F**k Higher Education: The Radical Yeezy-ian Politic of a Black College Dropout

• In Event: 25.035 - Underground, Outer Space, and on the Move: Fugitive Possibilities in Black Education

Abstract

This paper turns to Hip-Hop as a place of knowledge that speaks truth to power for marginalized Black people. Building upon the “F**k Tha Police” critique made popular by N.W.A, this paper forwards a F**k Higher Education critique based on Kanye West’s (2004) CD titled College Dropout. West challenges the master narrative of college as always a benefit or a social equalizer; a narrative presented constantly to poor Black people. Through songs and skits on the CD, he argues that higher education not only offers false promises of opportunity but sorts Black people into categories of value and disposability. West raps against the normalization of non-credentialed Black people being without resources, and livelihoods. When education fails to be the promised pathway, he highlights how poor Black communities resist their disposability and engage in place-making that reflects their value.

I utilize McKittrick’s (2006; 2011) Black Sense of Place theory to explore how West critiques higher education and urban settings as geographies of domination and at the same time documents how Black people in these sites form a sense of place. A Black sense of place is the material and creative geographies that Black people create in contestation with geographies of domination. The theory’s intervention is that oppression is often documented in critical scholarship, but the alternative ways of being human that Black people create in their sense of place are not. West’s writes and raps from his own positionality of a poor Black college dropout to disrupt these logics and center Black life.

The paper’s analysis focuses on how West describes the ways human value is produced at the intersection of credentials, race, and class. His CD critiques the proximity of low-performing colleges in the “hood,” the unaffordability of higher education, the lack of secure pathways for poor Black students to graduate, and college enrollment as a form of consumerism. West’s critiques are compared to prior research and available data on Black students’ college outcomes to explain his anti-higher education arguments. At the same time, West’s lyrics ensure the hood cannot be understood only through anti-Blackness. As McKittrick (2011) argues, racism and resistance to racism are not the defining features of how Black people create place. West’s lyrics document how communities like South Side Chicago are where Black people live through human connections that generate joy, affirmation, and collectivity. The paper highlights West’s example of place-making as models for how higher education and society should value Black life.

College Dropout is utilized as a lyrical map to understand how Blackness is already positioned as fugitive and how education systems help to normalize that fugitivity. Hip-Hop often provides the vocabulary for unspeakable ideas and justified rage. This paper follows that tradition in documenting how higher education masks and reproduces anti-Blackness. Yet, the F**k Higher Education critique shows how educational fugitivity can be generative. It first critiques how the same education system that condemns Blackness can also uplift it. Then it imagines how freedom requires more than degrees.

Author

• Jalil Bishop, University of California - Los Angeles