 All right, good evening, distinguished panelists and attendees. Thank you all for being here. Happy Cesar Chavez Day. Welcome to Hip Hop and the Law. My name is Jeff Prostaski and I'm President of IPLA, the Intellectual Property Law Association at Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island. Welcome. Before we begin the program, I'd like to thank our co-sponsors, the Black Law Students Association, especially Leica, Brooklyn, Doug, and Amaya, the Multicultural Law Students Association, especially Ariana, the Boston Patent Law Association, especially Josh, Keith, Rebecca, Quincy, and Genevieve, the Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, especially Audi, Cornelius, Jeffrey, Michelle, and Professor Chung, the Criminal Law Society, especially Alyssa, and the Fine Science Center for Pro Bono and Experiential Education, especially Laurie, Eliza, Susie, and Zarene. I'd like to thank the Roger Williams University Law Library for creating the incredible resource guide, especially Nicole, Nathan, and Raquel. And lastly, thank you to my fellow members of IPLA and its board, Morgan, Irving, Tatiana, Christopher, Ishita, and our faculty advisor, Professor Nicky Kukas. Tonight's panel will be recorded. Please write to me at IPLA at g.rdu.edu. If you'd like to be sent the link for the recording, I also just put that in the chat below. Okay, let's begin. The biggest criticism I have of law school is that we don't learn about the race of the defendants. Cases are talked to us as person A sues person B, and here's the law that governs, like a math equation. My explorations in these panels on race and intellectual property has been my attempt to reassert the importance of the cultural narrative of people and how the law biases persons of color, how when A and B are persons of color, the law is not neutral. Tonight's panel continues that conversation that began last year with previous IPLA programs, copyright and racial justice and cultural misappropriation. Hip hop and the law will try to get to the bottom of this question. How do the laws relating to hip hop reinforce structural racism? In order to see this clearly, we'll need to see both the micro and macro pictures. In the micro, I'd like to focus on the strict intellectual property laws clamping down on music sampling, the fight over critical race theory, and the trauma from the policing of black and brown communities. And in the macro, how hip hop, by addressing those issues, can give authentic voice to those stories, and by doing so, inspire radical change. My own research this semester has centered on the laws of music sampling. I'd like to share with you all some quotes from judicial opinions that illustrate how the courts when faced with music sampling cases have consistently relied on negative racial stereotyping of black artists. For example, here's language from a judge in the district court of Texas. Tupac Shakur's music is tasteless, violent and socially offensive. The album Tupacalypse Now is riddled with expletives and depictions of violence, and overall the album is extremely repulsive and aesthetically questionable. Tupacalypse Now is both disgusting and offensive, that the album has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is an indication of society's aesthetic and moral decay. The court cannot recommend Tupacalypse Now to anyone. Here's a judge in the Sixth Circuit, which covers Nashville. Hip hop sampling is not like the case of a composer who has a melody in his head. When you sample a sound recording, you know you're taking another sort of product. And here's a judge in the Federal District Court of New York. Thou shalt not steal, has been an admonition filed since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world, this admonition is not always followed. Indeed, the defendants in this action for copyright infringement would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the music business, and for that reason, their conduct here should be excused. The conduct of the defendants herein, however, violates not only the Seventh Commandment, but also the copyright laws of this country and finally, here's a judge in the Ninth Circuit covering California. In any other context, this hip hop sampling would be called theft. It is no defense to theft that the thief made off with only an insubstantial part of the victim's property. The pertinent inquiry in a sampling case is not whether a defendant sampled a little or a lot, but whether a defendant sampled at all. True, get a license or do not sample doesn't carry the same divine force as thou shalt not steal, but it's the same basic idea. The de minimis exception does not apply to the sampling, copying, stealing, pirating, misappropriation, call it what you will of copyrighted fixed sound recordings. End quote. So the Sixth Circuit ends judicial counterparts reason that black hip hop sampling is like stealing, theft, and pirating. What these opinions get wrong in my opinion is failing to recognize that the art form of hip hop sampling is one of the great achievements in American music. Hip hop sampling is innovative and telling a step forward for music, not a step back. It is a musical art form of true beauty and creativity as much of an artistic expression as blues are and beer jazz. The Sixth Circuit and others language, which characterizes hip hop sampling as theft, stealing, and pirating demeans a legitimate art. When the judiciary furthers this damaging trope, black artists as incapable of the imagination of a white composer, they are furthering the structural racial hierarchy in this country. And by calling sampling artists thieves and framing the artist not like the case of a composer as a melody in his head, the courts are perpetuating structural racism in America. To analyze the various intersections of hip hop and the law and structural racism, we have a panel of experts joining us from across the country. Professor Dray Cummings is associate dean for faculty research and development at Charles C. Baum, distinguished professor of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. He is also the co-director of Bowen Law Center for Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform and author of hip hop and the law. Professor Todd Clark is a professor of law at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida, and writes our corporate, I'm sorry. Oh, oh, oh, sorry, someone. I've got to mute someone. Sorry about that. There we go. Professor Todd Clark is a professor of law at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida, and writes on corporate justice and critical race theory. Dr. Dawn Alyssa Fisher, let me pull up the revision she asked me, is a founder of deaf professor at Edutainment for Life and Equity and Racial Justice Consulting Group in the Bay Area. She's an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. Recent publications include essays in the Smithsonian anthology of rap and hip hop and selected fellowships and awards include the NFT Advanced Equitable Collaboration and STEM Fellowship, Science, Technology and Sub Hub Faculty Fellowship, Educator of the Year Award from the National Council of Negro Women Golden Gate Chapter, the Nassir Jones Fellowship, the Japan Foundation Japanese Language Institute and Dr. Fisher has examined hip hop as international black popular culture art, education and music in Japan and in the United States for over 20 years. And Professor Atiba Ellis is a professor of law at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and writes on voting law and race and law. He's currently working on a book length project related to the vicious voter myth and anti-democracy and co-author on the forthcoming seventh edition of Dirk Bell's Race, Racism and American Law. Welcome panelists. Attendees, please feel free to put questions in the chat at any time. If we don't get to them during the discussions there'll be a Q and A at the end. So my first question is for Dean Cummings. Although hip hop has grown exponentially from street music that had a limited audience in the Bronx to occupying center stage at Super Bowl 56 and in mainstream culture, it is still considered a dangerous outside or arts many white Americans. In this line of hip hop sampling cases that I've quoted from, one can trace the condescending language of juris towards successful and African-American musical artists, whether Bessie Smith or Biz Markey, the explicit message is the same. Black musical artistry is not valuable and does not deserve full protection of the law. Dean Cummings, how has intellectual property law harmed black musicianship over the years and in particular, how has the law beat down sampling? Thank you so much, Jeff. I wanted to just take a moment to thank Jeff for organizing this panel. Jeff, your explanation and your reading of the juris opinions was exceptional. Delighted to be gathered here with Professor Todd Clark and Professor Atiba Ellis who were contributors to my hip hop and the law book and to meet Dr. Dawn Fisher and to Jeff, I think you've gathered people from nearly every area code in the every time zone in the country. So well done. I'm delighted to be here and thanks to Roger Williams University for hosting us. Greg Bowman is a friend of mine, your Dean and a friend to many of us here on the panel. So I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for this invitation and thank you for the provocative question. So Fumni Ariwa, a legal scholar when she was at Northwestern University wrote an article called From JC Bock to Hip Hop where she talked about a hierarchy of aesthetics where at the top of the hierarchy of musical aesthetics is classical