ISBN: 978-1-942774-90-7
ILLMATIC CONSEQUENCES:
The Clapback to Opponents of ‘Critical Race Theory’
"Illmatic Consequences is a bold intervention in the mushrooming field of Hip Hop Studies. The anthology uses Critical Race Theory lenses to theorize political, class, scientific, spatial and cultural dimensions of Hip Hop as modality and practice. From considerations of proto-CRT scholar/activism to contemporary issues ranging from public health and Black representations in narrative meaning making to fundamental issues of housing and education, the message is clear: Culture is a tool for self-determination and self-defense among oppressed peoples.”
-- Greg Carr, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair, Department of Afro-American Studies, Howard University and Adjunct Faculty, Howard School of Law.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Peace God! A Trip Down Memory Lane (A Brief History of the “Critical Race Theory” Controversy)
Danian Darrell Jerry
Straight Up (Sh)It is Real
Walter D. Greason
SECTION 1: THE CRISIS
Resistance to Critical Race Theory: Much to Do about Nothing?
Lee Ross
The Critical Race Theory Legacy of A. Leon Higginbotham’s Vision of the Colonial Period
Christel N. Temple
Wicked Problems and Illmaticism: A Systems View
LaTanya White
The Ubiquity and Formlessness of Hip Hop and Critical Race Theory
Why Bans Against Critical Race Theory May be Unconstitutional as Against the Non-Delegation Doctrine
Andre L. Smith
Hip-Hop Represented Long Before CRT Became A Conservative Rallying Point
Ronda Racha Penrice
Rhizomatic
Benjamin P. Levy
INTERLUDE: R-Son the Voice of Reason
(Gangstagrass), 2022
5 Mics and 5 Tenants: A Content Analysis of Illmatic to Understand Critical Race Theory
Dwayne Matthews
Represent: Education Still Groovy but Smoother
Walter D. Greason
INTERLUDE: Systemic Racism
Joe Feagin
SECTION 2: THE CLAPBACK
Static: The Illmatic Consequences of the CRT Boogeyman
Bijoun Eric Jordan
Decolonizing Public Minds and Public Places—An Interview with Maurice Broaddus
ANTIBODIES//Shots: Engaging Public Health Critical Race Praxis to Counter Epistemic Violence in Discourse of Dual Pandemics
Ryan J Petteway
INTERLUDE: The Sinking White Middle Class
David Roediger
Don’t Believe the Right: A Message from the Media Assassin (An Interview with Harry Allen)
The Lion Man Project: Creating Critical Comics as Counter-storying
Michael B. Dando, John Jennings, and David Brume
INTERLUDE: A House Divided and New Abolitionism
Zebulon Miletsky, Ph.D.
Illmatic Images: A Visual Essay
Stacey Robinson
Christian Nationalism and the comic, Incognegro
Matthew Teutsch
Black Noise Whitewash
Michael A. Gonzales
Auto-Ethnographical Notes on Whiteness: My Nice White Family
Kat Moore
INTERLUDE: White Solidarity - A Dangerous Idea
Robert Baird
SECTION 3: THE CONSEQUENCES
Storming the Capitol: An Exercise in the Patriotic Right to Violence
Allen Chukwuhdi
From Visual Representation to Hip-Hop: Using Innovative Sources to Reconcile Hard History and Inspire Young Activism
Dory Lerner
Integrity and Responsible Journalism: Fact Checking False Narratives (An Interview with Jesse J. Holland)
INTERLUDE: Afrofuturist Design
Kurt Wagner and Walter D. Greason
Innovating Racism in Digital Detroit
Asha E. Criner
The Dark Green City: The Liminal-Space of the In-Between
C.N.E. Corbin
Into the Ether: The Rap Battle as Parable for the Slow Burn of CRT
Elle L. Littlefield
Black Zombies
Odell Hall
CONCLUSION
Afraid Not of None of You Cowards, But of My Own Strength
Walter D. Greason
Editors
Walter Greason, PhD
Illmatic@uwpbooks.com
“As the authors in this collection demonstrate, hip hop was not simply an aesthetic, but it was an epistemology – a fundamental transformation of the ways people know themselves and their world… The collected authors in this text offer a multi-disciplinary range of evidence and methods to counter the rhetoric that defined the latest moment of white backlash.”—Walter Greason, Editor
Walter Greason is among the most prominent historians, educators, and urbanists in the United States. He has spent the past 30 years speaking to audiences in dozens of states, on over 100 college and high school campuses, at dozens of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the country.
