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Hip Hop Raised Me
Revisiting the life lessons I learned from the early days of the Genre
The saying, “Hip Hop raised me” is common amongst most black Gen Xers, and I am no different. In 1989, as a 12-year-old middle schooler, I fell in love with all things Hip Hop. Rap music and its artists became my after-school teachers. They taught me the things I needed to understand about what it meant to be black in America.
Hip Hop was the older, rebellious cousin, that had a score to settle with society. It carried the angst of knowing the truth that the world is shit and everything our parents, teachers, and the news told us is a lie. By the time I got to high school, Hip Hop became the more experienced friend, the one with no parental guidance, whose house you went to for your first swigs of alcohol and first puffs of the blunt.
Why was hip-hop so appealing to a 12-year-old girl?
As the youngest of 7 children from an impoverished small city in Upstate New York, I had already experienced a fair share of unfortunate events. My family was dysfunctional due to a combination of my dad’s alcoholism and my mother’s strict, religious rearing. My exposures to the world were mostly negative and the lens through which I viewed things was skewed.