music, Beethoven Bach and white composers. And at the bottom of the aesthetic, she placed hip hop artists who are blatantly disrespected in the law as indicated by Jeff's quotations from judges listening to sampling cases. And according to Professor Ariwa's hierarchy of aesthetics, she essentially says what's true is that musical borrowing has been a part of history since the beginning and that Beethoven borrowed from Bach and Bach from Handel and Handel from Brahms. And I might have my composers mixed up and the air is mixed up, but the point is, is that musical borrowing has been a part of music since inception. And yet it is only, only vilified when musical borrowing is engaged in by black artists or at least partially vilified when engaged in by black artists. And what I wanna talk about specifically, Jeff, to your question is that I think this is an important distinction folks to make. I'm sorry to slip into law professor mode for a second, but I need to teach everybody something. There is two types of copyright in music. One is copywriting the musical composition and the other is copywriting the sound recording. What's important to know in musical composition is imagine yourself sitting at a piano or sitting with a guitar and you're writing a song and actually writing the notes on the sheet of paper. That is the musical composition. And the moment you write the note on a sheet of paper, you have placed it into a tangible medium and copyright attaches. You have a copyrighted piece of music in your musical composition. That in and of itself, the underlying musical composition is copyrightable. The sound recording is when you go into the studio. Those of you that have been in the studio and I just really wanna verify something that Jeff said earlier, I think that a sampling machine is similar to an instrument. And I think people that are gifted in sampling sounds and music are artists and musicians that create. So I agree completely with what Jeff said about the aesthetic of the beautiful creation of hip hop through sampling. But when you're in a studio and you actually lay down the music, you actually put the vocal track down, you put the drum track down, you put the beats tracks down, you are creating a separate copyrightable piece of music which is the sound recording. And so you have a musical composition, the notes written on the page that's copyrightable and you have the sound recording that's copyrightable. The way the law has stifled and crushed sampling and by extension hip hop is that there is a doctrine under musical composition called de minimis copy where you can take three or four notes of a particular song and you can borrow them freely. You can use them, you cannot copyright. You can copyright the notes but if you're only taking a small portion it's de minimis which means in Latin the law doesn't care about it. So in musical composition, you can take three or four notes because there's only so many chords. There's only so many keys on the piano but in the famous case of thou shalt not steal and then later the famous case which was a Bismarck key case and later the case of Dimension Films which was the NWA 100 Miles and Run In Case that's where courts found unlike musical composition that you can't take a single note from a previously sound recorded piece of music. If you take a sound you are engaging in copyright infringement, thou shalt not steal or I can't recommend Tupac who happens to be my favorite artist where a judge in Texas calls him the demise of society. Tupac lips now represents the fact that he sold to several hundred thousands of records is the demise of society. But the important thing here is that white male judges decided there would be no de minimis exception for sound recordings. And so the Dimension Films case NWA sampled three almost unidentifiable notes from George Clinton's Get Off Your Ass and Jam. And because they did and because of that holding in Dimension Films then every single sound taken from a sound recording has to be licensed and licensing makes it prohibitively expensive it takes a musicianship tool away from hip hop artists in the sampling machine and basically this Dimension Films case and the Bismarck case grand upright music basically made it so that you are infringing if you take a single note or a single sound from something that was pre-recorded and it was held by judges that essentially viewed in the hierarchy of aesthetics they viewed hip hop to be at the bottom. It's like Derek Bell talks about faces at the bottom of the well. African-American artists and musicians particularly those sample had a tool stolen from them in the ability to sample and create new music through sampling sound. So the last thing I'll say on this point Jeff is judges making these decisions based on their sort of hierarchies of aesthetics like respecting classical music disrespecting black musicianship is really rooted in white supremacy and white hierarchical envisioning of what is truly musicianship. And for that reason hip hop was stifled in their ability to continue to make great music through sampling sounds. And so Dean what are any electoral property laws in the hip hop space need to do to better serve racial and social justice? Yeah another great question Jeff thank you. So for one I think sampling should be covered under fair use which is an exception under copyright law in the United States. This is a pretty exclusive United States doctrine. Fair use essentially says if you take something that's copyrighted and transform it and you don't take away from the ability of the original to find financial success then you can use small portions of previously copyrighted music to make something new. And if you listen closely to A Hundred Miles and Running from NWA one of my most influential groups as a young person straight out of Compton A Hundred Miles and Running if you listen they completely transform the sound. It's unrecognizable from George Clinton's record to the recording of A Hundred Miles and Running and yet they weren't able to use the fair use defense. And that's what I think Jeff would allow some equality and some social ability or some social justice in hip hop and music is if the fair use doctrine were extended to sampling. And one other thing that I'll just mention here quickly for those of you unfamiliar with sampling or hip hop is that when Public Enemy first came out in the 1980s they sampled hundreds of sounds when they created a nation of millions to hold us back. They could not do that today because they would need to license every sound that they took and sampled in order to use it which would take years to clear and millions of dollars to pay the licensing fee for. And so when Public Enemy uses hundreds of sounds to create a record that they'd sampled and the courts take that away from them it basically eliminated an ability or a tool to create music. So I think the fair use doctrine Jeff is one. I also think that the other is that I wonder if those judges hip hop was kind of newer when they were calling it the demise of society and there's nothing redeemable in the sounds and now shall not steal. I wonder if 2020 if judges with the way that hip hop has taken over the world would continue to have that kind of disrespect for hip hop artists because they have become so influential and so meaningful. And last comment here. Meek Mill and Jay-Z have started the reform alliance together with the owner of the Patriots craft and one of the owners of the 76ers. We have hip hop artists that are not only billionaires but they are aggressive social activists. And I wonder if those judges would have the spine now to say the things that they've said about hip hop artists in the 90s and early 2000s. Thank you Dean and I'd like to also I know you have many hats that you wear and another is this. And I know you have students from your course the hip hop and the American constitution. So I wanna dip into that. How can law school incorporate hip hop into its curriculum? And how can hip hop help teach social justice? I almost wanna turn this over to my students, Jeff, but just let me say today. I opened contract law with Kendrick Lamar song I. And when I do that, I ask my students why am I showing you Kendrick Lamar today and really want them to dig in. Is it related to contracts? Is it related to another message? And for those of you unfamiliar Kendrick Lamar has this beautiful song called I which is essentially I love myself. And it's about self care. And it's about Kendrick being pretty vulnerable, talking about depression and suicide and other things that he's sort of been challenged by in his life and my message to my students. We just had a midterm, Jeff and some of the students didn't do as well as they wanted to do. And my message really was, you know what? It's about overcoming. It's about loving yourself. It's about being good to yourself. And so one way to incorporate it into the curriculum is just to straight up play the music in class which I do fairly often. But the other point that I wanted to make in my hip hop in the American constitution students that are here can attest if this is true or not. Is that if you offer a course like hip hop in the American constitution and I know that Professor Clark has offered hip hop law and social justice and other law schools around the country are adopting the course, you can have radical conversations in class. The kinds of radical conversations that not only open minds but that lead people to thinking about how the law could be radically reformed. Let me give you a quick example. I have an African-American student in my class that I respect deeply. A couple of weeks ago, we said something