The Lyricist's Ethic: Collective Affirmation at the Community of Practice Level

• In Event: The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Hip-Hop Pedagogy From the United States to South Africa

Abstract

Whereas the use of physical force to colonize a people has its primary place of operation in policy and policing which control how and where people move, the use of psychological force operates where information (or misinformation) is disseminated, and ideologies are transmitted, influencing how people think. Psychological colonization (Hall & Livingston, 2003) of a people necessarily involves undermining the value or efficacy of their intellectual and cultural practices. This includes conditioning them to believe that not only do they produce nothing of value, but that they must find value in what their subjugators have assessed as valuable, and they must sustain themselves on their subjugators’ productions (which are ironically, more often than not, created by their own mental and physical labor), giving way to a dependency rooted not in fact, but in systemic psychological force. In the case of Hip Hop, rapping as an intellectual and cultural practice has often been taken up within global spheres as a racialized commodity in ways that continue to disrupt the power of Hip Hop pedagogy. This paper asks: How do historically marginalized communities survive and transcend psychological colonization? How can members of these communities be made to feel as empowered and entitled as their counterparts whose identities are affirmed in entertainment, education, and scientific domains of mainstream culture?

Using expert freestyle lyricists (i.e., improvisational rappers) as an example, this paper presents a framework for psychological interventions in which the community of practice (Lave, 1991), rather than the individual, is the unit of focus. In this framework, knowledge of the intellectual complexity or physiological benefits associated with a specific cultural practice, are proposed as a potential self-affirmation (Sherman & Cohen, 2006) tool for all members of its community of practice, as well as for members of its community of origin, addressing psychological colonization at the group level. Freestyle lyricism is used as an example because, despite its intellectual and neurocognitive complexity, it remains associated with its African-American originators, a people historically propagandized as intellectually inferior.

This paper draws from a recent study in which 12 expert freestyle lyricists were compared to 11 non-lyricists in their neurophysiological responses to rhyme judgment tasks using electroencephalograph (EEG), and interviews of 18 expert lyricists’ philosophies regarding their practice and its possible benefits. Findings are discussed in relation to stereotype threat theory (Steele & Aronson, 1995), self-affirmation and social-belonging (Walton & Cohen, 2011) interventions, and the use of scientific knowledge/theory as intervention (for an example, see Aronson et al., 2002).

Research on the intellectual complexity or physiological benefits associated with specific cultural practices of historically marginalized groups, with the communities of practice and communities of origin as its intended beneficiaries, may encourage those communities’ continued participation in (or support of) the practices, and general sense of efficacy with regard to their own creations. This has implications for freeing marginalized populations of conditioned notions of inferiority and dependency in education and other domains, and for how scientific investigation to this end, must be designed, conducted, and disseminated.

Author

• Keith G. Cross, Stanford University