For the Culture: Hip‐Hop and the Fight for Social Justice. Edited by Lakeyta M.Bonnette‐Bailey, and Adolphus G.Belk, Jr. U of Michigan P, 2022. 346 pp. $80.00 hardcover
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this timely and important work, Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk, Jr., bring together scholars and hip-hoppers to negotiate the cultural and socio-political value of hip-hop in matters related to racial justice. Carefully examining the music genre that has been interpreted by some scholars and activists as “nihilistic, sexist, and outrageously violent,” the contributors in this collection uncover the power of hip-hop to play crucial roles in the fight for racial equality and justice: “as a transmitter of news and information, an agent of socialization, a teaching tool, a space for marginalized people to find and strengthen their voices, and a vehicle for political engagement” (7). For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice is divided into five sections, each including three to four essays. The book opens with “Activism or Perpetuation? Hip-Hoppers, Protest Movements, and Mass Incarceration,” where the authors tackle such issues as mass incarceration, the drug trade, and police brutality. Drawing on Black Lives Matter and other forms of activism, the essays demonstrate how hip-hoppers have been participating in the fight against oppression and how this has been reflected in their songs. Specifically, this section emphasizes a change in the stories communicated via hip-hop songs. The second section, “Old-School and New-School Methods of Political Engagement,” is essentially about the involvement of different generations in political issues via hip-hop. The section explores, for example, how the 2016 presidential election and Donald Trump as a president have provoked a response from hip-hoppers, as well as how different generations of Black Americans have been contributing to activism because of and with the help of hip-hop music. This section is followed by a set of important contributions collected in the third section, “Education and Social Justice: Getting an Education in ‘They Schools.’” Here, the authors outline the ways in which hip-hop can be used in the classroom as an effective material through which to understand and fight racial oppression. In addition to that, the section explores how producing hip-hop music in the classroom both appeals to the emotional side of the participants and quite literally teaches them various skills in music production. The book then moves to discuss gender-related issues in the context of hip-hop. Thus, the fourth section, “Gender, Identity, and Sexuality in Hip-Hop,” considers the sexist and homophobic aspects of hip-hop from the perspective of women and queer individuals involved in it. Drawing on Batallones Femeninos and La Reina y La Real, among other hip-hoppers, this section provides an important, intersectional perspective on justice. In the final section, “Mixing It Up: Hip-Hoppers and Social Justice around the World,” the contributors move away from the U.S. focus to explore the worldwide impact of hip-hop. Examples here include Hong Kong, France, Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, and Australia. This section engages with multiple profound questions, including the idea of “a global indigenous identity,” to emphasize the transnational role of hip-hop (7). Bonnette-Bailey and Belk, together with the authors who contributed to For the Culture, have produced an important scholarly and activist work. They have demonstrated the multifaceted nature of hip-hop, foregrounding the political power that this genre has and its potential to help end anti-Black violence and racial oppression, and promote justice for all. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Black studies, justice studies, and popular culture studies. It will also be useful for those who would like to learn more about how to teach hip-hop culture and related topics. Activists and general audiences interested in hip-hop music will, undoubtedly, find this book compelling.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".