After over two years of missing their live shows, I finally saw my favorite band 311 again on Nov. 27 at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom. Just like the other four times I’ve seen them, 311 didn’t fail to put on a good live show (they’re actually quite known for their live performances, which often sound better than their albums)—the band’s energy and interesting set lists, as well as their loyal fan base, makes each and every show special and thrilling.

The band began their set that Friday night with “Sick Tight,” a great hard-hitting opener from their 2001 album From Chaos that really got me in the mood for the 20 plus songs that followed.  They went on to play classics like “Down,” “Freak Out” and “Applied Science”—the perfect sing-alongs for the crowd.

A small venue for a band that’s been around 20 years—with a capacity of about 3,000—the Hammerstein Ballroom opera house, which features a two-tier balcony, proved to be perfect for 311. The crowd on the floor was intimate, singing along and dancing (and occasionally trying to mosh): these were real 311 fans. When I showed up to stand in line two hours before the doors opened, there were already about 10 to 15 people waiting in front of me, and more gathered soon after. Early arrival would ensure a spot up against the rail, squeezed in front of other sweaty fans and loving every minute of it.

The sound at the venue was right on, and each member of the band was definitely into the show that night, dancing and jumping around, smiling and coming up to the fans.

Along with their staples, they played several songs from their 1993 Music, like “Plain,” and a new mix for this tour: a 311 “medley” of about five minutes that combines the happy slam-dance songs “Do You Right,” “Don’t Stay Home” and “Hive.” While the three songs all have completely different melodies and rhythms—from a funky groove with “Do You Right” to the straight rock/rap combo of “Hive”—the blend was an interesting and fresh idea for 311, but I have to admit I had a hard time keeping up my own singing in the switch between songs.

Besides their non-stop energy on stage, the band mixes up their set list each night to include a few rarities to please the fans. This time it was “Jackolantern’s Weather,” and the crowd grooved to every beat perfectly.
Two albums completely absent from that night’s show, though, were Soundsystem (1999) and Don’t Tread On Me (2005). Soundsystem includes a few favorites of mine I would’ve loved to hear. What I did hear was four songs from their latest album Uplifter (2009), one of my least favorite records by 311. It felt weird to not know the lyrics to the songs from start to finish. But even these songs, disappointing compared to the rest of the band’s collection, sounded great live.

As usual, the band went off stage after playing their set list, we called them back, chanting “three eleven, three, three, eleven” over and over again, and they came back to play two or three more songs. This show, they played the “medley” and “Feels So Good,” though unfortunately Nick Hexum, one of the singers and guitarists, didn’t stage dive for it like he often does.

After leaving the show, sweaty and completely in love again with my favorite band of over 10 years, I debated for several hours whether I should stay in the city and go back to hear them play the next night at the Hammerstein again. For whatever reason, I didn’t stay. Late the next night, I would come to hear that the Saturday show was “crazy” and “better” than the Friday show. What the fuck was I thinking not staying
Still, for as long as they’ll last, I’ll proudly display the several bruises I have on my arms from being pressed up against the rail: Why yes, I did get these at the 311 show. Thanks for asking.

Photo illustration by Plamen Petkov for Fast Company.

In the past few years, China has become the most aggressive investor in Africa, according to a Fast Company article. “There are already more Chinese living in Nigeria than there were Britons during the height of the empire. From state-owned and state-linked corporations to small entrepreneurs, the Chinese are cutting a swath across the continent. As many as 1 million Chinese citizens are circulating here,” reports Fast Company. The writer goes on to detail the importance of certain African materials and products to the Chinese: “…four African countries central to China’s overall strategy: Mozambique (a key source of timber for China), Zambia (copper), Congo (a wide range of minerals), and Equatorial Guinea (oil). What I found is that while flat-footed Western governments largely watch from the sidelines, cash-flush Chinese firms — many with state-directed financing — are cutting deals at a dizzying pace, securing supplies of oil, copper, timber, natural gas, zinc, cobalt, iron, you name it.”

Chinese influence in Africa goes back to the 1960s, when the Chinese spent large amounts of money on great infrastructure projects, usually without any economic development in the African countries. Throughout the decades, China provided technical expertise, doctors, scholarships and other forms of aid. Today more than 900 Chinese doctors work in African countries. But then in the ’80s, reports the Council on Foreign Relations, China was unable to compete with Western aid to Africa. In the past few years, China has returned to Africa with the need for resources and the money to spend on the country.

