Let the People Rap Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogy and Practices Under CUNY’s Open Admissions, 1968-1978

• Published in: Journal of basic writing Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 106 - 143
• Main Author: Brown, Tessa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York City University of New York 01.10.2019; Journal of Basic Writing
• Subjects: Adjunct Faculty; Administrative and governmental language; African Americans; American history; Attention; Basic writing; College Admission; Cultural identity; Education; Educational Administration; Educational Change; Educational History; Educational Policy; Hip hop culture; Language Usage; Minority Group Students; Music; Open Enrollment; Open Universities; Pedagogy; Puerto Ricans; Racial Bias; Racial Identification; Racism; Reflection; Remedial Instruction; Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012); Self Concept; Teacher Attitudes; Tuition; University admissions; Writing Instruction; New York; United States > US; New York (New York)
• ISSN: 0147-1635; 2164-5116

This article writes the histories of CUNY Open Admissions and hiphop toward each other, illuminating both. Bringing Open Admissions to bear on hiphop history helps us see that, while historians locate the birth of hiphop culture in a 1970s New York gutted by divestment and displacement, in fact the decade before hiphop’s birth was characterized by a flourishing Black and Puerto Rican arts scene in New York and the radical education of tens of thousands of students of color in the CUNY system. Revisiting the archives of Open Admissions with a hiphop lens draws attention to the cultural rhetorics education being taught in remedial writing classrooms by adjunct lecturers like June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and others, who drew students’ attention and inquiry to their own communities and language practices. Looking at a selection of documents chosen for their use of the term “rappin,” including teachers’ reflective writing, administrative documents, and community writing, this article argues that, as bureaucratic language evolved to disguise racism in the 1960s and 1970s, a resistive, identity-based language of rappin evolved in response. Ultimately, hiphop language only entered the commodity market at the end of the 1970s when CUNY instituted tuition for the first time in its history, pushing out many of the students Open Admissions had been designed to welcome in.