Views from the Bricks: Notes on Reading and Protest

CLA JOURNAL 169 Views from the Bricks: Notes on Reading and Protest David F. Green Jr. In reflecting on the African American protest tradition and the outsized role of storytelling as one of its most profound tools for reasoning through social unrest and social injustice, I believe our ability to understand Hip Hop music’s complicated messaging will be essential to examining critical responses to legal and social victimization. For me, Hip Hop remains vital to discussions of the African American protest tradition and to the critical work of reflection, healing, and organizing. The recent rise of Hip Hop songs, such as Kendrick Lamar’s “We Gon Be Alright,” as popular protest songs are testament to Hip Hop music’s function with the lives of marginalized people (Limbong). Moreover, Hip Hop artists’ skillful manipulation of multimedia resources across several digital and print platforms represents a bridge between tradition and social change. The podcasts, music videos, film clips, memoirs, interviews, and even tweets from these artists represent textual compositions that move seamlessly across genres, reading communities, and institutions. Thus, Hip Hop protest songs produce a type of literature designed for careful rereading, yet the processes of reading and method provide new and rich entanglements between texts, authors, genres, and platforms. I am reminded here of Todd Boyd’s measured observation in Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the Hood and Beyond that“rap can be used to analyze the mutually illuminating yet divergent categories of race, class, and gender in African American society. [Because] [m]ore often than not, questions of race dominate both popular and critical discussions about rap music”(39).Yet, rap and its broader cultural practice of Hip Hop music remain largely on the outskirts of cultural, literary, and rhetorical studies—a side dish often served up alongside the main course. I often wonder: what can Hip Hop’s visual and verbal compositions provide our understanding of racism, police brutality, or youth cultural activism? Although Hip Hop-based education and Hip Hop scholarship continue to increase and grow, Hip Hop’s role within African American Literature, for example, demands a change in approach to its conception and relevance (Jennings and Petchauer 220). In their essay “Teaching in the Mix: Turntablism, DJ Aesthetics and African American Literature,” Kyesha Jennings and Emery Petchauer make an intriguing case for reimagining how conversations between older and newer Black writers can occur. For them, the DJ’s approach of simply introducing new songs thematically or sonically linked to earlier songs of different genres models a type of skillful reimagining of African American literature as discussion occurring across time and taste (221-222). This method is called a “drop,” literally the 170 CLA JOURNAL David F. Green, Jr. dropping in of a new song on top of the previous, which symbolizes the creative ways DJs use reading and research to bring together texts that share unrecognized commonalities.What might we gain from rethinking the juxtaposition of Hip Hop music and older literary texts within the African American writing tradition as a series of synchronous and asynchronous conversations occurring across time? Ralph Ellison’s response to writer Irving Howe’s essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” is instructive here (Gates and McKay 1361). While I will not go into the substance of Howe’s criticism or Ellison’s rebuttal, paraphrasing Ellison’s distinction between ancestors and relatives adds to this discussion of Hip Hop and the African American literary tradition. As Ellison explains, Black writers do not choose their relatives—those associated with them because of ethnic and discursive commonalities—but they do choose their ancestors—those who shape their thinking, voice, and dispositions (1361). My question then becomes, what writers might we consider ancestors and what writers might we consider relatives? I asked this question as I rewatched some of the more spirited protest performances presented at the 2020 BET Awards and songs released in response to Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd.What conversations or strategizing might erupt from placing James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” in conversation with rapper Da Baby’s remixed performance of “Rockstar” at the 2020 BET Awards? How might readers benefit...