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Teaching Interlude II Through Their Window Super, Sweet, Soul, Sonic, Sisters. That’s what my friends and I called one another in junior high school but we did not invent those words. It was the effect of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force, the force behind what is now known as the Universal Zulu Nation.1 I only remembered this a decade later, in 1999, in the semester that I met Rakim,2 a student in a course that I taught at the City University of New York. The politi‑ cal activism and rhetorics that have shaped Rakim’s thinking represent a distinct history in which African American students have continually challenged the exclusionary boundaries of higher education whether it be admissions policies, curricular content, staffing policies, or language paradigms. To give a sense of Rakim’s presence, it should be noted that when on campus, it was a rare day when Rakim wasn’t sporting what we call a du‑rag under his baseball cap, those snug headhugging scarves that young men with short hair wear. Only when he was organizing, doing Zulu Nation stuff, did Rakim take the du‑rag off. I present this aspect of his visual aesthetic to bump it up abruptly against the everyday discourses of faculty at the campus where we met. One particular administrator of color came right out and told the faculty and tutors who teach freshman courses: such students are not ready for the intellectual responsibilities of college because they do not know that this kind of attire is inappro‑ priate for college and, thus, need a special kind of college education. These continual sentiments made it clear that working‑class black men are infantilized, quite literally from head to toe, in these public discussions of what and how they need to be taught. That someone such as Rakim actually had public spaces where he presented himself formally, that he had his own aesthetic code, was 67 68 Vernacular Insurrections inconceivable because black, urban youth cannot be imagined as even knowing what kind of clothes they need to wear in the world, though they, ironically, set the fashion standards of a now globalized youth culture. My own days as an undergrad at a white, supraelite university are replete with a standard attire that could hardly be called professional either: a crushed T‑shirt that no iron could straighten again; khaki shorts, and if they were just a lil’ bit stained, then all the better; and last but not least, a pair of Birkenstock sandals, with the toe crust so well worn into the soft soles that there really should have been some rules banning them. My girl (who I won’t name here to protect the innocent) coined a new name for these shoes—irkenbockers—because they irked us so much. I distinctly remember threatening to call the parents of a dorm neighbor if he did not curb a little of his dressing procedure: pick up a T‑shirt off the floor, since the closet stored state‑of‑the‑art stereo equipment, sniff the arm pits, and if the stench was only mildly offensive, simply put the shirt on. Yet no one lectured these students about their unprofessional attire (and smell) and dress‑code‑switching abilities; no one questioned these students’ cognitive and political abilities to understand what was appropri‑ ate for the “real world” corporate jobs that they have received. These sons of professors, senators, and some of the wealthiest capitalists across the world did not need to worry that their stylistic choices would mark them as cognitively deficient. And so this is where I start my introduction to the semester that I met Rakim: his very aesthetic, the very look of him, was rendered within racialized, bourgeois caricatures before he had even arrived at the campus, a student who had more rhetorical influence and sophisticated political alliances than many of his professors. Black and Puerto Rican men on campus interacted very curiously with Rakim. There were four acknowledgments that I saw. There were the young, urban, Hip Hop cultured men who would look at him and nod, a one‑head up kinda thing. Then there were the “Wassup” greet‑ ings that were still casual, but represented longer handshakes. There were the handshakes that featured doubled and tripled hand slides where the men got really close to one another, like maybe they were whispering something to each other. And then there were those long, long, secret things that only...

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