Interrogating your positionality and leveraging hip hop to decolonize education

Scholars have advocated for the use of hip-hop-based education to facilitate authentic learning experiences for students. As a result, more educators find themselves grappling with incorporating hip hop culture in their classrooms. While we support the inclusion of hip hop in educational spaces, we argue that all educators must interrogate their positionality related to race and hip hop culture to ensure that they are not replicating the social injustices hip hop – and subsequently, hip hop education – was created to counter within their classrooms and pedagogies. Through the lens of critical whiteness studies and conceptualizations of decolonizing methodologies, this article uses Milner’s framework for researcher positionality to provide a framework for educators to interrogate their positionality in hip hop education. This interrogation of positionality, by all educators regardless of race, is essential when engaging in hip-hop-based education to ensure that the oppressive structures hip hop, and hip-hop-based education, seek to dismantle are not replicated.