“‘Africa needs infrastructure,’” said Youssouf Ouedraogo, a special adviser to the president of the African Development Bank in a BBC News article. “Ouedraogo recognises that in exchange for the oil, gas and minerals that drive China’s fast expanding economy, there is hard cash available for Africa’s biggest projects. ‘We need the ports, roads, electricity, the airports to help Africa’s poorest country grow. You can’t do that without money for infrastructure,’” he said.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen JiaBao is pledging $10 billion in new loans and 100 new clean energy power stations over the next three years. These are loans, however, which the countries will have to pay back, probably with high interests.

The Chinese have gotten more criticism than using African resources for their own benefit, though (the Chinese Prime Minister denies allegations of Chinese neo-colonialism on Africa). Last month, a Chinese company invested $7 billion in a mining deal in Guinea, despite the international condemnation there has been for the country’s military junta. In September, the army in Guinea opened fire on demonstrators killing 150 people. Like this issue, there have been other criticisms of China’s interference in Africa about human rights issues. More on China-Africa and human rights.

Julissa Treviño is a senior Writing major and co-editor of Upfront. E-mail her at jtrevin1@ithaca.edu or leave a comment.

By Julissa Trevino

Sarah Lindland, an Ithaca College senior who teaches English to migrant workers, told me she had a lot to say about immigration laws. She had been teaching English through IC’s Intercambios program to her now-deported friend, Byron, a 25-year-old man from Guatemala, for the past three years. Byron was a migrant worker at a dairy farm in King Ferry, operating milking machines and doing various other tasks. There, he lived with four other workers in a house on the main road in town.

On Oct. 30, Byron was dropped off in Guatemala without a trial after being in the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, N.Y., for about a month.

Since 2003, the government has been cracking down on illegal immigration, particularly with the creation of the first Fugitive and Operations Program within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. The program dramatically expanded the localization and deportation of illegal immigrants. In New York state, outside New York City and Long Island, the program deported over 4,111 illegal immigrants in 2008, an increase of 1,430 from 2003.

There are over three million migrant and seasonal farm workers in the United States, many of whom travel throughout the country, working to help a multi-million dollar agricultural industry. Eighty percent of farm workers are men, 84 percent speak Spanish and only 12 percent speak English. The average age for a farm worker is 31, and their median level of education is the sixth grade, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS).

Migrant farm labor supports a $28 billion fruit and vegetable industry in the United States, according to the National Center for Farmworker Health. The presence of farm workers has resulted in an increase in the overall economic output of the regions in which they work.

Lindland’s friend and Intercambio was deported after he was arrested in Syracuse. He was pulled over by a police officer, taken into a detainee center in Buffalo and subsequently transported to a jail in Texas for being an illegal immigrant. The driver of the vehicle was a Puerto Rican priest, who was legal, and there was at least one other illegal Guatemalan worker in the car.

“[Byron] just came to this country to work and provide for his family, and he was going to church, and he got pulled over, and now he’s going to be in jail,” says Lindland as we drive to see Byron’s friends and housemates. She says there are farms with migrant workers starting 20 minutes outside of Ithaca and continuing for about three hours out, pointing out migrant worker houses.

Pete Meyers, coordinator for the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, which used to have an individual branch for immigrant workers’ issues, says there is a vast difference even among immigrants in the Ithaca area: the class difference that exists between those coming here for graduate school at Cornell, for example, and those coming here to work at restaurants or farms, most of whom are undocumented.

A recent NAWS study shows that 52 percent of farm workers are not citizens or legal residents of the United States. But regardless of their residency status, many farm workers report experiencing prejudice and hostility in the communities in which they live. According to a January 2009 study conducted by the Cornell Farmworker Program at Cornell University, 62 percent of randomly selected New York state residents said they noticed undocumented farm workers as generally having a positive impact on the local community. But the study also showed that a large number of people believed the undocumented workers were taking jobs from legal residents, although farm owners expressed difficulty in finding local residents to fill the positions because farm work is sometimes seasonal and physically demanding.

Forty percent of respondents stated that undocumented farm workers fill jobs that legal residents do not want, and 37 percent actually praised undocumented farm workers for providing farmers with the labor they need to keep food prices low. In stark contrast to this perception, of those who considered them as having a negative impact, 46 percent were worried that undocumented farm workers were taking jobs from legal citizens and residents or driving down wages. An additional 33 percent expressed concern that undocumented farm workers are a drain on taxes and services.

