The Mic and the Chessmen (REPOST)

This essay on Hip-Hop and chess was written by Grandmaster Maurice Ashley and I in 2014. It ran in Ebony Magazine in 2014. I just found it sitting in one of my drive files. I figured to celebrate Black History Month I would repost it. Enjoy...

-Adisa The Bishop

The Mic and the Chessmen   

By: Adisa Banjoko and Grandmaster Maurice Ashley 

I don’t play either side or the king, I play God/ Heavenly wars played out on hand
carved boards
- Rakaa Iriscience, 64 Squares in the Cipher 

Thinking Like A King 

About seven years ago I was speaking at San Francisco Juvenile Hall talking to teen boys
about and being an author as a career choice. I was promoting my first independent book
release Lyrical Swords: Hip-Hop and Politics in the Mix. Despite often connecting early
and easy with kids this talk was crashing and burning like no other talk I had given
before. I glanced in my backpack and remembered there was a chessboard in there.
I held the board up and asked, “Who here knows how to play chess?”

To my astonishment, about 75% of the room raised their hand. “OK, that’s good!”
I yelled out with a smile. “But who here is the best?! Only keep your hand up if you
know you are thebest.” Only a few hands went down. “Alright here is what's going to
happen” I declared. “We are going to have a tournament. Whoever wins gets a book.
Circle up, let’s do this.”

The energy in the room became electric. I saw racial and other social barriers fall right
in front of me, because of chess. The entire scene blew my mind. 

I asked myself, “How did these kids know so much about chess?  An avalanche of
rap lyrics from Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, and EPMD collapsed on my brain
simultaneously. Hip-Hop gave methe answer. As I exited the concrete hallways
with the flickering fluorescent lights in the stairwell,I said “This is something big.”
Within the next year, I founded the Hip-Hop Chess Federation
(HHCF) nonprofit 501(c)3 to teach chess and life strategies to at-risk youth.
We use martial arts philosophy to reinforce the lessons that rap and chess teach. 

Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and Rugged Monk of Black Knights (R) playing Chessmaster Emory Tate (L)
and others 

For some, it might easy to default to the Wu-Tang Clan’s rise as the apex of this fusion between
rap and chess. Yet to start and stop it from Enter the 36 Chambers denies the full scope of the
relationship between the game of kings and Hip-Hop. 

The truth is, when Brooklyn’s own Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in September of
1972, chess was huge. Those games were aired on PBS and the network had it’s highest
ratings ever! In November of 1973 a young gang leader from The Bronx named
Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation to cultivate Hip-Hop and promote peace
throughout the city and the world. At that same time the movies from the Bruce Lee
and the Shaw Brothers were taking over America. The strategy
ideas from Eastern Philosophy started to spread into the streets of NY. A perfect
cultural storm was brewing.

Street chess games played on the corner, the parks and those played in prisons would
ultimately serve as the glue between these subcultures. Neither chess, nor Hip-Hop
would be the same again. 

Jay Z is respected for his rap and business skills, playing chess in Italian Vogue

Chess gave Hip-Hop political, social and spiritual symbolism for metaphors no other
game hasgiven them.  RZA, Will Smith, 50 Cent and others represent a growing number
of chess playing rappers who have amazing business minds of the industry.  So its not
just good for the art its good for business.   

Reflections of the Grandmaster 

At first look, it might seem strange that there may be any substantial connections

between the world’s most intellectually revered board game and the dynamic

musical art form that is Hip-Hop. Chess, an ancient practice over 1500 years old,

often today conjures up images of rich old men on park benches.To blend that high-brow
image with the effervescent rush of inventive lyrics, pulsating, at times rebellious beats can
seem hard to bring together. But that is only if you are looking at the surface.

Grandmaster Maurice Ashley giving play-by-play coverage of Sinquefield Cup

And yet, the stereotypical differences that seem to create a cavern between chess

and hip hop soon wilt under closer inspection. For one, with the advent of the digital

age and ready-made computer instruction, today’s chess is a game for the young.