Danian Darrell Jerry, MFA
Illmatic@uwpbooks.com
“Our volume, Illmatic Consequences, elucidates and demystifies the recent controversy surrounding “critical race theory," a term we place in quotations due to its habitual and strategic misuse by its opponents and by those who fail to recognize this rhetorical tactic.”—Danian Jerry, Editor
Danian Darrell Jerry, a writer, teacher, and emcee, holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Memphis where he teaches literature and English composition. He was a featured guest at the 2019 Mercedes-Benz SXSW MeConvention in Frankfurt, Germany. His work is discussed in This Ain't Chicago: Race, Class, & Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), Hip Hop In America: A Regional Guide (two volumes, Greenwood, 2009) edited by Mickey Hess, The Commercial Appeal, The Memphis Flyer, and Southern Soul Magazine. As a professor, he has taught fiction writing and performance reading at Memphis College of Art. Currently he revises his first novel, The Boy with the Golden Arm. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Marvel’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fireside Fiction, Cracking The Wire During Black Lives Matter, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, and other notable publications.
Artist
Stacey Robinson
Stacey Robinson is an artist from Albany, NY, who creates graphic novels, art exhibitions, and other multimedia works of art that explores the ideas of “Black Utopias” through an Afro-Futurist lens. Robinson graduated from Fayetteville State University with a Bachelor of Arts, and went on to complete his Master of Fine Arts as a Arthur Schomburg Fellow at the University of Buffalo. He is a part of the collaborative artist duo “Black Kirby” alongside John Jennings, which explores Afro Speculative existence through the aesthetic of Jack Kirby. Robinson’s artwork explores the ideas of futures where Black people are free from the harmful impacts of colonialism. His work can be seen around the world at Modern Graphics in Berlin, Bucknell University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Meet Our Contributors
Benjamin P. Levy
Benjamin Perry Levy (they/them & he/him) is an undergraduate student, educator, and leader at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, majoring in American Studies with an emphasis in Black Studies and expecting to graduate in May 2023. Reminded by their mother and maternal grandmother growing up to “never forget their people” and where they come from, Levy’s upbringing in Kingston, JA; Tulsa, OK; and Beloit, WI has fundamentally shaped how they engage with the community and academic life–with interests ranging from the relationship between memory, new media, and Afrofuturism; spatial justice and architectural theory; to Black aesthetics and politics. Their interests have led them to conduct qualitative research with Research in Action in Minneapolis, MN, and at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Benjamin P. Levy
Michael A. Gonzales
Michael A. Gonzales is the co-author of the seminal music text Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture. A former writer-at-large for Vibe, The Source, and Ebony, he has written essays for Essence, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Wax Poetics, CrimeReads, Longreads, and Soulhead.com. His Black book series “The Blacklist” appeared in Catapult. Gonzales’ short fiction has appeared in The Oxford American, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, TaintTaintTaint.com, Under the Thumb: Stories of Police Oppression edited by S.A. Cosby, Black Pulp, The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Get Up Offa That Thing: Crime Fiction Inspired by James Brown edited by Gary Phillips.
Michael A. Gonzales
Allen Chukwuhdi
Allen Chukwuhdi is a psycho-historian that attended Fordham University, where he majored in both history and psychology. He is currently a Psy. D candidate at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. “It was my enthusiasm for history, and specifically Black history, colonialism, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that induced me to employ the psychological sciences. I believe that history and historical figures cannot be properly investigated without it”. Chukwuhdi is interested in developing psychological interventions in Black communities that incorporate cultural solutions and use history to develop identity cohesion, as well as to challenge constructed narratives.