in class when we were talking about hip hop and policing. And he said something like this and I hope it's okay that I share it. I didn't pre-clear this with my student. He essentially said, I had the talk with my son when he was 13 or 14. He's an African-American father in my class. And he said these words. I told my son that I can get you out of jail but I can't pull you out of a grave. He just dropped that comment in class. And for me, I know about the talk. I've, you know, Todd Clark has given the talk to his son, you know, that I know about the talk but I didn't realize the impact of my student statement until the students submitted their reflection papers. And several of my students talked about how deeply that comment impacted them as mothers or as future mothers who will never, as white women, will never have to have the talk with their child and how meaningful that was to them in a way that made them think about policing in America in a way they had never thought about it before. And so for someone, you know, like you were I, Jeff or the members of the panel that know about the talk and know about these things, you know, that's an affecting comment. But when you can have a class where that then launches us into how do we reform policing? How do we police differently? How do we get to a place in America where the talk isn't something that every Black parent has to have with their child? Then you're talking about things in law school that I think have to be talked about and that are rarely talked about. And in those two ways, Jeff, I would say incorporating hip hop into the curriculum can make a real difference, not just in the lives of the students, but in the way that we think about the law and reforming the law going forward. Thank you, Dean. And you know, I have read excerpts of your book, Hip Hop in the Law, and I wanted to ask you that. You know, why did you write your book, Hip Hop in the Law? And what other kinds of areas intersect with hip hop besides policing and intellectual property? Yeah, such a good question, Jeff. Thank you. Okay, so let me be real, try and be real brief about this. In 2012, I spoke at a conference at the University of Iowa Law School, and at that conference, Donald Tibbs, one of the co-authors of the Hip Hop in the law book was there with me, and unbeknownst to each other, the conference at Iowa was about the war on paradigm. So it was critiquing the war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on, you know, whatever, as sort of wars on communities of color. And unbeknownst to each other, I started my talk with public enemies, black steel in the hour of chaos, and talked about prison, and talked about how hip hop has taught generations of people how unfair and harsh and discriminatory prison is, and sentences are. And then Tibbs, Dr. Tibbs gets up and gives his presentation, and he plays Karris One's officer, officer, or the sound of the police. And then he talked about how hip hop has taught generations about how policing is similar to the slave era of overseers. And he and I had dinner together that night, and we basically conceptualized a course called Hip Hop in the Law that had never been taught in an American law school. And from that dinner, it germinated into a class where he at Drexel Law School and me at West Virginia University Law School at the time got our curriculum committees, the first two curriculum committees in the United States to ever law school approve a class called Hip Hop in the American Constitution. And we offered the course. And in offering the course, it became so powerful to us that our guest speakers like Paul Butler and Pamela Bridgewater and Imani Perry and Atiba, I think, and Todd both spoke in that course. We had to write the book. We had to create the book in case anyone else in the country wanted to teach a class called Hip Hop in the Law. They had the tools to do it. And those conversations were amazing. And one thing that I'll say, Jeff, is that we were very fortunate. Drexel Law School put up a little bit of money and our final lecturer for that first course ever was Chuck D from Public Enemy. And he came in, spoke to the students and verified so much of what we'd said about the law. Not just intellectual property, not just policing, not just mass incarceration, but family law and Hip Hop. And Todd Clark's chapter is about corporate law and Hip Hop. And Atiba Ellis' chapter is about jazz and innovation and civil rights law. And so it just gave us an opportunity to truly explore, truly explore, not just Hip Hop's real sharp critique of criminal justice, but it's intersections with all of those other areas of the law. And then the last thing I'll say is it was also an innovative course in 2012 because we taught it through streaming. So that was before COVID, where my students in West Virginia were beamed in to Drexel. And then for Chuck D, I rented a couple of passenger vans and all the West Virginia students drove up to Philly and we sat together with Chuck D for that class. But that's when we were able to see that in my humble opinion, this has potential to transform not just the lives of the students who take the class, but the law in and of itself. Thank you, Dean. The last thing is, you know, this is a Hip Hop and the walk panel. So any track you're listening to right now, you wanna play us a minute of it? Yeah, yeah, I would love to. Professor Clark and I, together with Caleb Conrad and Amy Johnson have been really vibing with Meek Mill lately. We've been talking about adverse childhood experiences, folks. Those are the types of traumas that happen to children that change their adult health outcomes. And there's basically 10 adverse childhood experiences and people that have suffered six or more have a life expectancy that is 20 years less than someone that has suffered zero adverse childhood experiences. And I want you to pay attention. I'm gonna play a little bit of Meek Mill. These adverse childhood experiences are things like suffering, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse as a child, living in a home with an incarcerated family member, living in a home with someone with mental illness, living in a socially disadvantageous situation, violence in the streets, death of a parent, divorce. Those are some of the 10 traumatic childhood experiences. And as you watch Meek Mill count on your fingers, how many traumas he described experiencing as a young man growing up in Philadelphia. So the song is called, the song is called, oh, sorry. And Nadine, if you could just keep it to that one minute, that'd be great. Have you been talking to Professor Clark? Does he tell you that I don't keep to my time limits very well? All right, one minute. Here we go, one minute of trauma. Let me fast forward it to a place where it makes the most impact. So let me just quickly finish up here, Jeff, by saying that if you listen to those lyrics carefully, what you heard Meek Mill say is he grew up in a home with a mom addicted to drugs, with a father that was locked up, says drugs got a hold of my mama, the judge got a hold of my father. His dad was killed when he was five. Those are three adverse childhood experiences right there. Said he saw his brother's blood on the pavement, bullet holes in the lockers at his school. Those are like five adverse childhood experiences right there. If Meek Mill is statistically accurate, he would be slated to live 20 years less than someone that had zero adverse childhood experiences. And I want folks to think about that. Why do we allow these types of traumas to impact children in this country? We just really need to figure out a better way under the law to treat children and to protect them from these adverse childhood experiences. So thank you very much, Jeff. Thanks for those great questions. I look forward to the rest of the panel. Thank you so much, Dean Cummings. And now for Professor Ty Clark. According to critical race theory, the law in America functions in producing and insulating white dominance. The exercise of racial power is systemic and ingrained in America. Laws produce racial power through rules that continue to reproduce the structures and practices of racial discrimination and sustain hierarchies of racial stratification. What constitutes progress of the arts in the copyright clause of the Constitution must be construed within the context of enslavement, Jim Crow, lynching, and mass incarceration. Black artists must make artistic progress under the Constitution, faced with a culture that devalues their bodies and minds. Professor Clark, what is hip-hop's perspective on the current debate over critical race theory? Jeff, listen, before I begin, one, let me just tell you how excited I am to be here. I'm with Professor Cummings, my mentor, a friend, co-author. We argue about college football. He doesn't know much about that, but I'm doing my best to teach him about it. And so it's really good to see Attiba. And one of the things that many people don't know is Greg Bowman played a role in my career as a law professor. Because of my relationship with Professor Cummings, he called Greg Bowman maybe about 15 years ago and said, hey, I have this young guy named Todd Clark look out for him at Mississippi College. And I went and I met Greg and Greg was so compelling. I almost ended up at Mississippi College because of Greg and another professor there who's a really dynamic guy. So I hold Greg in the highest regard. He's a great person. You guys are lucky to have him. The other thing that I wanna say before I begin is I wanna thank my students. I know a few of them have decided to join and they mean the world to me and they inspire me to be the best