The best chess players in the world are under 30. Public

school teams are represented in full glory every year at national scholastic chess

championships, with the most accomplished team in the last ten years, I.S. 318,

coming straight out of Brooklyn.

Even the slow grandfatherly pace no longer holds water. The most popular form

of chess, is Blitz Chess, where players compete with less than five minutes
to complete all of  their moves lest they lose the game on time. At that speed,
chess becomes a blendof sophisticated pattern recognition, intense focus and
spirited improvisation.

Watching two players bang out moves with precious few seconds on the clock can

thrill and hypnotize as much as Mike Relm or DJ QBert   slicing up a turn-table.

Magnus Carlsen is putting a youthful face on the future of competitive chess. 

While chess can be coldly analytic, it’s the perpetually creative and individualized

styles that separates the players at the very top. World Champion Magnus Carlsen

plays in the style of Common. He does not care to insert himself into the battle with a

whole lot of ego. Instead slowly enveloping his opponents with subtle ideas

and smooth syncopations they succumb to his skill and assuredness that

somehow always seems totally effortless. On the other hand, Hikaru Nakamura,

America’s top player, mimics NWA with his gangsta’ style. He comes straight for the

jugular with vicious blow after vicious blow, to eviscerate his opponents

with killer movement. He’s not giving a damn what the world thinks about his overly

aggressive style and brash personality. It may say something about the nature of life

and competition that when the two face off, the calm and cool Carlsen almost always

endures. Stylish doesn’t mean a lack of determination.

American chess player Hikaru Nakamura’s attacking style of play is likened to N.W.A’s
aggressive
rap style.

It should then come as less of a surprise that musicians have embraced the art form

of chess as a means of relaxation and creative expression. 

Like music, chess has gone through its evolutionary stages as well. From the

Romantic Era, scientific period, Hypermodern period, to the digital age where
more and moregreed is good- chess continues to change with the times. Hip-Hop
has gone through similar
evolution's. Look at the old school lyrical party styles of the Sugar Hill Gang, to the
intellectual
flow of Rakim to the rage of Eminem rap has changed significantly.
The science ofthe DJ’s mixing and scratching methods,  graffiti,  Bboy’ing 
and all the branches of Hip-Hop dance
have also grown immeasurably from the early 1970’s.  

The fusion of Hip-Hop and chess is beautiful and dynamic on many levels. There is a
mountain ofstill untapped potential in this artistic and intellectual union. The amount of
lyrics about chess in
the rap world can be cool, or dark and often times very inspirational. However, if today's
MC’s are
really going to take the  fusion to the next level they are going to have to raise the bar
on their knowledge of the game. Read The Immortal Game by David Shenk, Chess Bitch
by Jennifer Shahade and Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom. After reading about
the Black Moorish conquerors of Spain taking the game to Europe, algebraic notation,
we should see rappers naming champions other than Bobby Fischer. There is still much
more lyrical work and history breakdowns
to be done! There are still new graffiti murals and DJ tracks to be made. I look forward
to hearing
and seeing more from the chess and rap community as this beautiful phenomenon
continues to grow. 

Adisa Banjoko is the Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation. They fuse music,
chess and martial arts to promote unity, strategy and nonviolence. Maurice Ashley is the
first Black Grandmaster in chess and host of Millionaire Chess in Las Vegas Oct. 9th.
Adisa Banjoko will be at the World Chess Hall of Fame’s Living Like Kings exhibit 
which runs October 9th 2014 to April 26th 2015 in St. Louis Missouri. 

+++++

To learn more about how the fusion of Hip-Hop and chess can improve your life
subscribe to the Bishop Chronicles Podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Mixcloud and Libsyn.
Bishop Chronicles is brought to you by the good people at Pharcyde TV!

