“You like what?”

“I like girls with that light complexion look.”

“You’re a moron.”

“Man I can’t help it.”

“What, being a moron?”

“Yeah that too.”

“You’re the first one out there with a dashiki talking that shit.”

“I’m a victim!”

“Good hair” (laughs)

“Nigga you so brainwashed.”

“I’m a victim brotha!”

“You’re a victim?”

“Yeah! I’m a victim of 400 years of conditioning.  The man has programmed my conditioning.  Even my conditioning has been conditioned.”

- A conversation from the independent film Chameleon Street by Wendell B. Harris, also sampled on the track Brown Skin Lady by Blackstar featuring Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Hi-Tek

I was a little disappointed to discover that this Ann Ferguson’s Bad Boys: public schools in the making of black masculinity was not so much about hip-hop pedagogy or the words and message of Chuck D as it was an ethnographic study on the different forms of discipline implemented in public schools and the effects of race on those forms and implementations.  This article is often quoted in hip-hop pedagogy articles and so I anticipated a discussion of the benefits of black voice and identity and the use of hip-hop in the classroom; however, this was not the case, yet it did strike me as interesting for a number of different reasons.   It reminds me of a conversation I recently had with my sister about the way the French use the word race. 

My sister just defended her MA thesis on the effects of culture on international hospital patients in the US, and as such she used the word race a few times in her paper because often racial and cultural identity are closely linked.  One of her committee members was incensed at her use of the word race because in France the word often times carries a wholly different connotation.  The use of the word race can carry the supposition that the writer is a racist.  In other words, by calling attention to someone’s race you are identifying them as being only that.  By saying I’m of the white race or your of the black race would be a racist remark.  This is not the case here in America, and I don’t think it should be.  I feel this is one of the arguments Ferguson is making.   Let me explain.

I recently wrote an article for publication entitled Constructing Identities through Campus Diversity in Post-Racial America, and one of the arguments I made was that if the US is ever going to move beyond issues of race, if we are ever going to live in a “post-racial” country, we must not be colorblind.  We must not ignore someone’s race because as Peter McLaren argues, in Life in Schools,  “to ignore the history or race relations in this country, to ignore that blacks and minorities have been oppressed for hundreds of years is to ignore American minority races all together” (280).   So I would have argued vehemently against my sister’s committee member decrying her as a racist.  Maybe I wouldn’t have gone that far, but I think you get the point.  Issues of race are important.  Ferguson also makes this point; “it is important that we understand human culture differently – not as a set of immutable characteristics that seem to be transmitted through the genes but as a practical, active, creative response to specific social and historical conditions” (20).  In other words, people are who they are because society, history, and their environments have made them so, and ignoring this is not only turning your back on people but also thousands of years of history.

If we study this history and the ways in which some cultures and races have been dominant and others have been oppressed we realize that there are two ways “racial inequalities are reproduced today.  One is through institutional practices, and the other is through cultural representations of racial differences” (Ferguson 19).  And this is the benefit of Ferguson’s work.  She is calling attention to the ways black males are still being oppressed.  Her work and others like her is a beginning, a beginning to understanding race differently, not just as the color of the skin because I think that if this country and all countries for that matter are ever going to move beyond issues of race or end racism altogether; it begins with awareness and an understanding that people are different and then and acceptance of those differences.  If we as a people can do that then perhaps race can be an empowering identity instead of a way to track and differentiate between people.  Being colorblind will get us nowhere it only keeps the wool pulled over our eyes.  We need to try and break free from the conditioning.