This data shows a contradiction over the impact and role of farm workers. They express almost evenly split opposing perceptions—that undocumented workers are truly filling a need for farm labor or that they are stealing jobs and driving down wages. Some say that they are hurting the economy by collecting welfare and not paying taxes, others that they are helping it by supporting farmers and increasing the availability of affordable food.

A recent NAWS study found that nearly 75 percent of U.S. farm workers earn less than $10,000 a year, whereas the average income for those over the age of 25 in 2005 was $32,140, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In other industries, illegal immigrants are sometimes paid drastically lower wages than the average American.

Meyers says the branch began working with immigrants when, within the first couple of months the organization was officially founded, someone came to the center with an immigrant worker issue. Several undocumented workers from Collegetown Pizzeria asked for help because of their conditions and treatment: they were sleeping in the basement of the restaurant, getting paid $4 an hour and not receiving overtime pay. Meyers says the center was able to help them, recognizing the need for this kind of work. “We’ve actually had what we call a lot of ‘wage theft’ situations,” he says, referencing the pizzeria situation, “where their wages were being stolen.”

The Workers’ Center sometimes works with individuals on a more personal basis, says Meyers. “For us to be successful with anybody, we have to build trust,” he says. “And I would say in some ways, with immigrants, it can actually be harder in some ways because we often don’t speak the same language. But I can still work it out.”

The center also has a list of contacts who can act as translators in situations where the language barrier is significant.

The current New York state law does allow certain freedoms and rights to illegal immigrants. Anyone who is pulled over in a car, for example, doesn’t have to answer any questions beyond giving the officer their name. Officers are still allowed to ask about immigration status and nationality, and because most illegal immigrants don’t know they have any rights in the United States, like Byron, they end up saying more than they have to and put themselves at risk of deportation. Meyers says this is a problem, and the center has been addressing this issue by providing pamphlets and other information about these rights.

While many people in Ithaca perceive the center’s efforts to inform illegal immigrants with basic workers’ rights sensible and even necessary, others see it as breaking the nation’s laws. New York state has much stricter laws against illegal immigrants than other states like Texas and Tennessee, which have high populations of undocumented workers. In 2007, state legislators in all 50 states introduced at least 1,169 bills and resolutions related to immigration, immigrants and refugees. Of those, 18 states enacted at least 57 bills—most of them negatively affecting illegal immigrants by limiting, tightening or restricting their freedoms and rights.

In November 2007, an editorial in The Cornell Daily Sun criticized then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and the Ithaca Common Council’s resolution to refrain from being excessively aggressive toward immigration law.

“America must remain vigilant against the tide of illegal immigrants,” the Daily Sun writer said. Since 2007, the City of Ithaca has not passed any other resolutions concerning illegal immigrants or undocumented workers.

“[Byron] did nothing wrong. If coming to another country to work and trying to give your family a better life is wrong, [if] helping the U.S. economy is wrong, then my grandparents were wrong,” says Lindland. “If family is the only thing you have, you’re willing to do anything for them. And I don’t care how many people criticize me for saying that.”
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Julissa Treviño is a senior writing major who swears she is a legal citizen. Really. E-mail her at jtrevin1@ithaca.edu.

There has been a lot of speculation and suspicion about corruption and illegitimacy surrounding the re-election of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. President Karzai was automatically given a second term Sunday, after his opponent, Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the race just six days before the run-off election. The Nov. 7 election was set “after UN-backed auditors annulled nearly a third of the Karzai’s votes as fakes,” according to The Huffington Post. “In an emotional speech, Abdullah told supporters that he could not accept an runoff led by the same Karzai-appointed election commission that managed the fraud-marred vote in August.” A transparent election, Abdullah said, is not possible.

On Monday, President Obama congratulated Afghan President Hamid Karzai on his re-election last Tuesday. “Mr. Obama told reporters as he sat in the Oval Office next to the prime minister of Sweden, ‘You know, although the process was messy, I’m pleased to say that the final outcome was determined in accordance with Afghan law,’” according to an ABC News blog. After pressure from Western governments, DemocracyNow! reports that the newly re-elected president “has vowed to form an inclusive government and has promised to work harder to root out corruption. Karzai today also called on the Taliban to stop fighting against the Afghan government and to ‘embrace their land.’ The Taliban said in a statement it would continue its fight and called Karzai ‘a puppet.’”