Artificial Intelligence, Chess and the Mind Feb 25th!! #UnityInDiversity

If you love technology. If you love looking into the essence of cognitive function. If you love chess, come out to this amazing talk by Dr. David Timony.

TIX HERE! 

Why Don’t The Black Kids Like Math and Science?: Easy Answers

Why Don’t The Black Kids Like Math and Science?: Easy Answers

By: Adisa Banjoko and Arash Daneshzadeh

Some ask why we act the way we act, without lookin’ how long they kept us back- Public Enemy, Rightstarter

I took a job working as a security guard for about five years while doing guerrilla research for my non-profit (Hip-Hop Hop Chess Federation) to help at-risk kids at John O’Connell High School in San Francisco. At the time, “OC” had a solid reputation as a tough school. In my five years there I learned a lot about youth violence, teen eating disorders, teen pregnancy and alcohol and drug abuse. What I saw and learned changed me as a parent and a teacher forever. One of the main things I learned was about why kids don’t learn.

For the record, that school has many loving and competent teachers in the space of math and science. However, “Why don’t the Black kids like math and science?” was a common question. The answer for me, as a Black male who was transformed by books like Golden Age of the Moor by Dr. Ivan VanSertima, African Presence in Early Asia by Dr. Runoko Rashidi and The Black Man of The Nile and His Family by  Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan was very easy.

HHCF Founder, Adisa Banjoko teaching Hip-Hop history.

“You must tell them their cultural and historic connections to the subject. The kids are feeling like they have no connection to the formulas and concepts they are being shown. If you teach this as part of their cultural legacy, it will be more exciting to digest.”

My own son was actually home schooled from the  6th grade to the 11th because my wife and I saw many unfair biases in the way the teachers treated him. When my wife first began teaching him algebra he was very unexcited. Then I told my son about Moorish achievements in mathematics, cartography and architecture. David Shenk’s chess book The Immortal Game illustrates how one Moorish scholar of the era used the chessboard, as an abacus! His eye opened a little wider.

I showed him a section of John G. Jackson’s Man, God and Civilization that reads: Students flocked from France, and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia (what Spain was called at the time) were in the van of science: women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study, and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and and botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence were to be mastered in Spain and Spain alone. “

“Look at what all your ancestors invented and how they used all relevant knowledge in the field of mathematics” I said with wonder. “If they could create it, you can at least do them the honor of learning what they made.” He took those words to heart. Making math part of his cultural and racial legacy gave him a reason to rise to whatever occasion was on the whiteboard. He is currently trying to decide between several top tier universities for his college path. For my daughters I do the same thing.

I explained to one of the math teachers, a White female, how crucial this was. “If your students are mostly Latino then you need to tell them about how the Mayans invented the concept of the zero several hundred years before the people of India and they had no contact.” I talked about how Aztec and Mayan architecture is something that should be used to as a cultural bridge for them to understand their legacy in math and science.

Her vacant eyes she blinked in hollow despair “But I don’t know all that stuff.” Her unwillingness to pursue new racial and cultural paths to math told me she was not interested. She still struggles to keep her students engaged to this day.

Her struggle is real, and not uncommon across  America. Many teachers across the country hold the same recalcitrant psychological posture with students of African and Latino descent. This ties the child to a culturally infertile arena where the monotony of formulaic recitation does not feed the brain or the heart. For this reason the minds of many Black boys and girls (like many of their Brown brothers and sisters) are often remain unopened like a treasure chest at the bottom of the sea.  The issue is not about ability, it’s about authentic m consistent engagement.

Helping teens discover their own wisdom is the highest form of teaching.

Unless and until all American children can name African pioneers of math like Imhotep (architect of the first step pyramid) or list the achievements of Benjamin Banneker or George Carruthers , Black children will never believe they have a place where STEM and STEAM are taught.