version of myself. And I also wanna thank you and your team for inviting me and having me on this telephone call or this Zoom call. So I'm excited. Now, Jeff, I know you just asked a question, right? But one of the things that you gotta understand is that when we're on these panels on me, these are my boys and women, right? That we work together a lot. And I know one of the things that you were scheduled to ask me about was sort of the meat bill in trauma. And I knew that you wanted to possibly ask me about that. So if you just give me just a quick second just to kind of dovetail off of something that Professor Cummings said because I think that it's a natural progression. And then I'll dive right into the discussion about critical race theory and hip hop. So, you know, Professor Cummings did a wonderful job of sort of highlighting this notion of trauma. In fact, we've recently published two pieces, one at the St. Thomas Law Review and another one I think that just came out yesterday at the University of Cincinnati Law Review about trauma. The first piece that we wrote was about analyzing trauma from a hip hop perspective and we utilize Meek Mill's song that you just heard as a sort of lens to evaluate this idea of adverse childhood experiences on young African-Americans. And we were arguing that the African-American experience with black law enforcement should be a recognized ace because of the negative impacts associated with it and how it impacts the life cycle of young African-Americans. So really compelling piece in our St. Thomas Law Review. And so I did want to touch on something. Professor Cummings made an excellent point. Many years ago, back in sort of the mid to late 70s, this group, the Kaiser Permanente study is what Professor Cummings is referencing. And as a result of that study, there was a determination that individuals that experienced six or more aces lived 20 less years than individuals that experienced zero aces, right? So that's a pretty substantial impact. Well, there's a really compelling point about that survey that needs to be highlighted. One, the study was of individuals of about 13 or 14,000 people in San Diego, right? And 70% of the individuals as part of that study were white and they were middle to upper class individuals. So let's think about that, what that means. That means if middle class white Americans that are educated, highly educated, that was the population. If they experienced six or more aces and they had a lifespan that was 20 years shorter, imagine what the experience would be if you recalibrated the study to focus on marginalized populations, it might be 40 less years, right? We're talking about a really large disparity here. And I think it's important for us to recognize that the data and the statistics that we're talking about in the short lifespan was of a group that has the financial capacity because these are working individuals. They have insurance, right? So if they have issues or their children have issues, they can get them care that's covered by insurance. When we're talking about inner city communities where individuals may not have access to these same support services, these aces have a much greater detrimental impact on that population. So I think that it's important to recognize that. And we believe that our work in this area is gonna be transformative and we're really excited about it. In addition to those two pieces, we have another piece that's going to come out and really a series of pieces. And we're gonna look at how adverse childhood experiences impact the way that policing in America occurs on actually black and white police officers. And we're gonna do some data analysis. So we're really excited about that piece. So Professor Cummings and I will continue working together in addition to all of the other stuff that we've done in the past. So Jeff, would you like me to transition back to the question that you asked me about? Right, so I was gonna ask you about the current debate over critical race theory and your thoughts. So the current debate, recently I wrote an article in a blog called Decarcerate. And it was zeroed in exactly on this particular issue about hip hop and critical race theory and the attack of a critical race theory. What's really interesting to me when I entered into the academy, I'm gonna be quite honest with you. And I think that my panelists will share the same sentiment. If you were a young law professor, especially a law professor of color, you were encouraged not to write articles in critical race theory because that would pigeonhole you and it would make it difficult for you to climb up the ranks and earn tenure, right? I think that the world has changed a little bit because one of the things that I talked about Professor Tibbs, when he was at St. Thomas's writing an article about, because we're sitting there in these interviews and we see all of these people from the majority, let's say white scholars, men and women talking about critical race. And we were like, wait a minute, 20 years ago we were African and we could not do this, but it's interesting how the world around us has changed. And so one of the things that has happened is that people have started to recognize the value of the messages that disseminate from this idea of critical race theory. And so because of that, it is now under attack by people that don't know what the hell it is, right? And so oftentimes you have many of these conservative conservative individuals who are attacking critical race theory as though critical race theory perpetuates this notion of hate. And that is the exact opposite. Critical race theory does not teach hate. What it does is it forces us to sort of take a critical look at the way that we view things. So I'm gonna show you a couple of images and I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about why critical race theory is important. And then I'm gonna circle back around and then make a direct point about its intersection with hip hop. So I'm gonna share my screen here. Let's see here. All right, here we go. You share my screen. Share is cool. All right, hopefully you guys can see this. I'm gonna scoot this over a little bit. Actually I can leave it here, right? We all see this picture, right? And one of the things that in an article that I wrote, I talk about this notion of Bull Connor racism, right? So yeah, Bull Connor was a law enforcement officer in the Deep South during the civil rights movement. And he was notorious for his vicious attacks on the civil rights protesters. And so in this image right here, you can see the 17 year old civil rights activists getting attacked, viciously attacked by a German shepherd. I mean, that's a pretty big dog. And you can see the brutality of it. And so at some point racism was synonymous with brutality. So we can see this image, right? In America could see this and say, there's something wrong about this, right? There's something evil about what we see here. That's racism. Now, one of the things that ended up happening when you think about the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement really was confronting overt racism, racism that was in your face. Think about that as Bull Connor racism, the dogs, the water hoses, right? The getting beat with the police batons. That became what is racist. And so America got a chance to see that that was wrong because it was vicious, it was overt and it was in your face, right? But let me show you this. We see this picture right here. Does anybody know who this is? What this is a picture of? Professor Cummings, other than Professor Cummings. Anybody know? Okay. This is a picture of AIG's board. And this is a picture from Professor Cummings and I. We have a course that we teach called Corporate Justice. And this is a picture of the board. And AIG's board, and the reason that we're showing this is because AIG was one of the primary culprits of the financial crisis. And if I have more time, I would talk about how AIG and a few other bad actors were single-handedly responsible for the reason that many law students, at least for the past five to 10 years, have had difficulty getting jobs at big law firms and other law firms because of the greed and the selfishness and the fraud that these individuals engaged in on Wall Street. And so oftentimes, when we see this, right? We just see, oh, okay, this is a board right here. What is it about? Approximately 15 people. One of the first things you should probably see is there's very little diversity. There's only two women and maybe one person of color on this entire board. And at the time, this was the 17th largest company in the world, the largest insurance company in the United States. Obviously, they no longer exist in the same capacity. But a lot of times what has happened is that because racism has gotten more covert, some people have difficulty seeing that this is a remit of sort of America's insidious history towards people of color, right? Some people say, oh, well, the reason that these individuals sit on the board is because of this notion of meritocracy. And these are the most deserving individuals. Well, no, some of the individuals are on this board because of this thing known as white privilege. Some of these people have this benefit that is observable to everybody else in the room, except for the people that carry that benefit. There are certain opportunities that are given to them. And this is what critical race theory is about. Critical race theory is such an important theory because it helped us as a country transition from the fact that racism is less overt and more covert. And critical race theory gives us a mechanism or a lens to