Recent news on the war in Afghanistan:

At least 883 U.S. military members have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since 2001.

Kim Howells, chairman of the intelligence and security committee and former minister in the UK, writes an article in The Guardian suggesting the withdrawl of UK troops from Afghanistan.

Opposing the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, former Marine captain and State Department employee resigns from the administration. “In a four-page letter he sent to the State Department, he explained his resignation by writing that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan serves to ‘bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by [the Afghan] people,’” writes a blogger from Think Progress.

Read more about the news in Afghanistan:

Abdullah vs. Karzai

From NPR.org

Julissa Treviño is a senior Writing major and co-editor of Upfront. E-mail her at jtrevin1@ithaca.edu or leave a comment.

Racial diversity initiatives absent in college policy

By Julissa Trevino

“There’s a way in which diversity can becomesuch a broad, vague and general term that it means nothing in the end,” said Asma Barlas, professor of politics and program director for Ithaca College’s Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity. “But at the Center we are focused primarily on racial diversity, and from our perspective, this is a pretty homogenous campus. It’s white, middle-class, upper-middle class… I’m not sure how anybody in their right minds could think that’s diverse.”

Still, this is what Ithaca College is labeling as “diversity.” The college’s Diversity Awareness Committee recently developed a new campaign to give the impression the campus is full of different kinds of people. The “i Am Diverse” campaign features fliers with photos of an assortment of individuals on campus that tell of their backgrounds, interests and hobbies. But we are being manipulated into thinking that being born and raised in Long Island, becoming a “soon-to-be middle-aged first-time father”–IC President Thomas Rochon himself–and volunteering makes this campus something other than white, rich and uniform. While the mission of DAC is “to provide educational programs, training sessions and experiential activities on issues of diversity” relevant to IC, what the committee is actually doing with this campaign is portraying the campus in a misleading fashion.

“The ‘i Am Diverse’ campaign completely undermines historic racial and ethnic lack of diversity in institutions of higher education. It does so by claiming that you can be diverse by just being from somewhere different or liking other things than different people,” said  sophomore exploratory student Natasha Tanner, who met with Rochon in early March to try to get his stance on the issue. “That undermines the lived experience of people who are of different racial and ethnic minorities than the majority white population.”

Originally from Philadelphia, Tanner came to Ithaca College because of her financial aid package. Because she visited during an Ithaca Today program, in which prospective students get to experience a day in their schools with lectures and various presentations, she said she didn’t get to experience what IC was really like.

“[The lack of racial diversity] pisses me off. And it perpetuates the way of thinking that we’re supposed to speak for our race and we’re the voice for our race. We’re the spokespeople that are supposed to know everything, which is absurd. It’s a constant battle,” she said. “Every day in class, there are students who are oblivious and can be because there’s nothing, besides maybe me, saying that they are.” Tanner, who went to an all-girls public school where about half of the student population was black, said the college is deceptive when it comes to the way the school tries to show its “diversity.”

Various faculty members and students have been quoted in The Ithacan saying diversity means a variety of things—not just race or ethnicity, but backgrounds, hobbies and interests. While this may be true, it takes the focus off the real issue at hand: Ithaca is, in fact, lacking when it comes to race, ethnicity and culture. Based on the enrollment figures of fall 2008, out of 6,446 students attending IC, 4,824 were white–there were only 1,624 students who were either non-white or whose race/ethnicity was unknown. Since 2004, the number of “minority” students has only slightly increased.

“[Ithaca College can] attract a diverse population because you have huge, big cities which are very racially mixed… We can’t pretend that we’re in the middle of, say, Kansas and we can’t attract anybody here,” said Barlas. “We’re on the east coast and there are cities on the east coast that are very racially diverse. There’s a possibility that you could recruit more people.

“I think if you create a critical mass of students and faculty of color, then that becomes a source of attraction [for non-white students].”

Unfortunately, since 2001–when Peggy R. Williams, former IC president, adopted the Institutional Plan, which included policies that led to the establishment of the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies, CSRCE and Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar Program–not much else has been accomplished when it comes to attracting more students of color (aside from the development of the Latino/a Studies and African Diaspora Studies minors in the past two years). While Tanner thinks programs like the MLK Scholar Program are great parts of IC, she also sees it as token “for the institution to point to and say, ‘Look, we’re doing something,’ instead of actually being proactive and taking it a step further.” Tanner, who became an MLK scholar entering her sophomore year, said most of her friends are students of color at Ithaca. She added that when she came to IC, the opportunity opened up for her to make friends who were white, but “people weren’t willing to talk about parts of my identity because it made them uncomfortable,” she said. “At home, there was more of a probability to relate to some of the white people there because of socio-economic statuses. Here, you can’t make that jump.” Tanner is trying to build her own major in African Diaspora, which is currently only offered as a minor.

