Christopher Emdin - Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success

To all the students who taught me to be me and my HipHopEd family

I write these words in tears and in utter amazement at this monumental work by Chris Emdin.

Emdin writes,

To be ratchetdemic is to have no role in starving part of the self in pursuit of academic knowledge. It is a recognition that any education that is disconnected from helping students understand themselves and the power structures that influence their worlds and how these structures operate to stifle or obfuscate young peoples purpose is not education at all.

I am a proud ratchetmom. A ratchetpoet. A hip-hop-generation single parent of a self-aware, poetry-writing, hockey-playing, music-producing, question-asking fourteen-year-old son named King. My son, raised on poems and possibility on purpose. An Obama-era baby who grew up knowing an American president looked like an older version of himself.

While my son is a well-rounded, globally thinking teen, raising him inside the United States education system has been one of the most difficult, heartbreaking experiences of motherhood. Everything I poured into my son would be slowly devoured, poked at, carved into an unfamiliar place outside our home called the classroom. A lively, free-spirited boy would soon be forced to sit still at outdated square desks facing a grownupusually a white womanand having to regurgitate whatever knowledge they were ordained to deliver for the day.

Whats worse is, I was paying for it!

With few choices at high-performing, art-focused elementary or junior high schools in the city of Detroit, I simply had to make a choice of school based on things most white affluent parents will never have to consider: safety. Will my son be safe? Somehow I thought my tuition dollars would give him smaller classrooms (and it did), but it did not lessen the Eurocentric lens of the teachers and the systemic racism they learned in the same system they now teach in.

By the time King was in first grade, I was completely over it. I would spend my days nervously pacing in front of his classroom at the trendy progressive school he attended because my son told me the boys were being treated differently than the girls. He said the teacher was mean.

We loved this school in preschool and kindergarten. I loved the comradery of the like-minded parents. Still, a bad hire would change everything. This afternoon, I would catch the young, blond white teacher from far north of Detroit talking to the Black boys in the class as if they were not human. There was one student I remember whom she found disruptive, and she would just give him puzzles and refuse to teach him most of the day. On this particular day, King must have done something to upset her, and she told him to go stand and face a corner for several minutes. I happened to be in the hallway, and I saw her eyes lock mine with a fear that had her rethinking her morning commute to be in front of brown and Black babies in Detroit.

She was never fired, so I pulled him from the school, and five other students would follow suit, and we (the parents who left the progressive school and I) created the Aker School for Gifted Children in the living room of one of the parents who already had a strong homeschooling experience with elementary schoolage children.

As King got older and outgrew Aker, the stress of finding a safe place for my son to attend school while I was on the road being a poet, and educating other peoples kids, did not stop. It became years of systems stripping down the essence of who he was/is. Write-ups sounded like misdemeanor charges in fifth grade at his small private neighborhood school, and as he got older, I found that school had some strange need for him to have some compliance with authority.

Im a ratchetmom, meaning, I am educated, but I am from the west side of Detroit and will get in the face of a racist teacher and threaten an administrator attempting to humiliate my son.

Education became the front line for me, whether I wanted it to be or not.

One morning his failure to pledge allegiance to the flag became a parent meeting. He was gently asked by his nice homeroom teacher to put his hand over his heart. His response was his head shaking from left to right in the no formation. His defense: I stood up, so I wasnt being disrespectful, and I should not have to pledge allegiance to a flag. My then ten-year-old told his principal he was a Muslim, something that forced me to laugh with pride on the inside. Oh, he is? Okay, well, good to know. It was news to me.

My ten-year-old had to use religion to explain why he did not have to conform to the class rule. He was defiant, but he was a solid student academically, so not much could be done.

Test scores over character. Personality overrides academic performance.

Over the years I have been forced to have to Jawanza Kunjufu these MFAd- and PhDd-up educators consistently.

Its exhausting, and it wasnt solely because of white administrators. I found some Black academics to be jealous of my son and to simply not like him because of his free personality and sometimes because I was his mother. In hip-hop, we call these people haters.

I decided to twist my sons hair when he was two years old. I knew he would eventually maybe chop off his locs when he was older, but this is the way I wanted King to approach the world. When he decided he wanted to go to a Jesuit high school for seventh grade, I supported him. The open house should have been a sign to run, but my son is a Virgo, and aesthetically the school had all the pretty rich kid resources while being in the neighborhood. This is a school with 80 percent white students, generally busing in from the suburbs, and 20 percent Black or Detroit students. You have to test to get in, and I knew many of the cool alumni. Its not a bad look for the resume. I tried. We tried.

During open house one of the music teachers made a comment about my sons locs that were long brown ropes nearly touching his waist. King had already told me he was hearing rumors that he would have to cut his hair. I told him that was nonsense. Then I was hit with the sucker punch. You know hes going to have to cut his hair, said the white teacher.

No one mentioned that to me when I was registering him and paying my deposit, I replied.

Its in the handbook. He actually said those words.

Really, the handbook. Well the handbook is outdated.

He was correct though. The handbook clearly stated that all the boys would have to cut their hair. No braids or ponytails.

He also told me and my head full of long blue locs that they were preparing the boys for professional jobs. I asked him if I looked like I didnt work, and then told him I was sending my son to the school to prepare him for college, not the workforce.

Why in the hell are we in this matrix, King? Because this is America, right in the middle of my predominantly Black city.

When King cut his locs, I cried. I felt as if this system had won, but it wasnt long before King, with his new conservative coif, would become a challenge for the administration at the school. I was asked by the vice principal less than a month after King had enrolled if I had ever tested my son for ADHD. He referred to me as a mom from a school of thought that probably didnt believe in testing. I told him he was spot-on and that, no, I had not tested my Knight Arts Awardwinning son, who was mentoring younger poets by ten years old and opening for Dave Chappelle, for any type of learning disorder.