Linqua Franqa, Dr. Mariah Parker diagnoses schools with bad prison conditioning

Bundled against Atlanta’s crisp late December air, I meet Dr. Mariah Parker, AKA rapper Lingua Franqa, at a hip coffee shop in Grant Park. A gentrifying, touristy neighborhood with new breweries and bourgie food, Grant Park also has attractions like the city’s oldest park and Zoo Atlanta.

Parker (they/them), 31, who until now I’ve only seen on stage performing in Athens, GA, where I live and they used to, waits for me in a yellow ball-cap pulled tight and high while starting on food-truck tacos. The contrast to the Lingua Franqa stage persona – wide-eyed, free-fro’d, amped, pontificating – is striking, but Parker isn’t here to perform.

Parker is here because they have a vision: to use language – beyond the mic – to help people. I’m here is to understand that vision and what it might have to do with hip-hop.

Parker made national headlines In June 2018, they were sworn into office as county commissioners for Athens Clarke County in Athens. Malcolm X: The Autobiography They are entitled to raise their fist.

Lingua Franqa had been well-known in hip hop circles long before this. February 2018 saw Lingua Franqa release their first album. Model Minority, a sophisticated aural exploration of self, race, mental health, and social justice supported by a sound and groove reminiscent of 1990s neo-soul but powered by Parker’s cunning language and flow. After completing a Masters of Linguistics at the University of Georgia, Parker also started a doctoral program at the University of Georgia in Language and Literacy Education.

If 2018 was a year of sowing, then 2022 would be a year for reaping. April saw the debut of the second full-length Linqua Franqa album. This was a long-awaited release. Bellringer. In August, Parker not only completed their graduate program and received the title of “doctor,” but also resigned from the Athens-Clarke County Commission to commit to greater activism (and hopefully less death threats). Parker then moved to Atlanta.

The media often overlooks the complicated, multifaceted human being that Parker is, instead selectively zeroing in on whichever of Parker’s identities – politician, rapper, graduate student – that’s deemed newsworthy at the time. Parker believes that all these people are working towards the same goals.

I’ve driven two hours in mostly dense traffic to be here, but Parker – whose career I’ve followed for some years now – is such a compelling conversationalist that I don’t even think to get a drink for the first half hour of our talk, which roams through a Kentucky upbringing, formative college years in North Carolina, how schools are like prisons, how the education system could be reformed, and much more – including hip hop.

SPIN: You’re originally from Kentucky?

Parker: Yeah. I’m from Louisville, Kentucky [but] I don’t really remember a ton. When I was 17, I moved away. I only found out that it was cool when I got older and other people were like, “Oh, Louisville; they have a great music scene. Oh, it’s quirky, and, you know, da da da da da.” So I’ve trusted people’s feedback but I didn’t get to experience any of the cool things: things that, for example, drew me to Athens [Georgia]: Like the music scene; like walking cities where you can go places as a young person without a vehicle.

So, you moved to Louisville to go to college.

Yeah. For Warren Wilson Asheville North Carolina. Because my extended North Carolina family is from North Carolina, I wanted to travel. I felt drawn back to my homeland.

It was the one thing that attracted me to my attention. [college’s] work program. It was great that people could work at school while also taking classes and performing a variety functions. You could also learn how to fix cars in the mechanic shop. [for example] where they would be able to work on the school cars. What I ended up doing [was] working in the writing center as a tutor, and in the print shop: learning how to print the big binders of texts that people get from their professors; helping coordinate student activities, and run the student newspaper — all these things I ended up getting to do. Then there’s a culture of service on campus where folks are always finding ways to help out around the community.

The idea of a trio of learning methods was something that really appealed to me. [study, work, and service to the community].

I’ve read about Warren Wilson in that context, this wonderfully progressive style of education, and I’m wondering how that experience at Wilson set up what became your future understanding of education in general?

Absolutely. Not just about the experience of education, but also how it is lived.

