The Power of Resistance by Elmesky Rowhea M.;Camp Yeakey Carol;Marcucci Olivia C.;

Author:Elmesky, Rowhea M.;Camp Yeakey, Carol;Marcucci, Olivia C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

SCHOOL COUNSELORS AND HIP HOP

If school counselors are to competently leverage the insights articulated by women in hip-hop culture when working with Black girls, it is imperative that they be cognizant of how hip-hop culture can be read as text. The assertion that written texts, as well as visual and auditory artifacts, can operate as text is integral to critical media literacy. For school counselors who seek to align their counseling praxis with the tenants of social justice, it is important that they understand how hip-hop culture, as part of the current media apparatus, can be unpacked to explore salient issues that are germane to socio-educational marginalization that students of color repeatedly encounter, especially Black girls. As Morris (2016) illustrates vividly, for Black girls matriculating in the PreK-12 public school educational pipeline, this marginalization entails exposure to subjective Anglo-normative behavioral policies that routinely demonize and punish Black aesthetic expressions (e.g., locks, braids) with draconian disciplinary policies.

When school counselors are equipped with an understanding of how critical social and cultural theory can be used to interrogate practices such as these in schools, they can formulate approaches to counseling that broach discussion around institutional oppression and resistance through youth-driven culturally relevant materials (Freire, 2006; Macedo, 2006). At its core, this approach to counseling is rooted in the principles of critical media literacy, an unapologetic centering of the joyful and enthusiastic voices of Black girls, and demands platforms where Black girls can exercise their agency, through hip hop, to counteract the educational policies that marginalize them along intersecting subject positions, for example, race, gender, and class (Collins, 2002).

Certainly, there are a number of exemplary examples of Black women within hip-hop culture – representing various regions of the country, parts of the world, and subgenres. In theory, any number of these examples could have been used to illustrate how the voices and experiences of Black women in hip hop are applicable to the experiences of Black girls in schools. The selection of the following Black women emcees (aka rappers) reflect our tastes in hip hop and should not be construed to imply that the work of other, equally qualified Black women emcees could not have been used.

On the song Complexion, Rapsody (2015) discusses, in part, the degradation of dark Black girl skin, and how that pervasive perception about the inferiority of dark Black skin is something with which Black girls must habitually contend (https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-complexion-a-zulu-love-lyrics). Rapsody undertakes the task of critiquing the ways in which dark complexion has been historically devalued aesthetically through the White racial gaze. Specifically, Rapsody asks the listener to contemplate several questions including how the constant devaluation of dark skin is institutionalized and strategically disseminated to the public; how the devaluation of Black skin, particularly when associated with the Black female body, positions the Black female body as hypersexual and devoid of any inherently discernible beauty in relation to hegemonic Eurocentric standards of femininity and beauty. Moreover, rather than asking us to consider what these tensions means only at the level

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