evaluate the reality of what is happening in America. Critical race theory is not about going around calling people races. It's not about teaching hate. It's not about teaching separation. Critical race theory is about taking a critical look at the perspective and then making an informed assessment about the deficiency so we can move to a more positive future about how to enhance the processes. And this is the special part. I'm gonna give proper attribution, again, to my buddy and mentor because we work together so much. Professor Cummings wrote this article many years ago. So when I teach my hip hop law and social justice, one of the fundamental articles that we talk about, Professor Cummings wrote an article that's published in the University of Louisville Law Review and it was called a Furious Kinship. And in this particular article, Professor Cummings talks about the various intersections between the early critical race theory scholars like Derek Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and he makes a connection between those individuals and members of the hip hop community. So for example, he talks about Derek Bell and Chuck D. He talks about Richard Delgado and Ice Cube, Kimberly Crenshaw and Queen Latifah. And what it does for the students is it gets them to understand, oh, now I can see why Derek Bell's notion of interest convergence was so compelling because he's like Chuck D. in Public Enemy when they were out talking about fight the police and how that was so revolutionary and so bombastic and so the article does a wonderful job. Now, the thing that I tell Dre is that we're getting old. So when we're in class and we're trying to make this wonderful connection, people are like, who the hell is Chuck D and who the hell is Public Enemy? And Ice Cube, I think I see him on Friday, right? So one of the things that Professor Cummings and I are doing is we are remixing his Furious Kinship article and we're going to use it by talking about more modern artists and connecting those modern artists back to the critical race theory because from our vantage point, it is the hip hop community that is actually serving as the transition from let's say the Derek Bells and the Kimberly Crenshalls and the Richard Delgado, it is the JZs of the world, right? It is the Kendrick Lamar's of the world. It's the Lamarcus joiners of the world that are picking up the torch and then taking an introspective look at what is happening in America to help us create better tactics and techniques to confront racism. Thank you so much, Professor Clark. Unbelievable. We can come back to some of these ideas at the end. Moving forward to Dr. Donalissa Fisher. Copyright law in theory protects any author's exclusive right to their original creations but in practice, it does not equally protect and value artists of color and white creators. Copyright law is not and never was race neutral. Judicial opinions such as Bridgeport work to calcify race into intellectual property doctrine and racialize the standard of true imagination. Music industry has benefited from societal inequities that devalue people of color, especially black Americans. As Naz said, everyone I grew up with, no one finished college, no one owns a store, no one owns a bank, dudes are doing life, dudes are dead, dudes are in the streets or dudes don't know where they're at. Our friends being the projects are jail, never Harvard or Yale. Dr. Fisher, if we zoom out as the only anthropologist, public intellectual speaking this evening, could you please give us a theoretical framing of some of the topics we've been discussing, racial capitalism, white hegemony, colonialism, black history, hip hop. Could you elaborate on where we are right now and how does hip hop inspire your work and what does it mean to you and why does it matter? All right, thank you very much. So as we, I'm gonna keep, you're gonna hear timer. So I stay on time because as someone who has been, I guess a theme of my work is representing the unseen. Indeed, I am not a law professor. I am what's called a political anthropologist and I have been in conversation with youth. Well, I've been an intergenerational conversation about intersectional activism and what was theorized as critical race theory for over 20 years. Let me dial back though for a second, Jeff. I get that I won't be off time. My name again is Dr. Donna Lisa Fisher. I am a African-American woman with shoulder length black gray hair. I am wearing a black top with a red turquoise and sparkled color and behind me is a tan wall. I am zooming in from the unceded territory of the Ramatush Ohlone and my pronouns are she. I use she, Siri, but you can complicate on your own. She, they, and they. All right, so I wanted to make sure that I had an accessible introduction and I think that when and where I will be entering here is to connect with the previous speakers in a topic that I've been theorizing about for 20 years and that's hip hop is critical pedagogy. Thankfully I don't need to go too far into hip hop is critical pedagogy because our law professors explained in detail how they utilize hip hop is critical pedagogy in the law classroom, how they utilize a song and their own interest as well as student interest to illuminate the relationships between power and authority in the classroom and to engage in dialogic learning as that powerful case that was shared earlier from I believe Dean Cummings shared it about the student sharing about a personal experience concerning the talk and how that impacted the quality of work that was turned in by his peers for that particular example. The first, it's 2022. So the first peer reviewed article that I published was indeed entitled hip hop is critical pedagogy and it was an anthropological journal but I have to share that I'm gonna share a little bit about my background as well so that because my main goal is to as I put in a chat way far along ago is to be in dialogue with our participants because I would like to share some experiences from my activism, the activism and leadership of my students and even my mother's generation who was the first person, that was only three minutes who was the first, my mother happened to be going back to get her third postgraduate degree whenever I was an undergrad and so she was in law school reading critical race theory as it was being published. So at a very early age I was able to engage some of these texts and included in the way I think and enact my activism in my life. So you all don't, a key aspect of my work we've been focusing on, for the most part we've been focusing during our conversations here today about how hip hop has been deployed for anti-racist well here, how hip hop has, whoops, oh where's my whoops, oh no, I had a, well I'll just say it, sorry. There we go, what we've been talking about today is the relationship between popular culture, research and activism, oh what did I, sorry I didn't, research or politics is political activism or politically informed research, pardon the typo, and policy. So we've been talking about the conversations about and the data shared with the judge citing Valshal not still in the Bismarck key case, a judge entering, being so threatened by Tupac's work as an organic intellectual that they sought to codify it in a way that continues to punish, that continues to abuse and continue to affect trauma on most of us. So we've been talking, you've gotten a lot of examples of how this has been working in the United States per just question, I will be taking us, I'll be taking a lint out and talking about how this works in global hip hop and political activism in transnational social movement organizations. And so we'll be looking at some comparative race and ethnic studies here as well. And yeah, and so I think a key point that's it, so some of the images that you're going to see here are gonna be from my work, which my dissertation was on Japanese hip hop and African diaspora and activism therein. And my current work engages African diasporic youth who are engaging both international black popular cultures such as hip hop, as well as international Japanese popular culture, such as anime and manga as part of their political activism. So maybe we can get into that aspect in the dialogue depending on what the students here are listening to. But a key point is that hip hop serves a lens for how we understand race and race. And I define race following, there we go, following leaders and thinkers like the founder of the executive director and founder of the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University. Bring me back in just question. And who's the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute is the host of the Nasir Jones Fellowship. And they're here pictured, hashtag site black women. We have Dr. Marcelina Morgan. And this is her book published in 2002, Language, Discourse, and Power in African-American Culture. I recommend that these books, I recommend that everyone get those out there and reads it because it's just as important for the cases that you're studying if we are to truly advocate for the people who we seek to represent. I also have in more recent publication from Duran Kondo, World Making, Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity. And then over here on the side, resisting racism and xenophobia, global perspectives on race, gender, and human rights, edited by Faye Harrison, who just won the Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology. And again, this is this intersectional definition of race. And this is important because it's important, like for those of you that are teachers, those of you that are studying law or active lawyers or just