ABSTRACT
Also considering the potentials of music education to disrupt the status quo, Gareth Dylan Smith concludes this section with a challenge for music educators to recognise and counter racism as a ‘manifestation of hate woven into the fabric of American society’. Considering the ways in which the ideology of whiteness perpetuates systemic violence and injustice, he turns to rap music as the means for teachers and students to achieve self-actualisation and recognise the omnipresence of racism in their daily lives. Smith illustrates the potential pedagogic authority of this music through an analysis of rap lyrics in light of Kahn Egan’s (1998) five tenets of punk: ‘anger and passion, the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic, sense of destructiveness that calls for attacking institutions, a willingness to endure or even pursue pain, and a pursuit of the “pleasure principle”’ (p. 100). Through an engaged, punk pedagogical approach to rap as a ‘site of knowledge sharing’ (Torrez, 2012, p. 135), Smith argues that teachers and students might disrupt inequitable power structures in education and enact social and political change.
