Hip-Hop Encrypted Storytelling Within the Social Protests of High School Youth

• In Event: Encrypted Storytelling in Fugitive Learning Spaces: Disseminating Educational Research When Your Pedagogy Is Secret

Abstract

Researchers have studied the sociolinguistics of Hip-hop, and made the determination that it is its own discourse community or sociolect (Alim 2009). The findings of these linguists are also confirmed by the late Nipsey Hussle (2018) when he said: “See it’s a couple negus every generation/ That wasn’t supposed to make it out, but decode the matrix / And when they get to speak it’s like a coded language / Reminds negus of they strength and all the stolen greatness.” In this quote Nipsey attends to the ways that rappers encrypt messages of community transformation and regeneration within their music. The Lyripeutics Storytelling collective examines how hip-hop pedagogy (Emdin 2010, Love 2015, Alim 2007, Hill 2009, Stovall 2006, Petchauer 2009) can be used as a culturally relevant resource for inspiring youth sociopolitical becoming. We analyze data from a 6-week hip-hop arts intervention for high school youth in which learners, teachers, and community members engaged in hip-hop encrypted storytelling. In particular we unpack moments from our ethnographic accounts in which we used coded language to maintain solidarity and manifest social change, adapting to the fact that we were being surveilled and/or policed. In this paper, we will investigate how historically marginalized communities establish and maintain fugitive places, as well as how we encrypted our mobilizations so overseers cannot get beyond the fundamental knowledge of the code.

We will examine two specific cases where researchers joined young scholars in their fugitive social movements, taking part in the process of encrypted storytelling. Both situations are in relation to the mistreatment and displacement of teachers of color, specifically Chicanx teachers. During a silent sit-in, the lyripeutic collective joined the youth. We were booted out of the facility after a few minutes since the regulations indicated that adult visitors had to be in the designated classroom and could not attend the sit-in. As we walked out of the building, we held our fists up in solidarity. In the second incident, a few Lyripeutics members marched with youth to the school district building. During the walkout, nearly 50 police vehicles, motorbikes, and a helicopter surrounded the youth and supporters during their three-mile walk. As we neared one of Denver's busiest junctions, police began to try to narrow the lanes on which the youth were protesting. In this fugitive space, adolescents adopted chants, songs, and sacred healers as means of protection. In Lak'ech and Ridin' by Chamillionaire were chanted by the youth. While these songs are not new, they represent collective memory in that we knew we were unified despite the cops acting up, but we also embraced our rage at police techniques through song. Bakagiannis and Tarrant (2006) found that music and enables people to develop a more collective social identity. The struggle to recreate the self and construct as a collective while challenging the state is, by definition, an act of resistance. As researchers, we embrace coding and decoding in fugitive spaces and acknowledge the necessity for limited access to sacred story and space.

Authors

• Kalonji L. Nzinga, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Marlene Sulema Palomar, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Shawn T. O'Neal, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Carla Cariño
  Presenting Author

• Alexander Williams, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author