It would be great to know more about rural communities around the area where these kids live. Big Brothers and Big Sisters they were, by hanging out with them and playing pingpong with them.

Insulating trailers in the area that were deteriorating. These are just a few examples of how you can understand the environment beyond the beauty of the forests and mountains. However, the reality of rural poverty is quite different from what you see in urban centers.

Then also learning through work — in my experience at the writing center — how impactful writing well is to how one is perceived intelligence-wise.

Many students came in to talk to me about their ideas, and they were great. They’re clearly incredibly smart people, but they were getting all these bad grades on their papers [which were] making them feel dumb — because they weren’t articulating themselves well with prose.

And so, realizing folks know so much, folks know so much already: they’ve taught themselves so much. They’ve learned so much from here and there, but how is that learning then exhibited to others or manifest to others and how does that influence everything? That was what inspired me to pursue language education.

Can you talk about your Masters thesis: “Flipping the script, jousting the mouth: a systemic functional linguistic approach to hip hop discourse.”

I looked at Athens rapper, Squallé, and differences … through his freestyle rap versus the conscious rap versus the trap rap he was creating, with the hope that studying these differences [would enable me to] See the patterns in genres. It’s not just all random noise. It’s not just like a degradation of how good hip hop used to be, you know? It is very internal coherent.

I’m not a music critic or anything, but you can hear the difference between, let’s say; De La Soul and Kendrick. But not many people can put a word to it — especially in terms of grammar and syntax and what kind of slant rhyme is going on. Then we can appreciate modern hip-hop more.

And I wanted to see how it can be useful for educators … and to use some of these patterns in the classroom context to guide students: “Okay, so you’re a brilliant freestyle rapper. I often see you in the lunchroom, waiting for the bus, etc. These patterns are common in freestyle rap as an art form. So how do we get you from these things that you’re really great at and you already know how to do, to the things that you’re gonna be expected to do in writing a five-paragraph essay. What are the ways you can demonstrate authority? These are the ways you rap to convey your street authority. What kind of pieces of that can we put in that essay to keep your voice alive?”

I was almost tempted to continue that project. [doctoral] My dissertation was accepted, but I was then appointed as a professor in the department. Melisa Misha Cahnmann-TaylorShe came to see a show that I performed at Flicker. [a club in Athens, GA]… and she saw the set and was like, “That should be a dissertation.” And I was like, “What?”

But I knew what she meant, ’cause I was familiar with the discipline she worked in: folks using art in analysis or note-taking or presentation in the research process to capture qualitative elements that are harder to do through other means. And I knew she was a poet — knew she did drama — but when she said that, I was like, “What are you, for real?”

The album had been in my hands for at least three or four years. She was like, “Yo, you could write a paper reflecting on how hip-hop songwriting has been a research tool for you.”

So that’s what I did instead.

In your PhD dissertation, “Bellringer: An Autoethnographic Homecoming to Hip Hop as School-Abolitionist Practice,” you talk about “carceral logics of schooling.” Can you explain that term along with another: “school abolitionist practices?”

Carceral logics Yeah. Schools are a lot like prisons.

They mobilize you. They can tell you where and when to go. [when you can attend to] Other fundamental human functions. Only you can speak when you are instructed to. And if you don’t adhere to this behaviorally then … [there’s trouble]. And you’re measured based on your grades, obviously. It’s familiar to all of us.

These methods of controlling people are very similar to those used in prison.

We also have the criminalization and abuse of children in the school. I’m thinking about tracking systems which separate people, oftentimes blatantly on the basis of class and race and given the backgrounds and living conditions of various students.

We have in-school suspension or isolation. Things like detention. Expulsions or suspensions of students for non-normative behavior.

For example, you speak when you’re allowed to. But if you grew up — like I did — in a black church, folks is yelling out hallelujah, amen, just willy-nilly cuz that’s what you’re supposed to do. And so, you get these kids who come into school and they’re yelling out answers, yelling out jokes in response to what the teacher’s saying. Suddenly they’re in in-school suspension, and then they’re in there enough that [next] they’re getting suspended. Suspended and then da, da da da! They will eventually be criminalized.

