ABSTRACT
This chapter builds upon the themes embedded in the "making connection and new meanings" and uses them to articulate a necessary stance on the education of urban youth of color who are deeply embedded in hip-hop. It suggests Maxine Greene's work moves educators who work with youth from the hip-hop generation to focus on approaches to teaching that focus on empowering young people through an acceptance and validation of their culture. For many urban youth of color, hip-hop is the chief mechanism for activating innervisions and then triggering the imagination. In other words, a school structure that bars hip-hop in many ways reverses the sublimation that hip-hop provides outside of schools/classrooms. In the case of hip-hop youth, who have developed a tool for sublimation that has evolved to become a part of their identity, questions related to the challenges to their self-actualization must be explored.
