The Hip-Hop Mindset

2023 NAME Philip C. Chinn Multicultural Book Award

2024 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop culture which, as a global industry and phenomenon, has accomplished a lot. But as a culture, what has hip-hop taught us? How has it inspired us? In what ways has it freed us? This book presents The Hip-Hop Mindset Framework—a perspective that gives us the permission to show up in life as our full authentic selves and to shine in our own culturally unique ways. Centered primarily in the field of education, this book introduces the hip-hop mindset as a professional practice that holds relevance for students, educators, and ambitious leaders in any profession. It is for those who seek to innovate, trailblaze, and create a rich source of professional magic. The author offers a fresh contribution to the literature by focusing on what hip-hop culture has to offer in terms of success strategies—what it can teach us about leadership, work ethic, commitment, and resilience. Expanding the important conversations about the power of hip-hop in the lives of youth, Jenkins explores hip-hop culture in the lives of adult professionals, including P–20 educators, community leaders, and organizational administrators.

Book Features:

• Moves beyond pedagogy and teaching strategies to explore how hip-hop mindsets can contribute to professional success.
• Examines hip-hop as a cultural mindset that has nothing to do with the ability to rhyme, breakdance, or spin records.
• Argues that everyone can benefit from a hip-hop mindset, regardless of the field you are in, by welcoming new ways of knowing, being, and doing.
• Pushes us to consider culture as a professional practice and to embrace the nuggets of wisdom and insight from hip-hop culture to inform how we lead and work professionally.

Toby S. Jenkins is a professor of higher education administration and interim associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Graduate School at the University of South Carolina.

“Dr. Jenkins’s work provides a framework for other educators to creatively engage their students, as well as encourages them to lean into their own authentic hip-hop selves as they do their work.”
—From the Foreword by Walter Kimbrough, president, Dillard University

“Dr. Toby Jenkins is one of our foremost educators, scholars, and working professionals for the people, all people, in America today. With her incredibly generous new book, The Hip-Hop Mindset, she has gifted us what hip-hop culture gifted us 50 long years ago: how to win on our own terms, how to make something from nothing, and how to create rules that allow us to thrive against any odds.”
—Kevin Powell, poet, human and civil rights activist, author of 16 books, Tupac Shakur biographer

“Dr. Toby Jenkins’ book The Hip-Hop Mindset triggers rarely thought-of and ‘dope’ views about the power of a hip-hop mindset and how it can effectively be embodied in praxis. I have never seen such prolific writing about hip-hop and its value proposition and impact on creative and forward thinking, practice, knowledge, and community connectedness for good. The read reps the foundation for understanding hip-hop as unapologetically driven and positively strategic.”
—P. Thandi Hicks Harper, president, Youth Popular Culture Institute, Inc.

“The Hip-Hop Mindset offers professionals in other industries insight into what those of us in the music industry have known for decades: that hip-hop is a mainstream culture of power, drive, excellence, and success. Professor Toby Jenkins’s profile of the ‘hip-hop habits of mind’ is accurate, authentic, and filled with all of the creativity, flavor, flow and style required by the culture.”
—A.J. Savage, former director of radio promotion, J Records, Arista Records, and RCA Records; vice president of promotions and marketing, Warner Bro. Records

“In true hip-hop scholar fashion, Dr. Toby Jenkins presents an educational approach borne of the aesthetics of hip-hop: the Hip-Hop Mindset. It goes to the core of what education and professional discipline should do: begin with students’ human audacity, push past basic test scores into higher realms of creativity and a superstar mindset, where guts and love are core to an ethic of professional practice.”
—Elaine Richardson, professor of literacy studies, The Ohio State University

Contents

Foreword Walter Kimbrough  vii

Series Foreword James A. Banks  xi

Preface: Trash-Talking  xvii

Acknowledgments  xix

1.  Born to Rhyme, Destined to Shine: The Hip-Hop Mindset Framework  1
Culture as a Politic  3
The Hip-Hop Mindset  8

2.  Drive  12
Hunger  12
Competitiveness  16
Honor and Kinship  20

3.  Approach  35
Ingenuity and Cultural Efficacy  35
Turning the Tables: Creativity and Originality  38
Representing: Authenticity and Clarity  43

4.  Posture  50
On Being a Badass  50
Shine Bright Like a Diamond  53
Watch the Throne  57

5.  Cultural Roots: Inherited Values, Beliefs, and Traditions  60
Eight Africanisms Fundamental to Hip-Hop Culture  61

6.  Can I Kick It? The Hip-Hop Mindset in Professional Practice  70
Toni Blackman  71
Martha Diaz  75
Timothy David Jones  79
Emery Petchauer  83
Bettina L. Love  87
Tony Keith Jr.  90
Ian Levy  95
Andre Perry  100
Edmund Adjapong  105
Mazi Mutafa  109
Aysha Upchurch  113
Baron Davis  117
Michael Benitez  122
William Boyles  126
Crystal Leigh Endsley  130

7.  Air-Walking: Concluding Thoughts  134

Glossary  145

Notes  147

References  155

Index  161

About the Author  172