentioning Grandmaster Flash in the same breath as T.S. Eliot is wack. They reject the notion that rap, with its raw language and vivid depictions of violence, has anything in common with literature.
But those who use it to teach say rap can be intellectually provocative, shedding light on the grand themes of love, war and oppression in much the same way as classic fiction. As a teaching tool, they liken rap to the songs of Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, used by an earlier generation of teachers.
In Camangian’s South Los Angeles classroom on a recent afternoon, students read the lyrics from a Shakur song, “Shorty Wanna Be a Thug.” The verse describes a man’s internal struggle to remain virtuous while a devil-like figure tempts him toward immorality and loose women:
I tell you it’s a cold world, stay in school. You tell me it’s a man’s world, play the rules and fade fools, ‘n break rules until we major. Blaze up, gettin’ with hos through my pager.
Camangian, 28, asked the class to compare the song to a speech said to have been delivered in Virginia in 1712 by a British slave owner. In the speech, whose authenticity has been questioned, Willie Lynch offers advice on preventing slave rebellions and urges that slaves be pitted against one another–men versus women, light-skinned versus dark, young vs. old.
Toure Eagans, 16, said Shakur’s lyrics showed how the “slave mentality” persists in disrespectful language.
Shakur “is reinforcing what Willie Lynch said. He’s putting the man against the woman. It’s dehumanizing them,” he said.
“So it’s the same thing they did to the slaves? Take a powerful man and turn him into a slave?” Camangian asked.
Another student pointed out that some African-American students address one another with racial epithets, without thinking about the pain such words can cause. “Yes, Willie Lynch said slavery will carry on for hundreds of years, and we still (perpetuate) it everyday in our language,” she said.
After class, Elyse Bryant, 16, said studying hip-hop helps students define a role for themselves in their neighborhoods and the wider world.
“We’ll sit in class and really think about what (rappers) are saying,” she said. “They talk about what’s going on in the country, from the government to the streets.”
The students also gain insight into how poetry is created. “When we go into college English classes, we’ll know how to break down each line,” she said. “You use the same skills to break down a college textbook that you use to break down lyrics.”
Lisa Moore, 16, said hip-hop speaks directly to young people in a way that classic texts cannot.
“We need to learn about Shakespeare, but hip-hop is history too,” she said. “As far as Shakespeare goes, we can’t relate to that. We can relate to what’s going on now.”
Hip-hop has become an object of serious study on college campuses. Stanford University, the University of Connecticut, Michigan State University and Pennsylvania State University have offered classes on hip-hop. The University of California, Berkeley, has a poetry course devoted to Shakur’s work.
In high school and lower grades, hip-hop is a more delicate subject. Crenshaw Principal Isaac Hammond said some parents complained last year that their children had been exposed to foulmouthed rap lyrics in class. Hammond now requires Camangian to edit out the strongest language.
Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy center at Stanford, said: “I would be outraged to find out my child is being subjected to Tupac Shakur in an academic classroom.”
Steele, a political essayist who taught college English for nearly 25 years, said students learn rap lyrics on their own. In school, he said, “they need to be taught great literature.”
Two education professors–Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ernest Morrell of Michigan State University–say students need both.
The two designed and taught an English course at Oakland High School in which students studied rap lyrics in tandem with classic works. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell reported the results in July in the English Journal, published by the National Council of Teachers of English.
“Hip-hop can be used as a bridge linking the seemingly vast span between the streets and the world of academics,” they wrote. At the same time, they said, rap is literature, “a worthy subject of study in its own right.”
Duncan-Andrade and Morrell say rap lyrics can be used “to teach irony, tone, diction and point of view” and can be “analyzed for theme, motif, plot and character development.”
A sample lesson plan they offer to high school teachers calls for comparing “Kubla Khan,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with “If I Ruled the World,” by rapper Nas; Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash; and “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” by modern poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, with “The World is a Ghetto,” by Geto Boys.
Their students have noticed parallels between Eliot and Grandmaster Flash, the researchers wrote. Students found that both artists speak of a “wasteland” of physical and moral decay in their societies.
Nancy Brodsky, 23, a teacher at Samuel Gompers Vocational Technical High School in New York’s South Bronx, has her ninth-grade students listen to a song by Dead Prez before reading George Orwell’s 1945 fable “Animal Farm,” the classic commentary on the Russian Revolution.
The rap song “Animal in Man” is based on Orwell’s use of animals to represent figures such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. In both works, a group of pigs seizes power on a farm and turns on the other animals. The creatures then revolt against the boss pig, Hannibal.
The last verse in the Dead Prez song says:
They took his tongue out of his mouth. And cut his body up for sale, for real. You better listen while you can. It’s a very thin line between animal and man. When Hannibal crossed the line, they all took a stand. What would you have done? Shook his hand? This is the animal in man.
Darien Lencl, 26, a social studies teacher at Skyline High School in Oakland, has made the Dead Prez song “Behind Enemy Lines” part of his students’ assigned reading on the civil rights and Black Power movements. The song deals with Fred Hampton, a 21-year-old Black Panther Party leader who was shot dead during a police raid in Chicago in 1969.
Outside class, students “may listen to the music and bob their heads, but they’re not going to think, `How does this relate to the lesson at hand and the curriculum we are using?’ ” Lencl said.