concerned people in the community, it's important that your own operational definition of race as part of your anti-racist practice recognizes race as an intersectional identity that you're doing the knowledge, that you're doing the work on gender, sexuality, sexual identity, sexual orientation, language, speech community, national identity, religion, and so forth. It's important that we are continually doing the work to remix our words, to center, you might have seen in the comments, I wrote hashtag site black women, right? So it's important that we're doing that work and that we're understanding race as always being a gendered and sexualized concept. So I'm gonna pause for a moment to share a quote from Hal Boots-Riley. I think something that maybe we could, I don't think we'll wanna talk about this in the question and answer, but another thing that, actually, I'm gonna pause Boots for a second. Another aspect of my work has been that as an anthropologist and, sorry, I was also for 12 studies in the first Department of Black Studies ever at San Francisco State University and former department chair. And that's what I want to know more about ethnic studies that we can talk about in the question and answer. I highly recommend it being included in your legal education. Yeah, I wanna get back to, wanna share a little bit about my background and how, why I understand race as being intersectional. I'll just get some, there we go, it's my mother. So again, this is the mother that was in law school whenever I happened to be an undergrad teaching me critical theory and we're sharing books. Prior to that, one of her postgraduate degrees is in East Asian language and literatures. And so at a very early age, she taught me Japanese and my mother entered into this world, part of those pictures that you saw, she and her grandparents and great-grandparents and so forth were people that were agitating in Louisiana in the South doing the work, doing the social movement work that allows us to even be connected here today. My mother was in conversation with Yuri Kochiama, for example, she utilized her love, she spoke many, many languages, Chinese, Japanese, French, I mean, just a lot of languages. And part of my mother's generation of civil rights activism was being sure that as women and people advocating for marginalized genders, not women and non-binary people that they were, I mean, this is back in the day, they would be pen pals writing to each other about what was happening on the ground with law and policy and how they could intervene as activists. And so doing the translation work of letting people know what's happening on the ground was a very important part of my mother's work. And that was, so that's the point in which I enter into this, not necessarily through, unlike the rappers I work with now, I didn't grow up watching Toonami on Saturday night, no shade, I'm like, I kind of grew up alongside my mother as did many of the people pictured here without an iPhone. I'd be lucky about a coloring book at protest. And that's the lens that made me start to think about how popular culture can be mobilized as part of our individual and local work and as well as part of our global work. And it was the work that my mother, that I saw my mother and Yuri Kochi Amman, some of the other people pictured were Roiko, Yoshida, and Mayumi Nakazawa. It was seeing people do that international multilingual work that encouraged me to make sure that whatever I was doing on the ground, fighting white supremacy in the United States or teaching about race as an intersectional, that was five minutes, teaching about race as an intersectional or amplifying hip hop heterogeneity in the classroom. But it was also making sure to continue to use whatever limited language skills I have to be in conversation and to translate this work because it matters, it matters globally. And so I will close with, hopefully Boots telling us something about hip hop is critical pedagogy or ethnic studies. Here we go. And ethnic studies is something that at least, for me and for folks that went through it, it helped us posit things in the world and helped us have an analysis of what is going on in the world. Okay, and there's actually one more point about hip hop's intersection with ethnic studies. There we go. Hip hop tells them about the world and gives them a picture of the world. Whether you like the picture that's being painted or not, you know, people are learning about the world through hip hop. Okay, I'd like to end by giving a shout out to Michael Peyton, one of my former students in mentees who, if you don't know his name, you don't know it in a couple months because he got some big stuff coming out, documenting the fight that was outlined by the professors that came before me. And I think a key point is that, I mean, some of the professors that came before me talked about people like Chuck D coming to their classrooms and they talked about work with like St. Meek Mill and so forth. And I think something that has set aside the curriculum that I create and the community conversations that I engage and the direct action that I still do, even as I am mid-career and slowing down, is being in conversation with artists who aren't always necessarily talking about something that may have happened to them. They have been utilizing, in a way how I theorize it as organic intellectuals, they've been giving us dispatches of ethnographic details, they're weaving together statistics and meta narratives in creative and poetic ways to be that CNN, to be the media, to get the message out. And so on one hand, it's important that artists have the basic human right to be performers, to help us in our critical media literacy without being killed or punished. And then it's important that we recognize how, it's important that, and so as part of that, I wanted to share that I've been in conversation with artists directly. That was a big part of the doctoral work that I do. It's something that I continue to do. I was in conversation with Chuck D. My cousin was a member of Slum Village. So let's shout out to Jay Dilla and my cousin was Batin. Boots Riley is my son's father. And so I've been continually in conversations with those who came before me and those who are my same peer. And importantly, since 1999, I've been in conversation with new artists that are emerging. I never knew who was going to make it into the public, break out into global popular fame, yet many have. And that's why I highlight, this now is considered all, that some of these artists that I'm highlighting are Megan Thee Stallion, Xavier Wolf, and Denzel Curry, who have never not known a Black Lives Matter movement, by the way. And so talking about ideas that shape our art and our politics and the way we engage and educate the masses from an early age, whatever our critiques, like Boots said, you may not like the message that someone's saying, but there's definitely messages and there's definitely ethnographic information that we can engage to get to our hopefully collective cause of reparative justice, of transformative justice, of reparations. Those are my words on racial capitalism that we need to do the knowledge and understand what's really going on so that we can get in by any means possible. And as Stuart Hall wrote, like what are the consequences does this have to shift the strategies of intervention? I put this in the chat and I hope that we may not have time and question and answer, but if you don't get anything else from my story from the front lines of creating curriculum and citing the badass Black women that came before me, Dr. Marcelina Morgan, Dr. Faye V. Harrison, Dr. Keisha Fikes, Dr. Doran Kondo, Dr. Irma McLaren, author of Black Women's Anthropology, my mother, Cheryl Fisher, my grandmother, Mildred Glover, my mother's interlocutors, Mayumi Nakazawa, and Yuri Kochiyama and many, many more. If you don't get anything else from me telling you these stories right here, I want you to know that you as someone who has access to a Zoom account and can be in conversations with professional legal scholars, as you as someone who is listening to music, whether it's something that we referenced here or something else that have access as ethnographic information, you have a power that can be used right now today to intervene on policing cultures in K through 12 education, to intervene in cases like those that have been talking about before or to translate across oceans to help us with this movement for reparations and transformative justice. Thank you for your time. Oh, can I? Thank you so much, Dr. Fisher. Now for Professor Atiba Ellis. Taking a step back, Professor Brian Stevenson has said that, quote, we cannot understand these present day issues in Black America without understanding the persistent refusal to view Black people as equals, end quote. Black bodies in this country carry with them the presumption of dangerousness and criminality, a presumption that creates the notions that Black people cannot be trusted and Black bodies must be controlled. We have unfortunately excluded the long history of racial injustice from our national discourse and that omission may be lurking behind these problematic judicial opinions that target the pop sampling. Questions of Black art in America, particularly when the law presumptively treats a Black artist as a thief, are intricately connected to the same issues concurrent to policing and mass incarceration of Black people. Professor Ellis, how should we respond to racism? How can we undo the programming and learn the supremacist mindset and better understand ourselves? How can we discipline ourselves to not reinforce the system? Well, Jeff, the