Abstract
Sociologist Michael J. Cermak discusses what he learned while teaching environmental science with hip-hop in urban public high schools. This article provides an applied perspective of teaching at the crux of social justice and the environment.
Keywords
Whenever I play Marvin Gaye’s song “Mercy, Mercy, Me” in my high school environmental science class in Boston, I follow it with two questions. First: How many people recognize this tune? Almost all hands go up. Then I ask: How many people know this song is about the environment? Maybe one hand stays in the air. These questions and their predictable responses have shown me how little we consider music as a valid source for environmental thought, and the untapped potential of poetic verse in strategies for urban environmental education.
Learning from hip-hop deejays, I added records to my teaching turntable.
Marvin Gaye’s ode to the environment, where in one verse he sings, “Mercy, mercy me/ Oh things ain’t what they used to be/ Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas/ Fish full of mercury,” was my first attempt at infusing music into the environmental curriculum. Today, more than four years later, I play or recite environmentally-themed soul music, hip-hop, and poetry in the classroom and challenge my students to compose their own eco-centric rap to show what they have learned. The story of how I, a science-trained environmental educator, came to embrace hip-hop is as much a personal journey as it is an ethnography of the vital interplay between race, culture, environment, and education.
When I first entered the low-resource, urban high school, I thought I would have a lot to teach the over 95 percent black and Latino student population about the environment. When asked about global warming, the greenhouse effect, or sustainable organic food, most of them could not explain what these were or how they operated. This apparent ignorance of the ecological crisis matched several sociological studies that assess racial differences in environmental concern. However, I quickly learned that it was my own idea of environmental communication that needed remixing. My initial failure as an environmental educator working with racially and culturally diverse learners was made apparent by an unexpected comment from a student of mine, who, after completing a lesson on sustainable urban agriculture asked, “So you mean you want us to go back into the fields?”
Damien’s furrowed brow and challenging eyes stared back at me from the front desk in the room as he popped his question, without raising his hand. To justify sustainable urban agriculture, I had outlined the typical argument for why localizing agriculture was important: inner-city areas have some of the least access to healthy, organic foods, some of the highest concentrations of diet-related diseases, and low access to green space, all matched with high rates of unemployment. The elegance of the urban agriculture programs were, to me, quite apparent. It is hard to disagree with the logic of supporting programs that clean up urban lots for use as farmland, employ local youth, provide leadership training, grow fresh foods, and distribute them fairly. But for Damien, the logic of this sustainable effort was the last thing he was feeling.
Damien was a 16-year-old African American student who had disrupted my logical approach to teaching about environment. His hesitation to embrace an idea that placed youth of color “back in the fields,” working the land, did not come from a formally educated line of thought about the legacy of slavery or the role of nature in urban revival. To him there was just something that felt wrong about more young Black people working in the fields. It was these sorts of interruptions of my well-trained and scientifically-grounded environmental discourse, and the specter of slavery in a course about nature, which led me to question how people of different cultures and races produce different forms of environmental knowledge. At the time, I do not believe either of us knew what a more balanced environmental classroom would look or feel like—we just knew we had to mix it up. Eventually, I would provide my own interruption of scientific discourse by bringing in hip-hop, poetry, and Marvin Gaye to the classroom to spark new lessons on how race, nature and social justice fit together.
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Courtesy of EJAM ©2009.
The author (left) and his students at school in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Courtesy of EJAM ©2009
Soul singers and hip-hop emcees provide strong examples of African American artists who speak about the environment and don’t dismiss or omit the importance of racialized discourses. Mos Def, for example, says in his 1999 track “New World Water,” “Fools done upset the old man river/ made him carry slave ships and fed him dead nigga.” In these intentionally strong lines Mos Def tries to awaken the listener to how our nation’s natural resources, similar to our society, can be polluted by the legacy of slavery. Styles P, guest rapping on The Roots’s 2008 song “Rising Down” proclaims, “It’s hard to claim the land when my great, great, grands were shipped to it,” again referencing how connection to the land may be marred by slavery. Scholar Debra Rosenthal, in her 2006 paper, “Hoods and the Woods: Rap Music as Environmental Literature,” argues that songs like these have deep environmental meanings on par with the words of famed nature writers such as Thoreau and Emerson. As a teacher, I saw that the songs had the potential to speak to youth like Damien and address the tensions between race and the nature.
Hip-hop songs provide accessible and relevant messages that simultaneously address ecological issues and racial inequalities.
The broad practice of blending the dominant rational and scientific discourse on environment with musical and lyrical forms, using this to teach and communicate is what I call a “hiphop ecology.” One aspect of this is an understanding that artists like Mos Def and Marvin Gaye actually took the time to write about nature, a fact that my opening anecdote shows is still in need of propagation. Hip-hop ecology in the classroom emphasizes the skill of blending disparate discourses into a synchronous whole. The early hip-hop deejays refined the skill of spinning two records simultaneously and switching between the beats, leading one into the other. In retrospect, my teaching practice and environmental education was just spinning one record, that of the scientific and rational approach, to understanding nature. I could learn from the hiphop deejays by thinking of how to add a record to my teaching turntables, blending them with enough skill to speak to my students.
Like many mainstream settings where the intense beats and confrontational words of hip-hop feel disruptive, adding any form of creativity to science education, particularly with the heavy emphasis on standards-based learning and accountability for test scores, is a controversial topic. Where teaching about global warming and acid rain fit more neatly with the existing science standards, the metaphorical and historical themes in hip-hop did not often mesh well on the surface. As Damien’s story reminded me, I did not want to allow my classroom to become a microcosm of the larger environmental movement, where we were ill-prepared to deal with strong conversations about race. Nor did I want to leave deep social discussions of our science for the last few minutes of class. The hip-hop songs provided accessible and relevant messages that could simultaneously address ecological issues and racial inequalities. I wanted to make these songs more than a creative garnish or poetic afterthought, as much arts education does.
To mix the discourses, I built the songs into a more academic curriculum and linked this to an assignment where students would have to show what they organic voice. Sure, the environmental justice materials and the songs helped, but I was still hiding behind my scientific discourse, and still relying on the play button to broadcast my mp3s. I was reminded of rapper Nas’s biting critique of the decline of “real” hip-hop in his 2006 song, “Hip Hop is Dead”: “We went from turntables to mp3s/ From ‘Beat Street’ to commercials on Mickey D’s.” Nas’s deep respect for the authentic voice in hip-hop makes him one of the foremost critics of commercialized rap, and he notes the dilution of skill that comes with relying too much on computers and allowing corporations to own your message. I realized that to be a real teacher of hip-hop ecology I would have to step up and recite some real poetry.
Students take a “toxic tour” of their neighborhood to learn about its brownfields and other environmental justice challenges.
Courtesy of EJAM ©2009
I started by memorizing Austin’s words, the first rap I recited spoken word style in another class. This gave them a real example of a young person like them who took the time, like Mos Def and Marvin Gaye did, to write about ecology but who did not sacrifice their identity in doing so. The organic nature of my real voice, amplifying his words off the page in a non-scientific rhythm, also had a strong effect on engaging the class. A real hip-hop ecology is more than adding songs to an environmental class, and it is more than a way to bring the environmental message to urban youth of color. I have learned that it is actually about embracing your own organic voice, stirring up the logical discourse on environment, and using it to revolutionize how we teach in a time of environmental crisis.