Allen Chukwuhdi
Asha Criner
Asha Criner is an undergraduate student, studying Neuroscience and Urban Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 2020, she guest-authored an Op-Ed for the Detroit Free Press, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, discussing the consequences of insufficient Black representation in academic/high school curricula – a direct response to the social upheaval that arose after the murder of George Floyd. As a graduating high school senior, she was the recipient of the William Keane Award, which recognizes one student for exemplary achievements in writing.
Asha Criner
Lee E. Ross PhD
Dr. Lee E. Ross is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. As a graduate of Rutgers University, his research spans a variety of areas, from his seminal work on religion and social control theory to more recent publications in the areas of critical race theory and criminal justice systems responses to domestic violence. As the author of Domestic Violence and Criminal Justice (2018), his scholarship can be found in a variety of academic journals, including Justice Quarterly, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Crime and Justice, and the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.
Lee E. Ross, PhD
Bijoun Eric Jordan
Bijoun Eric Jordan is a high school English teacher in his 19th year. His greatest professional pleasure is stoking enjoyment of words and ideas — and after school, making students world travelers. Bijoun studied education at New York University, followed by a gap year abroad, then a master's in English literature at Hunter College. A self-professed nerd and staunch advocate of the Oxford comma, Jordan is also a consummate hip hop head and a recovering lyricism addict whose other passions include politics, pop culture, gaming, and creativity. He lives and loves in Brooklyn with his wife, daughter, and son.
Bijoun Eric Jordan
Andre L. Smith, Esq
Andre L. Smith writes widely on issues relating to race and administrative law, taxation, sports and entertainment, as well as jurisprudence, including critical race theory, and law and economics. He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and manuscripts, including Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice: Black Tax (2015). Professor Smith also wrote “Other People’s Property: Hip-Hop’s Inherent Clashes With U.S. Property Laws and Its Rise as Global Counter Culture” in The Virginia Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law (2007) and “If Hip-Hop Is Dead, Did the Law Kill It: How Overzealous Interpretations of Copyright Law Promote Sex and Violence in Hip Hop Music” in Hip Hop and the Law (2015).
Andre L. Smith, Esq
Michael B. Dando, PhD
Michael B. Dando, English professor at Saint Cloud University, holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An author who specializes in science fiction and fantasy novels, his research explores how students engage youth culture and sense making during academic endeavors in ways they find personally meaningful. In particular, he studies how students and teachers use elements of hip-hop to interpret and assimilate central representations of self, community, and a prosocial worldview, and how educators might enhance these environments to provide rich learning experiences that students will see as highly connected to formal tools and ideas. This work involves closely attending to the design of representations and tools within these academic spaces as well as the artifacts (both tangible and intangible) constructed by teachers and students. His writing appears, or is forthcoming, in SAGE publications, African American Intellectual History, and Race, Gender, and Class.
Michael B. Dando, PhD
Matthew Teustch, PhD
Matthew Teustch is currently the director of the Lillian E. Smith Center at Piedmont University. He’s published articles and book reviews in various venues, including LEAR, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, African American Review, and Callaloo. Matthew’s research focuses on African American, southern, and American literature. He is the editor of Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays (2020), and his current project examines Christopher Priest’s run on Black Panther.
Matthew Teustch, PhD
Elle L. Littlefield
Elle L. Littlefield is an Afro-Mississippi writer, editor, and professor. A regular contributor to creative and literary projects in the “MemphiSippi” region, she works to document and preserve Black vernacular and culture from the American South. A two-time Callaloo Fellow, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has served as editor and creative director of BG Memphis Magazine and as an assistant editor for Hieroglyph. In 2021, she co-curated the Afrofuturist virtual exhibition Curating the End of the World: Red Spring, the third installment of the series by the Black Speculative Arts Movement, hosted by Bill T. Jones’s New York Live Arts and Google Cultural Institution. Currently, she serves as Assistant Professor of English and Department Chair of Humanities at HBCU Rust College in Mississippi and as a contributing editor at Obsidian.
