2
movement a powerful tool for critically analyzing the past, present, and future of diversity in American
politics and culture.
This particular approach to using hip hop in the political science classroom operates from Rogers
Smith’s premise in Civic Ideals (1997) that the ascriptive inequalities of race, class, and gender represent
as powerful an ideology in America as liberalism and democratic republicanism. Whereas Smith
examined citizenship and formal voting laws, hip hop shifts the focus to the more informal arena of
culture and grassroots organizing in order to assess how ascriptive inequalities define American politics.
Since hip hop represents a contemporary movement that emanates from and responds to historical
oppressions determined by race, class, and gender, it opens a window to the past and links it to the present
political context. Considering hip hop as a political movement that, for some, aims to transcend the
barriers erected by race, class, and gender further enables students to explore the possibility of overcoming
these inequalities in the future. To examine how these inequalities shape American politics, this approach
takes diversity as its organizing principle and moves marginalized groups from the periphery to the center
of analysis.
This paper then contends that hip hop “decenters the center” by offering students a different
vantage point from which they can critically analyze their political culture from the perspective of
marginalized groups and how they relate to the political mainstream. Investigating the portrayal of women
in music videos and rap lyrics, for instance, sheds light on how race intersects with gender and the
complex relations between men and women in and outside the black community, lending a different view
to feminist issues. Such examples only begin to indicate how hip hop can effectively serve as a template
for interrogating diversity’s role in American politics. To develop this point, this paper first explores the
political importance of diversity education for social justice teaching, then turns to how hip hop
Convention