My emancipation don't fit your equation

-Lauryn Hill, Lost Ones

        Math is a universal language that has been ubiquitously applied in creating virtually all civilizations. Paradoxically there is a racist notion that Black youth are detached from mathematics curriculum, due to an inherent version and cultural disposition towards education. However, this dangerous and quixotic belief is underscored by correlation to the under-subscription of Black students in what is quickly viewed as the most academic fields—STEM education.  This unfounded belief submerges education policy in every American milieu and has even managed to unearth the rancor of the Supreme Court during last year’s debate regarding the polarizing case of Affirmative Action. Recently deceased court Justice Antonin Scalia, is on record, as saying a Black student in a selective college “does not do well” and thus is more auspiciously fit in “a less-advanced school—where they aren’t being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them”. This anecdotal narrative has shaped the contours of educational opportunity since well before the Jim Crow era, and yet, it continues to place a student’s race, at the center of conversations around educational disparities, rather than the ecology in which racism socially engineers the construct and pathological associations tied to race.

        It is a common idiom of thought that race creates a susceptibility of understanding. Nevertheless, there is no verifiable research to suggest that Black children are innately less able to solve the geometric challenges presented in Tetris, the algorithms germane to computer coding, or the inductive reasoning requisite of Chess. Black children are not reclamation projects. They are not devoid of creativity as a result of oppression, but like other students, require frameworks of academic achievement that recognize the multiple ways that creativity manifests itself. The rubrics commonly associated with academic excellence are not representative of students, and create what H. Rap Brown (2002) describes as academia’s “monopoly on truth”—that allows schools to create competitive individualism that controls youth, by forsaking the political polarization triggered by race. Stuart Hall (1997) explains that negotiations between students and their educational settings involve students conceding any community-based concerns with racism by focusing on material gains by the individual.  What we do find, is a host of literature that demonstrates the ways in which race impacts academic expectations and perceptions of Black youth, and thus, the harsh conditions that subject them to more exclusionary discipline for subjective infractions in schools, even experienced by students in elementary schools as young as five-years old.

HHCF Director of Education Arash Daneshzadeh.

        Racism legitimizes race as the most salient hurdle towards effective teaching, without examining the toxic and self-effacing environment propagated by racist teaching practices. At the crux of teaching Black youth, is a rigid policy towards control and conformity. This draconian ideology places students in a position at the hegemonic fringe of society, punishing them for an existence more readily associated with criminality as existential threats. Classrooms are subsystems that work on behalf of a racist academic machine that squelches opportunities for inquiry and innovation, and pathologizes Black youth for classroom “errors” that could ultimately give rise to synthesis and greater understanding. Race and ethnicity are not synonymous but inextricably linked. Understanding ethnicity as a portal to community literacy, demarcates access to cultural vehicles that make learning a more familiar experience for students, thereby narrowing the social distance between communities and academic institutions.

The fulcrum of popular culture bends images of urban America. As prelude to Freddie Gibbs’ song, F**kin Up The Count, there is an image of Black youth solving a math problem by finding analogues within the drug trade infesting their neighborhoods. When one youth asks his peer why he’s more likely to solve math problems grounded in criminogenic frameworks commonly associated with drug deals, he responds by citing the live-or-die stakes associated with many Black urban communities. In Strange Fruition, by Hip-Hop emcee Lupe Fiasco, he explains that youth must make “double-edged choices” regarding their identities within White Supremacist frames of school that create a mismatch of power and consequently disillusion Black youth to education systems associated with oppression. Terrell and Terrell (1981) describe this psychological phenomenon among Black youth, as cultural mistrust. In this description, what is perceived, as a student’s impertinent disinterest in math education is a means of self-defense in lieu of the more public narrative of Black destitution. So how do schools begin to move beyond blaming Black youth for wittingly removing themselves from academic spaces, as an executioner would his victim? We must begin with the history of Math education within the realm of public education. From the Algebra Project created by Bob Moses, to Dr. Chris Emdin’s pedagogy that bridges the dialectical space between STEAM and HipHop expression, we find culture as the spool which unites the fabric of math education.

