February 9, 2012
“Hip hop has saved many lives. Drugs, crimes, the NYPD, any of that could have taken me out, but hip hop kept me focused,” said Don C. Sawyer III, an instructor and doctoral candidate at Syracuse University. He spoke to a room of students and faculty on Monday as Hamilton’s Black History Month Keynote Speaker. The lecture, co-sponsored by the Days-Massolo Center, the Office for the Associate Dean of Students for Multicultural Affairs and the Black and Latino Student Union, dealt with his research on Americans hip hop culture and how it relates to young black males.
Sawyer was born to teenage high school dropouts in the Lincoln Projects of Harlem during the cocaine epidemic. He talked about how hip-hop kept him focused and saved his life in a culture where a very low percentage of children graduate from high school. Growing up in poverty he explained that he had a supportive family and community centers, but it was hip-hop that kept him sane. While he went on to Hartwick College, most of his teenage rap group, N.F.L. (Niggaz from Lincoln), also “went upstate- but a lot of them went to the prison.”
He graduated from Hartwick “with a degree and a daughter” and joined the army as a combat medic so his children would not need to grow up in the projects. Three more children soon followed, and Sawyer smiled proudly at his children watching from the back of the auditorium as he quipped, “it’s hard to be gangster leaning back in a white minivan.”
His research deals with a group of young black males at a “dismantled school,” officially the school did not exist. When this particular school district in New York changed, a group of mostly African American eighth graders did not fit in the new building and were instead taught in one part of the old, breaking down building. Sawyer explained that the children live in a place without love, their success academically was not important to most of their teachers or the school district. At school they were under “constant surveillance” and needed to prove that they were not doing anything wrong. These students listen to hip-hop constantly and use it “to resist structures” in a school where out of 85 students, only 45 remained in school at the end of the year.
Sawyer speaks to show that hip-hop does not have a negative effect on the children. To the accusations that hip-hop encourages violence, Sawyer offered a few quotes from the children as evidence; one of the students, Robinson, explained “sometimes what they say is true. You can tell when they making stuff up and going too far…” Most of the students also claimed that the music kept them sane, motivated and gave them the ability to express themselves. At this school, Sawyer uses the spoken word with the eight graders, Black Ice is a particular favorite. He has the students then analyze “the poems” and tie them back to their lives. Many of the students also write lyrics of their own, giving them the opportunity to express their burdens.
Sawyer was easily able to hold the room’s attention at one point looking up from his notes and rapping an entire song and encouraging audience participation saying, “come on, this is hip-hop; you have to talk back to me.”