Barlas says even in her Politics of Identity class, where she sometimes gets an astonishing eight or nine students of color, the dynamics are different when there are students with different backgrounds. It is appalling to see classes at IC that have maybe one or two non-white students. How does this even resemble the real world? In 2008, the U.S. was home to 44 percent of people of ethnic or racial minorities. According to an August 2008 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2042, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up the majority of the population. It’s doubtful that the same could be true of Ithaca College.

“Of course IC does not represent the population of the United States,” said Rochon, adding that the college is a regional institution. “Ithaca College is not as diverse as it should be… We do everything to present our campus as a diverse campus.”

Perhaps that’s exactly the problem–that Ithaca is, in fact, not diverse, but it attempts to appear to be so. The “i Am Diverse” campaign is only part of a larger issue. The DAC wanted to advertise campus personalities to show people are different, said Brandon Bariles-Swain, one of the committee chairs for DAC and resident director of the Circle apartments–his face can be seen on one of the campaign posters. “The campaign’s goal is to educate students what other definitions of diversity are,” said Bariles-Swain. But doesn’t the campaign just skirt around the real issue?

“[The new president and provost] have been speaking about developing a new integrated curriculum; they’ve been speaking about a strategic vision for the college. And as I have pointed out to President Rochon and to Provost [Kathleen] Rountree, there is really no mention of racial diversity in that new vision, in that new curriculum,” said Barlas. “Just taking that as an example, what message is it sending to people who might be looking at Ithaca College?”

The college has been hypocritically saying for years, in various outlets, that racial diversity is important. Rochon himself said, “This is a very high priority issue.” It’s a matter of social justice and providing students with a quality education, he added, though he dismissed categorizing IC as “white, upper middle-class.”

“There are several initiatives–efforts around recruitment of students, faculty and curriculum–the admissions staff is sensitive to diversity,” said Rochon. But he gave no specific details on what initiatives or strategies are being enacted to ensure racial diversity.

It seems IC students and faculty alike are catching on to the problems with making promises and taking no action. People are noticing that while IC can portray itself as a diverse campus, the school continues to refuse to create initiatives to make it the reality.

“Why not make racial diversity a priority in a meaningful way? Lots of people just say, ‘Yes, well, diversity is a core value at Ithaca College.’ I have heard the president say that,” Barlas said. “But how does that translate into recruitment strategies and retention strategies? If that is going to be a core value, then you need to develop appropriate strategies for putting it into practice.”

Barlas believes this is an issue–and how could it not be? How can an institution simultaneously say to us that racial diversity is a priority but do nothing about it? “We have close and honest relationships with our students,” said Barlas. “At an individual level, I think we’re trying to do the best we can. But at an institutional level, I think just simply even increasing the number of students and faculty of color can create a support group. If you have, say, four faculty on campus [who are non-white], what message is that sending you and what support can those four faculty provide you?”

Julissa Treviño is a junior writing major. E-mail her at jtrevin1[at]ithaca.edu.

By Julissa Trevino

The first few minutes of Two Lovers are completely silent as Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) hastily makes his way along a boardwalk on a cloudy day–and jumps off into the water. As he’s saved by a passerby, he seems lifeless and gets up without making eye contact with the people around him or saying, “Thank you.” Director James Gray makes Leonard a depressed, awkward and stiff character here, but there’s a duality to Leonard we don’t see right away. Something happens to him when he’s with Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow)–he becomes casual, funny, cute and relaxed.

Watching Phoenix’s portrayal of Leonard enhances the conventional storyline of a love triangle and makes it all the more fascinating since he says this is his last film. Phoenix’s performance erases the memory of his bearded appearance on The Late Show in promoting this exact film. His gum chewing, big sunglasses and mumbling are completely different than his handsome, emotional and real character Leonard. His performance begs us to ask Phoenix: “Why would you ever quit acting?”

