"DOES THE SUBJECT OF RAP MUSIC COME UP in your work with kids?" I tell him it does. "Do you think that rap music is harmful to these teenagers you work with?"
It is New Year's Eve 1998, and I sit with my friend, Tom, who is Brazilian. He is a physician/researcher and has often been helpful to me in researching articles in the medical field. He knows that I have been working with children and families affected by AIDS for over twelve years. Initially, my work was in a pediatric AIDS clinic and then in a community-based agency serving HIVinfected adults and their families. My current work is with teenagers who are affected by HIV/AIDS. Some of these teens have already lost one or both parents to AIDS and sometimes a sibling.
The agency I work for offers case management services to adults who are HIV infected. Our youth support program arose from the insistence of a young teenage boy whose mother was receiving case management services. His plaintive cry of "What about us? Where is our support group?" was heard and responded to. The agency was able to obtain a modest grant from a corporate foundation for youth support services. The agency now offers both individual therapy and a support group for teens who are dealing with HIV/AIDS in their families. The teen group has now been running for five years.
My friend's question about rap music gives me the kind of opening for which I always wait. I have my own "rap" down about this, about how much the hip-hop music culture has entered my world in working with these teens. I can talk with vigor and passion about my ongoing education by the teens about this music and how this process affects the dialogues in which we engage.
It is always easier for practitioners to talk about what they are doing rather than to get it down on paper, and I am no exception to this rule. As I speak, I am aware of the fluidity with which I describe my practice. My freeflowing style has been commented on with appreciation by attendants at the workshops I have conducted. This natural style seems particularly effective in conveying the realities of day-to-day practice as I experience it. In particular, I am thinking about an interaction with one of the teens in the group, Zaddi, and how she has been affected by the death of a rapper named Tupac Shakur.
Zaddi (not her real name) is a seventeen-year-old African American female who lives with her maternal aunt, a younger sister, and two cousins. At the request of Zaddi's dying mother, the maternal aunt became the legal guardian for both Zaddi and her sister. Zaddi, who was fifteen at that time, and her younger sister, who was nine, went to live with her aunt and two cousins in a very small apartment. Although the area she moved from was in a rough section of town, Zaddi felt the loss of the friends she had known since kindergarten. She resented being uprooted and feels unloved and unwanted in her present home. She feels she is there only because her aunt is carrying out a debt of honor to her dead sister, Zaddi's mother. While she can respect the motive, she feels like an outcast - alienated. A frequent refrain is, "My aunt says we are just the same as her kids and she treats us just the same, but it's not true. She always feeds her kids first, and they get more food than me." She continues, "She hardly ever buys me any nice clothes to wear. Just the other day, she bought two new outfits for her daughter and nothing for me."
Clothing is very important to Zaddi, who always strives to be fashionable. Zaddi has beautiful, dark skin, is very tall and slender, and walks very erect. Other group members frequently comment that she looks like a model. She rarely wears her hair in the same style for more than a week, and, unlike most other teens in the group who favor the baggy look, Zaddi favors long skirts and slender-fitting tops. Her jewelry is minimal.
Music is also an extremely important part of her life, and, although her tastes vary more than the other teens in the group, she is enormously fond of rap music, "My people's music." Tupac Shakur has been a hero for some time. A strong, handsome, successful, black male, his "gangsta rap" words speak directly to Zaddi's sense of alienation; his "bad" attitude is often mirrored in her own defiant behavior at home. Although often a serious, polite, and somewhat quiet member of the group, Zaddi shows a great deal of animation when she describes trouble she causes at home. She refuses to participate in household chores, defying her aunt by saying, "This is not my home." She sometimes takes and wears her cousin's earrings and then misplaces them, which usually causes tremendous arguments and has even resulted in physical fights at times. Her attitude is, "My aunt thinks I'm bad, so I might as well be bad." She displays the same sense of animation and delight when she talks about the toughness of "gangsta" musicians like Tupac Shakur.
Tupac Shakur was a rap singer who was part of what has become known as the "gangsta" tradition, a group of popular performers whose lyrics contain many references to violence on the streets and violent confrontations with the law and are often misogynistic. Many people believe that these lyrics condone, glorify, and perhaps even promote violence, and that therefore this music contributes to the moral decline of teenagers today. The teens I work with, however, have very different feelings that I am learning more about each day. Zaddi, along with other teen group members, is one of my teachers.
The murder of Tupac Shakur has profoundly affected Zaddi. The day after Tupac's death, Zaddi arrived in group overwhelmed by a devastating sense of loss. She spoke with great passion. Zaddi, I should note, has two distinct styles of speaking. One style is the more traditional, formal English, which she reserves for her work in a bank or when she is meeting with adults in authority. As she says: "I talk to college interviewers one way; I talk to my friends another way." Using her informal style, she asked, "Why it have to happen?" The tears that flowed down her face were as copious as those she shed at her mother's funeral. She even commented on this phenomena herself. "Why Mary, why I feel this bad like it my own flesh and blood?" "Well, was he?" I asked.
"Yeah, in some ways he is. He a black man, and he got out of the ghetto. He a success, he made it; my mother she never made it out. But they both got took down: he by a bullet; she by AIDS. Seems like some kinda way something gonna get us black folks so young."
Her statement found resonance in the group. Another group member chimed in, "That's right; that's just the way it is." Another girl offered, "They got so many of our mens locked up in their jails ain't hardly many left to choose from." The young women in the group take up this theme, focusing on the "shortage" of young black men. "They either dead or in jail." One girl reminds me of my challenges to her dating a local drug dealer by saying, "See, you white. You got more choices than we do." Tupac's death opened up a wide-ranging discussion about hope vs. hopelessness and racism in the larger society - issues far more raw and painful than traditional clinical responses to Zaddi's initial comments might have produced.
At the conclusion of this day's group, Zaddi pulled me aside and asked if we always just have to "sit and talk" in our individual session, suggesting we "do something for a change." After some discussion, we decided to go riotwearether to see the movie Gridlocked, which had just been released. The movie which stars Tupac Shakur, was completed a short time before his death. Although the movie was playing in a theater local to Zaddi, she requested that we see if it was playing in a "better" area. Much later I learned that Zaddi believed that I would feel uncomfortable in her neighborhood.
It is useful to know a little about the plot of the movie before going further. Two buddies, stunned by the overdose and potential impending death of a third friend, decide that it's time to get clean. The movie follows their journey and escapades as they attempt to maneuver the bureaucracy of the "human social service system" in their efforts to enter rehab. I was glad that the second lead in the movie, actor Tim Roth, was English, like myself, as Zaddi pointed out that she was African American like Tupac and I was English like "the other guy." Zaddi commented that I would be able to tell her some of the things he says that she might not understand (because of his accent). As it happens, Roth speaks with an American accent so translation wasn't needed.
