ABSTRACT

In the verse that opens this chapter, Mos Def is addressing “negroes, latinos and even the gringos.” His overarching theme is the ideologies, values, and practices of capitalism and its far-reaching effects on society. Some bodies gotta suffer and they are disproportionately people of color. Another connection that Mos Def makes and draws his audience’s attention to is the effect that some technologies have on the literacy education of Black youth: “Young bloods can’t spell but they can rock you in PlayStation/This new math is whippin mother-fuckers ass/ You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add/It’s mathematics.” Briefly, Mos Def critiques one of the fallouts of education for the marketplace, the decontextualized and autonomous literacy education that stunts political holistic critical social self-consciousness development and by extension societal development. If we can make technological games like Playstation that young folks can’t put down, how come our educational technologies can’t keep up? It just don’t add up! It’s mathematics. The results of such education equip young people to proceed purposelessly through society becoming highly competent playas/players or consumers being pimped by the system to their own degradation. “You wanna know how to [write] you better learn how to add/ It’s mathematics.” In other words, what good is the flawless sentence, the rhetorically stylish argument, if that still leaves you powerless? To put it in terms of the Word: What does it profit a man or a woman to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul? Or his/her own center of self-consciousness? (Influenced by Mark 8: 36.) The purpose of this chapter is to offer educators and students a new song to sing. I want to provide notes that will lead us toward new refrains of free at last and bridges that swing both ways. Toward that end, I will describe a course I taught wherein I made African American rhetorical and discursive practices the center of the curriculum. By describing the course and the pedagogical approaches in it, and sharing examples of the kinds of writing students produced, I want to move to a discussion of specific practices that can follow from this pedagogy and can serve to encourage the development of African American voices (and those of all our students) rather than continue their subjugation.