Paltrow’s rendering of Michelle as an (almost) irrational, passionate and vulnerable young woman trying to settle into a real relationship, too, engages us deeper into the film. There’s a scene with Michelle and Leonard on their apartment rooftop, when he tells her he loves her, which is quite indicative of their relationship. It’s a beautiful scene, but both characters become frustrated with one another and make it one of the sad parts of Two Lovers. But her flowing hair, gorgeous figure and bubbly personality make it tough for us to not like her.

Two Lovers parallels Mike Nichols’s film Closer–its mature characters and poignancy–in its genuineness. The strength of the film is perhaps just that. The film makes us forget that a similar story has been told and has us focus on the highs and lows of the characters–on their vulnerabilities and their experiences.

The story behind Two Lovers is nothing original or enlightening–essentially, it tells the story of real life relationship problems. But it’s told in a fresh way: It never becomes dull, dry or even too emotional–it is just the right amount of gritty. The Brooklyn backdrop, three very well-acted characters and an ultimately satisfying ending make for an engaging film.

By Julissa Trevino

From UC Berkeley’s Tupac course to Syracuse University’s course on Lil’ Kim, hip-hop is becoming ever-infused in the academic world. There’s no doubt, though, that when people listen to the tasteless and tacky of the hip-hop and rap genres (read: 50 Cent, Soulja Boy and the like), they could be instantly put off by it all. But listening to more lyrical, political, socially conscious music–even by mainstream artists like Kanye West and The Roots–there seems to be a backlash to that tastelessness–a return to the greatness of what used to be hip-hop. With the ever-expanding intrigue of the musical genre and culture, and its roots in political and social issues, the academy is taking notice.

Hip-hop studies is one of the most striking subjects to come into academia in decades, with its subject matter itself only being out there for the past three decades. According to a 2005 survey by Stanford’s Hip-hop Archive, more than 300 courses on hip-hop were offered at higher institutions in the country that year.

At Ithaca College, the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity has two courses–one which entirely focuses on the music and culture (Hip-Hop Culture, taught by Assistant Professor Sean Eversley-Bradwell) and one in which hip-hop is integrated into the coursework (Watching Race in American Media and Music, taught by Assistant Professor Paula Iaonide).

“[Hip-hop as a field of study] really started with one of my mentors, Tricia Rose [then a professor at New York University], who wrote Black Noise. It’s the first academic book on hip-hop,” said Ioanide. “And she had to fight very hard, actually, to make it a legitimate site of study.” Black Noise (1994), written in the late ’80s during the beginning of the mass consumption of the music, looks at hip-hop as a form of black cultural production that comes out of a particular set of social and economic relations, such as deindustrialization and “the white flight into suburbia,” said Ioanide.

“She locates the birth of hip-hop in the Bronx, but connects it to these larger social and economic trends that essentially are very detrimental to the black community, and hip-hop becomes both a reflection of that, but also a response to it.” Black Noise became a starting point for hip-hop studies. Now there is a large following of hip-hop as an academic field.

Eversley-Bradwell has been teaching Hip-Hop Culture for the past three years. “I use hip-hop as the hook,” he said. “For me, the primary focus of teaching a class on hip-hop is to study the economic, social and historical policies that were taking place in New York specifically in 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. I’m most interested in the birth of hip-hop and under what oppressive economic conditions created this magical, mystical thing that we now call hip-hop culture.” Still, other (larger) institutions offer much more than one or two courses on the music and culture.

After being the first university to offer a course on hip-hop in 1991, the historically black Howard University began to offer a minor in hip-hop studies in 2007. In 2006, a group of UC Berkeley graduate students formed the Hip-Hop Studies Working Group to increase “the presence of hip-hop studies in academia,” which includes, as a long-term goal, to recruit more faculty interested in hip-hop. Similar groups exist at the University of Michigan and UCLA.

“I get students who run the gamut between those folks who thought we’d literally be watching BET most of the day and it as going to be their safe course to students who are hip-hop heads and serious about an academic investigation,” said Eversley-Bradwell. “I think [they] learn relatively early on that the course is reading-intensive–that there’s an extreme amount of good scholarship that deals with hip-hop. [Most of the students'] expectations are not met, in both good ways and bad ways.” The course, he says, is always popular: “It’s always at over-capacity.”

“There’s no way to dissociate hip-hop with its association with blackness. It not only emerges as a form of black cultural production, but it’s still largely represented, even in mass consumed media, as connected to black Americans.” Even though there are places where the music and culture have been taken up internationally, it’s connected specifically through identification with marginalized people in any society, said Ioanide–whether it’s the U.S., Africa, or Latin America. “Because of the place where it emerges, it fundamentally has always spoken to the position of the marginalized,” she said.