Arash and HHCF students after a day of chess and life strategies class in Oakland, CA.

        When examining the architecture of antiquity, one finds plush and radiant mosques from civilizations throughout Africa and contiguous acres that comprised Mesopotamia. But despite the reality of Black cultural representation since the dawn of civilization, images that forge a vast and pervasive influence from Black scholars do not parallel the intellectual ancestry that is generated in school curricula. Given the bounteous presence of conical shapes, pillars with concentric orbs, that stood atop Moorish arches, it stands to reason that today’s STEAM studies could create a more critical literacy of math education by representing the Pan-African contributions to the canon. Education practitioners and policy wonks use false assumptions about math to justify expectations that have more to do with anti-Blackness, ethnicity, national origin and gender, than reasoning and cognitive function. In Schooling for the New Slavery (1978), Donald Spivey asserts that the validity of anti-Black perceptions is fortified by the emergence of White settler education systems. Asa Hilliard furthers this position by recounting cases in which schools have “kept African people away from the data needed to interpret their own cultural and history reality” (1995, p. 189). Black youth are given the imperative to center a revisionist history as the benchmark of success. We treat the curricular mismatch between schools and students as a student deficiency or cultural problem squarely placed upon the shoulders of students with faddish bromides, such as academic grit or personal responsibility. These semantic dodges skirt the implication of schools—as a tool for perpetuating racist ideology—and avoid meaningful discussion about the ecology of anti-Black schooling.

        Finally, while Europe struggled to emerge from the Middle Ages, troves of literature demonstrate the unrivaled contributions that African scholars, during that era, made to the field of mathematics and other sciences. Yet, these iconic fixtures are all but removed from Western curriculum. Imagine if students were offered a portal into their intellectual ancestry in math, the same way Spanish immersion allows non-Native English speakers from Spanish-speaking countries to make lateral connections in the classroom. There are thousands of noteworthy contributions that Black scholars have made to mathematics, well before public schools were formally ratified in the Western Hemisphere. Timbuktu gave rise to many differential equations formulas used today by astronomers. These formulas were cultivated during the inception of the Ghanaian Empire (modern Mali) during the 11th and 12th century. Yet, the Treatise of Algebra, scribed 400 years later by John Wallis in 1685, is still revered as the seminal work from which astrophysicists operate. Omar Khayyam, a Persian scholar, is often recalled, as no more than an indulgent Sufi poet from the 11th century, yet he is responsible for finding the intersections between cubic and conic equations, which has influenced the architecture traditionally associated with colonial Spain. In regards to Arab contributions to math B Carra de Vaux wrote “They made algebra an exact science and developed it considerably and laid the foundation of analytical geometry; they were indisputably the founders of plane and spherical trigonometry which, properly speaking, did not exist among the Greeks. “

        To create a more equitable school system in which individual identities are not stigmatized, we must have painstaking and honest conversations around the process of academic identification. In order to fully affirm the academic pedigree of mathematics, we must recognize the geopolitical contributions that all cultures have made to its canon. Until then, Black youth will continue to be ensnared by the false binary of “underachievement” and fatalistic trappings of Eurocentric distancing. By stigmatizing and historically abstracting Black ancestry from the academic canon, we manufacture a pathology of Black youth, rather than achievement itself, as in need of restoration.

Adisa Banjoko is the Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF). They are the first 501c3 non-profit to fuse music, chess and martial arts to teach STEM, STEAM and Life Strategies. He is the author of the upcoming book Bobby, Bruce & Bam: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess. Follow on IG @realhiphopchess  

Arash Daneshzadeh is the Director of Education for Hip-Hop Chess Federation and a Professor of Education, in the Organizational Leadership Program at the University of San Francisco. Twitter: https://twitter.com/A_Daneshzadeh