“I Don’t Spit Dope No More, I’m Pushing Medicine”: Hip-Hop for Healing at a Community School

• In Event: Still Nuthing Ta F’ Wit: Examining the Power of Hip-Hop to Advance Justice for Youth

Abstract

Objective:

The Roses in Concrete Community School (Roses or RiC) was conceived as a counter-hegemonic schooling project and a community-based response to demand for self-determination in education for Black, Brown, and Indigenous children and families in East Oakland. The founders sought to fulfill this demand by repurposing a school into a center of wellbeing that would support healing and transformation. This paper examines the role Hip Hop played in the Roses community and considers the goals and strategies of the ‘Hope Dealers’ who used Hip Hop as medicine.

Framework, Data, and Methodology:

This paper draws from data gathered through a critical ethnographic case study of the Roses in Concrete Community School that took place from 2014-2020. Critical race methodology (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002), which foregrounds race and racism in all aspects of the research process, informed data gathering and analysis. I frame Roses as a culturally sustaining (Paris and Alim, 2017) and healing-centered (Ginwright, 2018) education project and a case of schooling as marronage (Noguera, 2020), or liberatory schooling that seeks freedom from the white gaze grounded in self-determination, liberation, and decolonization for Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples in settler spaces. Date sources include semi-structured interviews with teachers, administrators, and families of RiC, classroom observations and field notes, video and audio recordings of performances, and document analysis.

Substantiated Conclusions:

Hip Hop was intentionally used in the Roses community to meet a wide range of institutional goals related to supporting healing and transformation. Hip-Hop was used most at the school by members of the school culture team to address student needs related to critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009), but it was also used in arts programming and for community engagement. Hip Hop was also used pedagogically, to address social and emotional needs, to engage and activate the critical consciousness and mindfulness of students, staff, and families, and to increase authentic engagement with all stakeholders. In this way, Hip-Hop was used as ‘medicine’ at the collective and individual level.

Scholarly Significance:

This study frames Hip-Hop as culturally sustaining pedagogy (Alim et al., 2020; Buffington and Day, 2018; Paris and Alim, 2014) while also presenting evidence of its use in healing-centered engagement within a community responsive urban education justice movement. The paper considers implications of the study’s findings for educational leaders invested in dismantling racial injustice and creating new educational possibilities in U.S. schools today.

Author

• Joaquin Noguera, Loyola Marymount Universtiy