In San Francisco, students have a right to arts education that is relevant to them and a right to learn about the social justice struggles of their ethnic and cultural groups. We can’t achieve either of these goals without including the 5 elements of Hip Hop in the standard curriculum.
As an Arts Equity District, San Francisco is has committed to the Declaration of the Rights of All Students to Equity in Arts Learning, which states that all students have, “The right to arts learning that is culturally and linguistically responsive and relevant,” and, “have the right to engage in arts education that reflects, respects and builds on [their] culture, language and background.”
Hip Hop is an art movement created by teenagers in cities, what could be more relevant? This art movement art movement is very much associated with Black American culture, and it has been embraced and furthered by members of pretty much every ethnic and cultural community in the Bay Area.
Graffiti is one of the core elements of Hip Hop, and Hip Hop is perhaps the most important artistic movement of our time. Hip Hop culture was created by mostly Black teenagers in the Bronx and quickly spread across the world.
When issuing a set of stamps to celebrate Hip Hop arts, the United States Post Office explained, “Since its inception, the electrifying music, dance and artistic movement of hip-hop has profoundly influenced other areas of American and global popular culture. Emerging in the mid-1970s in African American and Caribbean American neighborhoods in New York City, teenagers developed hip-hop for neighborhood fun, storytelling and to speak out about social issues overlooked by mainstream society.
“Over the next several decades, hip-hop grew into a global musical and cultural force.”
Hip Hop isn’t only an arts movement; it is also a social justice movement.
An understanding of Hip Hop is also essential for an Ethnic Studies program. As the Post Office notes, “Not only are hip-hop artists found around the world, but each scene also brings its own contributions to the art form and tells its own local stories.” This is especially true in the Bay Area.
According to the Ethnic Studies Framework Tenets (McGovern & Buenavista, 2016), lessons should:
1. Question white supremacist notions of ideological objectivity and neutrality in process of knowledge construction
2. Move towards anti-essentialist representations of racialized communities
3. Develop and practice a community-grounded praxis in the teaching of content
4. Foster opportunities for individual empowerment and collective self-determination and social transformation
Where Art Lives program lessons use art created by individual artists and artist collectives, and interviews with those artists, as our primary texts. The goals of our lessons are to see what our students will create and what opinions they will express.
The promise of the SFUSD Ethnic Studies program is that, “educators develop and teach a more robust historical narrative that centers on the perspectives of historically marginalized communities.”
For every marginalized community in San Francisco and the Bay Area, we can find artists who use Hip Hop arts to tell their story. For every social justice movement, we can find artists using street art to express their beliefs and rally people to a cause.
Students in the Where Art Lives program will see examples of art that promotes justice and will learn about how they can use art to express their own values and beliefs.
Freedom = Peace
C Gazaleh, Clarion Alley, 2016