Where Do Biases Start? A Challenge to Educators

Ed Week

Earlier this year, I was invited to speak to a few hundred African-American male high school students in Jacksonville, Fla. The young people there were searching for answers in the untimely death of their fellow Jacksonville resident Jordan Davis, 17, who was shot and killed at a gas station in November 2012 after playing what perpetrator Michael Dunn called "loud thug music."

Like the shooting earlier in 2012 of Trayvon Martin, another unarmed 17-year-old black male, this death represented a shocking example of some teens' sense of being trapped by a new kind of racial optics, what I call the "hip-hop gaze." This is when signs, symbols, and images in hip-hop (e.g., language, music, style of clothing), associated with urban youths in popular culture, unfairly convey trouble or criminality about black males to the mainstream public.

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