Elle L. Littlefield
Kurt W. Wagner
Kurt Wagner is the university librarian of the Murry and Leonie Guggenheim Memorial Library at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, where he oversees the mission to cultivate an up-to-date collection that is excellent in breadth and depth across all resources and media types. Wagner works with the library staff as well as external stakeholders to identify, evaluate, and implement programs that improve services and facilities, enhancing the quality of resources and the operating efficiency of the library. Wagner has been a member of the Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey since 2000 and is currently a member of its executive committee. Wagner is also a member of the American Library Association, the Library and Information Technology Association, the New Jersey Library Association, and the Atlantic Journal of Communication’s editorial advisory board. Wagner was awarded the New Jersey Library Association Technology Innovation Award in both 2009 and 2013 in part for his leadership and management of project teams.
Kurt W. Wagner
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, PhD
Dr. Miletsky is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. His new book "Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle" is being published by the University of North Carolina Press for release in December 2022. Dr. Miletsky is a historian specializing in recent African-American History, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, Mixed Race and Biracial identity, and Hip-Hop Studies. His research interests include African-Americans in Boston, Northern freedom movements outside of the South, Mixed race history in the U.S. and passing, and the Afro-Latin diaspora. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, essays, and book chapters and is currently working on an edited volume on new directions in Boston African American History and school desegregation. He is also at work on his second monograph, a history of interracial marriage and racial passing.
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, PhD
Dwayne Matthews
Dwayne Matthews began to appreciate Hip Hop when he first heard “I Refuse Limitations” by Goodie Mob. While serving as a U.S. Peace Corps Community Health Advisor in Malawi, Africa, he created and launched the Malawian Empowerment Through Hip Hop & Organizational Development (METHOD), a program that used Hip Hop to reduce youth recidivism. His experience also includes leading a 12-month Hip Hop course in a Malawian Prison, instructing a Hip Hop Africa course at Howard University, and serving as a Board Member of Words Beats and Life, a DC-based non-profit that serves as an advocate of Hip Hop culture. Most recently, he was accepted in to Howard University’s Social Justice Consortium. Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Dwayne is currently a Sociology Ph.D. student with a focus on Criminalization in Hip Hop at Howard University.
Dwayne Matthews
Kat Moore
Kat Moore is a PhD candidate in English/creative nonfiction at the University of North Texas. Her essays have been published in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Image, Hotel Amerika, Passages North, Diagram, The Rumpus, Entropy, Hippocampus, Whiskey Island, and Salt Hill, among others. An essay of hers appears in the anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. She was a 2021 Bread Loaf Writers Conference Scholar. Her work has also been supported by the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop and a 2017 SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area) residency.
Kat Moore
Ronda Racha Penrice
Ronda Racha Penrice is the editor of Cracking the Wire During Black Lives Matter and the author of African American History for Dummies and its update, Black American History for Dummies. Her work as a cultural critic, entertainment reporter, lifestyle journalist, and Black history enthusiast has appeared in numerous publications, including theGrio, Essence, The Root, Upscale, Uptown, Medium, The Wrap, and Ebony.
Ronda Racha Penrice
John Jennings
John Jennings is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award–winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’s current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner Award–winning, Bram Stoker Award–winning, New York Times best-selling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred. Duffy and Jennings recently released their Bram Stoker Award–nominated graphic novelization of Butler’s prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower (Abrams ComicArts). Jennings is also the founder and curator of the Abrams Megascope line of graphic novels.
John Jennings
Odell Hall
Odell Hall is a Harlem-born, Charlotte, North Carolina–based writer, podcaster, and editor whose work has appeared in SXSW Magazine, AllHipHop.com, Planetill.com, Love Peace and Slander, and various other outlets. His cultural observations have run the gamut of music, politics, economics, society, and technology, across various media. In addition, he is cohost of the podcasts Firing Squad Radio and Illside Radio and a frequent guest on Volcalo Radio’s Weekend Gabe show. His publishing company, Kagyai-Hall Publishing, is dedicated to chronicling the journeys and telling the stories of Black people across the diaspora.
