Teaching intersectionality of race, class, and gender: hip hop and the secondary music education classroom

Abstract

In 1989, critical race scholar and activist, Kimberle Crenshaw, coins the term intersectionality to draw attention to the intersectional nature of racialized, classed, and gendered Identities. She draws attention to how one can experience multiple layers of oppression in their daily lives without their being a term that adequately describes their overlapping impact (Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection”). This term could be the key to understanding why one-dimensional depictions of race, class, and gender in contemporary US media culture leave generations of urban youth feeling unheard and invisible outside of degrading stereotypes. Hip-hop music captures the intersectional nature of race, class, and gender. Popular hip hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Jermaine Cole, Fatimah Warner & Saba, use their music as a platform to bring visibility to the way youth experience life in the intersections. Through their albums, these artists speak of how overlapping forms of discrimination have affected their lives, their communities, and larger issues that impact the entire United States, such as poverty, violence, drug use, and gendered, or sexual objectification. They offer perspectives that challenge systemic oppression and the power dynamics that uphold incomplete and stereotypical perceptions about youth culture. A focus on hip hop music in the secondary music education classroom can provide students with an opportunity to consider the artistic and expressive nature of hip hop as a generational voice in the history and theory of music as a language. The recent popularity of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s hip-hop musicals In the Heights and Hamilton have primed the US educational system for an opportunity to see how this musical genre can teach lessons central to the social studies classroom, such as government, immigration, and gentrification. This project seeks to bring hip-hop into the secondary music education classroom where it can be examined as part of a youth culture in which students can critically examine and communicate about their place in conversations about the intersections of race, class and gender as fully integrated experiences of personhood. Research to this end is applied to the development of a unit of high school lesson plans on intersectionality as a critical school of thought, the history of hip-hop as a protest genre, the analysis and writing of hip-hop lyrics.