answer to your question to put it very briefly is to find your own life free of the shackles of the imposed consciousness that a white supremacist society places upon us. And it's not just race, by the way, it is all of us. We are all prisoners of the tropes and stereotypes and ideology that is behind the issues that you raise in your question. Now I could just turn the thing off right now and just go feed my cat, but I wanna say a few other things. First of all, I got a shout out to my co-panelists. Well, first, no, first, Jeff, thank you for bringing us all together. Thank you, Roger Williams, for bringing us all together. Thank you, Dean Bowman, for supporting this. I have to take a minute to just tell a few real quick stories. Everybody talked about how people came up with each other. Greg Bowman and I started at WVU on the same day, sat beside each other in orientation and had lots of great opportunities to cause trouble together. Dre Cummings hired me at WVU, in fact. He was on the hiring committee. He drove me around in his Subaru from the law school to the hotel and there was a blizzard the day before that I had to drive through in order to get there. And Dre introduced me to Todd and Dre, Todd and I would sit around and we would debate college football and college basketball. And if you read my CV of Dre shaking his head, Duke Carolina Saturday night, that's all I'm gonna say. And Dr. Fisher- Go Carolina. Lord. All right. Thank you all for attending this talk. But Dr. Fisher, it is a pleasure to be in dialogue with you. And I am glad that all of this has brought us to your connection and acquaintance. And I want to dialogue with all y'all in this conversation. So this conversation, what I want to add to it is the idea, how to get free, right? One of the big themes of hip hop, let's get free. I think freedom lies in recognizing three things, right? One that we all live within and move in a space and move in traditions. And that tradition gives us the opportunity to think about where we stand within different traditions and how traditions like hip hop on the one hand or empowering and or enlivening that give us music, they give us strength when you sit in there and listening to the boogie, you feel powerful. Let's not short change the fact that in a lot of ways, music is life. And when Jeff and I were talking about this earlier this week, I was telling him about how I grew up in the black church, son of an Amy Zion minister. I mean, can you tell at this point right now that I'm a son of a preacher, but through that growing up and through growing up in church choir and my daddy made me take piano lessons, but I can talk about music from all kinds of places. I can tell Dre that Beethoven probably sampled Bach and then not the other way around, but that's one way of thinking. But in a few minutes, I'll talk to you for a minute about most death and thinking about he comes from a lineage too and there are people who come after him. But the fact is the traditions are there and we can think about and we can remix them. But that requires being aware of what tradition from which we are coming from. And in a way when we talk about race like Dr. Fisher has and we talk about racism as professors Clark and Dean Cummings have talked about, we realize that there are traditions that inform us in negative ways. And my intervention here is not only to acknowledge the ability that hip hop gives us to see insight and give commentary as Dean Cummings has talked about to sort of position it and big traditions of the establishment and structures that American society is built on and those insights of CRT that Professor Clark has brought out or understanding its intersectional, inter-relational and inter-positional nature as Dr. Fisher has talked about. My addition to this conversation is to let y'all know that this is a way of being free by gaining our own consciousness and possessing it for ourselves. The courts won't save us. And I write about voting rights in election law. Man, I can do a whole half hour on how the courts won't save us from Giles V. Harris to Bernovich versus the Democratic National Committee. The courts will not save us and therefore we must save ourselves. Now, let me just give you a few details on this to flesh it out. So when I say tradition, right? Tradition remixing and raising consciousness. When I say tradition, you know, let's step back a moment and let's think about the black tradition in America. And in a way, thinking about music in America, the slave songs, the Negro spirituals, the ways and means by which we've used music as a tool to create consciousness in order to survive an openly degrading system that was designed to use black bodies to their breaking point to breathe them in order to create a new and better person in order to accomplish the goal of sustaining a political economy of slavery. The music gave a space from all that and allowed us to survive. Even after slavery ended and thinking about Jim Crow, we fight through through a message of hope. But then there is this deep insight, right? This deep insight that being aware of living in this space and having to live this life in order to survive is the way through, right? And so we embrace the spirituals. We embrace musicality that transforms through the training and the Western tradition in order to get to jazz, in order to get the blues and in order to even be reinforced by the spiritual traditions through the music of the civil rights songs that bolstered people's hearts, minds and spirits and souls and led them to help transform the law in order to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. And then even hip hop, which I would locate as a post-civil rights movement critique of the incompleteness of the civil rights movement and the ongoing need to get to a larger, deeper, better meaning of and manifestation of my friends, manifestation of the beloved community and seeing the violence, the hurt, the harm, the danger, the struggle from all sorts of places. This is what we've been talking about all evening, right? But recognizing that consciousness as extending in and rooted in a deep tradition of this sort is the way that we can embrace how hip hop has taken over the world and how we can change that world through radical critique, through music and song and expression, right? So I found a little piece by most deaf and friends and allies who kind of took on that message in particular. I'm gonna play just a minute of it, but I play it in part because it gives us this opportunity to locate all these threads, jazz, hip hop, social critique and commentary, the ability to speak to the larger world, right? And I find all these things in this piece, it ain't my fault and let me make sure it's unmuted. And in fact, you get the story right here. If you remember, Golf Aid, right? The Deepwater Horizon spill created the need to fight and raise money and they created this song as the story's telling you here. D&M, higher and more on the point, first question. Say, man, who pushed the monster back to the hurricane shelter in the garden from Mexico to the boat never barred? Something gone wrong, and it should have right. So I'm gonna talk a little bit as most is going right there. Hear that, right? From the broke, lovey walls to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it's somebody's fault, but it ain't nobody's fault. I mean, it ain't my fault. Is the deep, sarcastic, incisive critique of the things that led to this disaster. And if we read it against the long tradition of jazz, right? And blues, right? And hip hop, that's where we are. We are raising the consciousness and raising the awareness. So, but how do we get to consciousness? I'm gonna let that go right here, but that's the question. How do we get to this consciousness? Or here are a few words that might help us get insight to this, right? And I've alluded to the notion of the double consciousness, the notion that African-Americans have lived in this country as more than just one consciousness. And so now I'd have to go all the way back and I had my screen share. Now I lost it again, but let's see. But let's talk about W.E.B Du Bois for a second. And if I can't see it, if I can't share it, I'll figure out how to read it to you. Okay, so Du Bois, in his famous The Souls of Black Folks, talked about how, quote, it's a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not want to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world in Africa. He would not bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. Now, Du Bois puts it far better than I could, but the one piece of that rich and deep quote that I want to point out is the existence of that double consciousness, the existence of the recognizing that we are something to ourselves and we are something to the outer world, but these things end up in dialogue, sometimes harmful dialogue. I need not repeat all that we have been talking about in terms of the effects of racism in American society, except to say that sometimes the script that we get, the consciousness that we're taught, the received tradition that we inherit is one that is racist and constructed to maintain power relationships and structures that continue to subordinate. Now, this awareness might be stating the obvious, but what is not obvious is the ability to break out of it. So the question is, how do we react to racism? We react to racism first and foremost by mastering ourselves, by working out that we have a received tradition that teaches us about our identity, some things positive, some things negative, but then being able to see that in a moment of pause between stimulus and response. And this