Odell Hall
Christel N. Temple, PhD
Christel N. Temple is a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she specializes in Africana Cultural Memory, the Intersections of History and Literature, Comparative Black Literature, and Cultural Theory. She is the author of Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory, Black Cultural Mythology, Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise, Literary Spaces: Introduction to Comparative Black Literature, and Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism. Additionally, her essays, commentary, and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Western Journal of Black Studies, International Journal of Africana Studies, Journal of Pan African Studies, CLA Journal, and more. She is a native of Richmond, Virginia, and earned her Ph.D. from Temple University’s Department of Africology and African American Studies.
Christel N. Temple, PhD
Dory Lerner
Dory earned her BA in Sociology from Willamette University in Oregon and her MA in Museum Education from Tufts University in Massachusetts. For over 20 years, Dory has created engaging experiences in museums, schools, libraries, and community centers. As the K-12 Educator at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, she develops programs and curricula to inspire learners of all ages and encourage activism. She served at the King Center in Atlanta, the Field Museum, and the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. For Dory, growing up in Memphis instilled a strong moral conscience for racial and economic inequities both historically and in modern context. Dory has volunteered and served on the board of Memphis Artists for Change and led a community vegetable garden with local youth for more than a decade.
Dory Lerner
LaTanya White, PhD
Dr. LaTanya White is the recipient of the North Star and Innovative New Scholar awards for entrepreneurship education and research. She is an expert in belonging, racial equity, and entrepreneurship. As a result of her leadership and contributions to the Education and Business Administration sectors, Dr. White was recognized by the U.S. Department of State as a Fulbright Specialist. She leverages her research and expertise on Black entrepreneurship and the racial wealth gap to help entrepreneurs and the inclusive organizations that support them create racial equity in their policies, practices, and programming. Dr. White is a 2x author, TEDx Speaker, and Founder of Concept Creative Group, a professional and management development training firm focused on empowering Black entrepreneurs, their families, and their communities.
Ryan J. Petteway, DrPH
Ryan J. Petteway is a public health professor and social epidemiologist—meaning that his research, writing, and teaching focus on the structural factors that shape health opportunities/inequities (e.g., structural racism, sexism, heterosexism). His scholarship integrates critical theory, participatory research, and decolonizing methods to engage notions of epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice within public health knowledge production processes. Before doing all of this, he listened to Nas, Mobb Deep, and Nina and drank orange drinks while conducting observational studies of project life. He reads Langston and Dunbar, Audre and Baldwin, Fanon and hooks while running real-time PCRs in an infectious disease lab. He drops bars and closes open mics for repair. Some bars, never caught, still roam free in the wild as he types this . . . in Portland, Oregon, sippin’ dark roast and trying to keep his Griffey Max 1 Freshwaters dry.
Ryan J. Petteway, DrPH
David Brame
David Brame is blackity Black and an Afrofuturist, and refuses to comb his hair. He’d rather spend that time making comics. He’s worked on titles such as Is’Nana the Werespider, Medisin, Baaaad Muthaz, Box of Bones, and Necromancer Bill. He lives in Mexico. You can follow him on graphicpoetics.biz or on Instagram @amazingdavidbrame.
David Brame
C. N. E. Corbin, PhD
C. N. E. Corbin studies the relationships between society and nature within the built environment by investigating the concept of the green city within the United States. As an environmentalist and political ecologist, her work focuses on public green spaces and how urban “sustainable development” initiatives and environmental policies and practices affect and shape land use and urban park access. Professor Corbin examines both sides of environmental (in)justice—the uneven distribution of environmental harms and the uneven development of environmental goods—in which low-income residents and Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards while also being blocked from environmental amenities. She incorporates media studies and visual culture, often deploying speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, to understand how images represent and influence environmental, racial, and spatial understandings of urban spaces.
C. N. E. Corbin, PhD
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