Becoming Black: Rap and Hip-Hop, Race, Gender, Identity, and the Politics of ESL Learning.

This article is about the impact of becoming Black on ESL learning, that is, the interrelation between identity and learning. It contends that a group of French-speaking immigrant and refugee continental African youths who are attending an urban Franco-Ontarian high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada, enters a social imaginary—a discursive space in which they are already imagined, constructed, and thus treated as Blacks by hegemonic discourses and groups. This imaginary is directly implicated in whom the students identify with (Black America), which in turn influences what and how they linguistically and culturally learn. They learn Black stylized English, which they access in hip-hop culture and rap lyrical and linguistic styles. This critical ethnography, conducted within an interdisciplinary framework, shows that ESL is neither neutral nor without its politics and pedagogy of desire and investment.