is a quote from Victor Frankel that I'll get into a second. He said, between stimulus and response, there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. So I think, and here I am mixing Du Bois and Frankel in the greatest of hip hop traditions, putting things together and mixing them in a way that leads us to a greater insight and a possibility of freedom, right? It is finding that space. Some people call it prayer. Some people call it mindfulness. Some people call it deep thinking and insight to create a new idea. But whatever that is for you friends is what I think hip hop calls us to do and remixing and rethinking and seeing and speaking incisively and insightfully in order to create space for that freedom. And in a way, we've seen this in all three other presentations, right? Brother Dre, now I'm getting to brother and sister right now. Brother Dre brings it out through the lyrics that point to trauma and name and claim trauma as a way of reinventing it as a way to move forward to be free. Brother Todd points this out in telling us about how CRT critiques are ultimately disastrous distractions meant to isolate us from a power structure and to allow that structure to continue and go unabated, right? The next AIG may well be on the rise if we get distracted from seeing the structure as it is. And our sister, Dr. Fisher is pointing out how this is intersectional and ultimately at root of all the things that are all about all our identities, right? And it's global as she has pointed out. And so by finding that space and being able to recognize how what we say, what we think and what we speak is at the root of how we respond then by knowing that and using that and finding the opportunity to find that space to make the choice between the stimulus of a angry and bitter racial world that wants to maintain its power and our choice in terms of what we do to respond, we have this moment of consciousness that we can claim to make that better. We can make it better for ourselves and then we can find our brothers and sisters to help build that beloved community. And by moving that one step at a time, we can respond to racism and change the world. Next question. I'd like to open it up for, thank you so much, Professor. I'll open it up for a bit of Q and A. We've got about five minutes. Does anyone have a question like raise their hand or question for the panelists? Well, I see a question here from that Akumba. How does hip hop allow one to explore that version of ourselves? We ourselves oppress. How's the success of hip hop in the market creating pressure for artists into entertainment packages? I think a number of people could answer this question. I open it up to any of you. I mentioned earlier that hip hop can be conceptualized in terms of ethnography. There's also a concept of auto ethnography. And so briefly, it could be, depending on when and where you locate your creative self, it could be by beginning to dictate your own thoughts about your inner identity and how your identity connects with other humans in the world. It could be through performance of work that resonates with you. So I think that hip hop allows us to do a lot of inner work and it also allows us to locate parts of ourselves that we don't know, that are not yet known to us in other others' arts so that we can then use part of that as a solution to mastering ourselves as Professor Ellis so eloquently put. Yeah, and I'll jump in very quickly. I mean, I think it's an excellent question. I'll tackle the first part about how does hip hop allow one to explore that version of ourselves? I mean, if you think about what Professor Ellis mentioned and he talked about the old Negro spirituals, right? These were stories of sort of overcoming trials and tribulations, right? These were, these Negro spirituals were designed to be inspirational by nature to help African-Americans endure challenging times. And I think that we see the same thing with modern day hip hop, right? Modern day hip hop serves as a narrative for inspiration. And I'm not gonna say all of it, right? But there are some inspirational music out there. I mean, I love Lamarcus Joyner. He has some really innovative stuff out there. And I think that what you see in some of the music is sort of a mechanism that you can use in order for self-empowerment because you can gain that power from the narratives of the people that have endured these trying situations. So I think that there's a lot of value in that and helping people to sort of explore that version of themselves. Great, well, we just have last minute here. Perhaps each panelist can give some 20 seconds closing thoughts. Should we go in order of our appearance? So again, Jeff, thank you so much. One of the things I'd like those of you that are students that are in attendance and a shout out to my students that are here from Arkansas, Little Rock, Bowen Law School is that for Professor Clark and Ellis and for Dr. Fisher, 20 years ago, maybe a little longer, 25, we were sitting where you are now. And I really want you guys to think about something which is, I never dreamed as a law student that I could ever be a law professor. I just didn't think that I held my Howard Law School as a law professor, if it's such high esteem, I just never imagined that could be me. I take it as a great privilege and honor to be able to teach law students. But what I want the law students to think about is you need to really imagine your trajectories as one that is going to be super meaningful and powerful. If you can see yourselves in the future as literally affecting social change, then go ahead and go do that. That's all I've tried to do in my career as a law professor and as a lawyer and as a social activist is just try to make my corner of the world better. And we have opportunities to really do that, to just improve those around us, protect our families, maybe make a difference. And I think a lot of university degree and a lot of degree gives you a real opportunity to do that. So I'd really like to challenge you guys to think about how hip hop can inspire you to your best self, to do right by your degree, to be powerful in who you are. And if you feel what we've been talking about today, and I love listening to all three of my co-panelists and Professor Ellis always seems to inspire me in some way or another, but I want you to take that inspiration and realize that you can literally make good, do good, improve the lives of those people that have been oppressed and harmed. If we're about that, then we're really doing change. We're doing something. And the thing that I would say quickly is that the thing that has been inspiring, most inspiring to me about hip hop music is its transformation. I mean, if you think about hip hop, hip hop in terms of a music genre is a very young genre. And so what is happening is that many of these artists that began in hip hop are now growing up. Hip hop is growing up. Hip hop is maturing. Hip hop is spreading its influence. If you think about how many black billionaires hip hop has created, I mean, you're talking about Sean Puffy Combs, you're talking about Jay-Z, you're talking about Dr. Dre. I mean, hip hop is creating billionaires. And with that, there is a responsibility in a maturity that we're starting to see that is more prevalent in the music and prevalent in the culture. If I have more time, I would talk a little bit about how hip hop is influencing the corporate world and the way that we look at Wall Street and the value of that. So one of the things that I would just say to you in addition to what Professor Cummings has mentioned is that this is a special experience where you could have three professors or four professors that are in front of you, right? That are all influenced by the music and it's growing. So watch out. I'll just add in here. So keep building, keep learning. We, many of us mentioned ways in which you can contact us or engage our thoughts. We have our publications as Andres over here. You can keep engaging the art and doing the history. And you can keep reading, I guess one of my most recent publications is in here. So you can find that online to learn more about how I think through hip hop culture and reparations. So keep building, keep joining together and keep changing the world. Professor Evans, you can bring it home. I know you are. So three thoughts. One is thank you again to everyone who made this happen. This has been wonderful and beautiful. And the dialogue shouldn't stop with us. It shouldn't stop here. We should keep engaging it, right? And my final thought to leave with you all is, I know our audience is probably mostly law students. So law students, it's been exactly 25 years since I sat in my first classes for law school and for graduate school. And here I am today and I don't know where I'm gonna be tomorrow, but I'm looking forward to the trajectory. And I hope you all do the same. And had I more time, there is an analogy built into what I was talking about. I didn't talk about how this tradition, especially African American tradition, has been about improvisation, right? Whether you're free styling or whether it's jazz, improv, but the trick. And this is the perseverance bit because it's March 31st exams are less than a month away. We learn what we learn to give ourselves the baseline, but once we have that line, once we know the music by heart, we can then go and improvise and find our own way to be the instrument of change that we wish to be in the world. So to all my brothers and sisters, persevere. Thank you. Thank you all for attending. Thank you to the panelists. Please email me at ipla at g.rwu.edu for a copy of the recording. Good night.