black girls rock

I am not a hip hop head. I rarely listen to rap music but I do teach hip hop culture in all of my classes. How can I not? I always tell my students that I’m not a fan and they invariably tell me to listen to this “conscious rapper” or that “underground artist.” Some even make me a mix tape and if I dug up those CDs now, I know there would be at least one with tracks by Jean Grae. Her name always comes up, especially when we’re talking about hip hop and feminism, but I never bothered to take a look at her or her work. Then yesterday at the Afropunk Festival I actually heard Jean Grae perform. Despite the blazing hot sun overhead, she came onstage wearing a black hoodie, sunglasses, and dark jeans. She said something about losing a loved one and then asked for energy from the crowd so that she’d have the energy to perform. I just went to her website and it turns out she lost her mother less than a week ago—and Jean Grae’s mother was South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin! I hope she felt the love emanating from the crowd; I’ve written through my grief but can’t imagine getting up on a stage like that. There are dozens of images of Grae on the web and I was surprised by the range of looks she’s had over the years. Yet any one of those looks would have been acceptable at yesterday’s festival. I admit I felt out of place at times, and I fled when a mosh pit opened up during Jada Pinkett Smith’s performance with her band Wicked Wisdom, but after a couple of hours my friends and I started to blend in; we were ourselves within a sea of mostly black faces, soaking up the sun, cooling off in the shade, surveying the food trucks, the hairstyles, the retro clothes, the parents with small children in tow (one white child clutching her Ziplock bag full of Cheerios; a black baby snuggled against her mother’s chest with pink noise-blocking headphones covering her little ears). We started the day in the botanic garden then had brunch in Brooklyn Heights. From there we walked over to the festival and the day ended, as it often does, with friends falling asleep on my sofa as I watched a British crime drama on PBS. I’m heading up to Harlem to see some art today: Robert Pruitt’s Afrofuturistic women. And I’m grateful that there are so many spaces in this city where black women can take center stage. Wangechi Mutu will have a solo exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum this fall (I’m taking my students). Black women authors are presenting at the Brooklyn Book Festival next month. My friends are producing scholarship, poetry, op-eds, performance art, and novels. It’s the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and every time I turn on the TV there’s a black man sharing his point of view. I haven’t seen a black woman interviewed YET. Things have changed but the resistance is stronger than ever. It helps to know that I’m part of an army still fighting for space to BE…