In the late 1990s, media conglomerates began to realize how much money there was to be made through hip-hop culture and its mass production. “When they get involved, hip-hop is in many ways dissociated from those roots, and what they do take up is a very narrow, reductive version of hip-hop,” which Rose calls the hip-hop trinity: the gangsta, pimp and ho, said Ioanide. “They know that that’s what sells the most to hip-hop consumers who happen to be 70-percent white males. So you have to think of this very long relationship of white people’s consumption of black music.”

But during hip-hop’s popularization, the mass media industry expanded at an unprecedented rate and new technologies affected the way hip-hop was consumed. With the new worldwide marketplace for music–on the Internet and TV–hip-hop has an innate global presence and distribution, said Ioanide. What gets distributed, though, is a simplistic form of hip-hop: mainstream and commercialized. “People now distinguish between underground hip-hop and hip-hop artists that are trying to circumvent that machine and are trying to reclaim hip-hop,” said Ioanide. But you can’t dissociate hip-hop from this mass distribution, from its racial and ethnic roots, or from white consumption of hyper-sexualized black images/black sexuality, said Ioanide.

But mainstream hip-hop in the ’80s began with artists taking a real interest in their public through music, which had both an entertainment value and a political and social force, claims an article in North by Northwestern, citing Run DMC, Public Enemy, Dead Prez, N.W.A. and A Tribe Called Quest. Still, today there is a light at the end of the tunnel, a call for this interest: “The best-selling and most interesting hip-hop acts in the last few years have come from hip-hop’s historians, artists with great respect for the genre’s pioneers–Nas, Common, Kanye West, The Roots and others.”

“By the time hip-hop takes such center stage, specifically in mass-consumed culture, it becomes a very easy way for people to scapegoat black people, which is the implied association with hip-hop. Hip-hop becomes the way in which racial politics is discussed. You have the conservative right saying, ‘Hip-hop is all bad,’ and then you have the defenders of hip-hop who are saying, ‘Well, we’re just reflecting our reality.’” Both of these approaches, Ioanide said, perpetuate a cycle of racism and sexism (with misogyny being a main issue in much of mainstream hip-hop today).

“The reason [hip-hop] has become a legitimate field of study within academia is also related to the ways in which people of color have struggled for a very long time to incorporate marginalized knowledge in academia,” said Ioanide. “There is an association to be made between the fact that today you can actually study hip-hop and the past struggles of people who have insisted that these are important sites of study precisely because they speak to a perspective of people that are generally marginalized.”

The field of popular cultural studies has widened in the past 20 years. As more traditional disciplines became disrupted and questioned, popular culture began to bring another perspective and narrative to academia. Because they have been excluded from positions of power and traditional systems of history and higher education, marginalized people have made their history through popular culture–music, in this case, argues Ioanide. “Beginning in the ’80s, and increasingly in the ’90s, people look to pop culture to hear the voices of marginalized people. There’s been an increase in student demand on popular cultural courses in general because this generation of students, in the last two decades, that’s how they understand their lives.”

What Eversley wants his students to take from this popular and expanding academic study is that “people cannot just consume the cultural productions of various racial groups without understanding their own complicity in either creating the conditions in which that music arises or having a deeper appreciation from the reality of the lives of the artists.”

Eversley-Bradwell notes some problems with the study of hip-hop, however: “As we know, academia tends to be a pretty conservative enterprise…[in] the way that it’s cautious in its approach to knowledge,” he said. “And the very nature of hip-hop challenges that idea. Hip-hop is all about newness, first and foremost. Hip-hop also has a quality of oral knowledge to it, as opposed to literal knowledge, he said. “Again, that’s not something that’s usually affirmed in academia.” He also said that because hip-hop primarily speaks from an urban young black voice, to go into academia that’s primarily white, there will undoubtedly be some disconnects.

Still, the study of hip-hop is showing up everywhere: the Ivy Leagues, the lesser-known liberal arts colleges and the mass media, and it remains a part of American culture. Perhaps now, though–hip-hop transcends cultures and racial identities and as it takes a turn back to its more socially and politically conscious roots–it can be welcomed by all as a unifying and culturally-knowledge based form of the study of social, political, historical and economic oppression that speaks to a younger generation.
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Julissa Treviño is a junior writing major. E-mail her at jtrevin1@ithaca.edu.