Free It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation by M.K. Asante Jr

of breath from sprintin’ across campus. When I explained to them that I’d just seen something terrible and horrifying, something even more terrible and horrifying happened. My students, all of them Black and most from Baltimore or Washington, D.C., were completely unmoved. In matter-of-fact tones they lunged into similar stories about poor Black men and women killed by the myriad symptoms of urban poverty and injustice.
    “So, that doesn’t make y’all upset?” I asked.
    “I mean, it’s life,” one student explained.
    “So then, how does life feel?” I asked, which they answered in the frigid language of silence. They had, a long time ago, grown numb to the daily terror of the hellish conditions that were omnipresent. Later, a student explained to me that, for all intents and purposes, this
somebody
who I saw was “just anotha nigga dead.”
    “Where you from, Professor Asante?” a student asked, surprised at my very visible outrage.
    “Philly,” I responded—proud.

     
    “And you never saw a dead body in Philly?” he quizzed.
    Quickly, I began to recall my own experiences growing up in the Illadelph. I realized that not only had I seen dead bodies, but I’d seen people shot, stabbed, and brutalized, both by people who looked like them and by people who didn’t. However, since going away to fantasyland colleges—first to Lafayette College, then to the University of London, then to UCLA—I’d been removed from so many of the realities of the inner city. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten what it looked liked,but rather, I’d forgotten the feeling, forgotten the pain, forgotten forgetting, forgotten forgetting what I forgot to forget in the first place. Feeling it now, after six years or so, was wrenching. Sadly, during my childhood in Philly and my students’ childhood in Baltimore and D.C., the violent, unjust, and oppressive conditions, the disregard for Black life, had been normalized and naturalized to such a blunt point that, as one of the students, Shandel, put it, “it’s like the rain.”
    “It just happens and all you can do is try to get inside but at some point, we all get wet, some more than others, though,” she proverbed. “I know,” she chased, “that things were different back in the day but all people care about now is what’s on BET. There’s no respect. Nothing. So what can we do?”
    Truth is: I didn’t know. I was in the classroom, like she was, in search of answers to that same question. I did know, however, that the fact we were having this discussion was a kind of proof that there were small fires beneath the surfaces of apparent apathy.
    “Things were bad back then, too,” another student offered. “The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.” My goal, as professor—which comes from the Latin
“profitieri”
meaning “to declare openly”—was not only to “declare openly,” but to reveal that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are in the same week; to show that injustice, inhumanity, and poverty, conditions of our color rather than our character, are not as natural as the “rain,” but instead, were the most unnatural conditions human beings could be subjected to. And, perhaps most important, engage with them in a process that could improve our communities. As bell hooks writes in
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom:
    The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunityto labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom
.
     
    “Never doubt,” I told my class, evoking the words of the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, “that a small group of thoughtful, committed