Add on top of that the actual incorporation of surveillance technologies, and state agents — cops — into schools, and you got something that’s looking kind of like a prison.

Like metal detectors …

Exactly. Children who need to have clear backpacks and metal detectors. It’s looking a little bit like prison.

The school is supposed to perpetuate social inequalities. All of these factors are in place in order to ensure everyone stays in school ClassesNot the classroom, but The Social class that they’re supposed to. If you’re poor, you stay poor. If you’re rich, you stay rich – unless you disrupt that.

These are some of the carceral logics behind schooling.

But then I’m thinking about school abolition, not necessarily like I wanna like tear schools down, but abolitionist like an imaginary lens: a way of understanding a social problem and thinking outside the school-shaped donut hole in our understanding of how education works.

The same way prison abolitionists think of how to de-link things is also true [welfare and mental health] Care from prison. So, it’s like no longer DFCS or something like that saying: “Oh, you have to come prove to us that you got X, Y, Z or we’re gonna take your kids away.” But instead giving people what they need to stay out of trouble, to stay safe, to keep their neighborhood safe. It is important to distinguish between the two.

That’s when I talk about imagining — just imagining — that education is separate from schooling: lifting education out of the school house, and imagining a totally different way that we can be educating people that isn’t constantly stuffed into and reinforcing this idea of school as we know it. And trying to think beyond the carceral logics that schooling imposes on us.

So: abolition.

That imaginary lens is often used to view carceral institutions. How can we make people safer without the use of state violence by the police? How can we achieve better behavioral health and not lock people up in mental institutions? How can we educate people without criminalizing them, using these carceral logics that penalize students and isolating them, and then how can we escape it all by finding other spaces where we can really educate, not just school children? Quote unquote: The idea of school abolishment David Stoval There are many ways to save money. Dylan Rodriguez and folks like that who are using this idea that has existed since the nineties in regards to carcerality, but applying it to the problems that we’re seeing in schools.

What would your suggestions be to improve education?

Reforms can be made to make schools more welcoming, supportive, and affirming for children.

First of all, it’s necessary for us to have more student input on the shape of their lives within schools. In local government I experienced a number of times where we took input from young people on things, and then it was just completely dismissed because kids “don’t know what they’re talking about”, or “That’s not really realistic,” or “They’re just trying to get away with this or that.”

The leisure services department conducted a survey to find out what youth would enjoy the most. This information was never used by the local government. We did a lot more than we had ever asked for and passed a number of additional programs.

So I think making sure that kids’ voices get heard [would] improve the programming and structure of schools, Making sure voices, kids’ voices get heard extends to having enough folks in schools to listen to them, because the current in-school student-to-counselor ratios in Athens-Clarke County – and a lot of high-poverty school districts generally – are abysmal.

It makes it such that kids can’t be heard by supportive adults who can give them what they need to be academics, to be successful, to stay out of trouble, to stay in school, to avoid joining a gang. These are vital for the overall health of our communities. This is how you invest in youth health. It would make schools more healthy.

Obviously I think we gotta stop these attacks on trans children and like LGBTQ youth, but I feel like … I’m almost loath to even bring that up given that it’s such a ridiculous culture war thing. That I don’t wanna give that any more light of day other than saying like, of course yeah, school should be gender-affirming places where kids feel like they can talk about who they’re becoming as people, who they are as people.

Schools are more than just producing robots for the workforce. It’s also about helping people grow into healthy adults. That includes healthy relationships with their gender, sexuality and gender.

I’ve even heard recent comments by our Democrat-appointed secretary of education, this very neo-liberal: “Oh, we need to, you know, produce like a strong workforce and it starts with education.”

It is wrong to believe that schools are for the purpose of preparing workers for work. They must know how to defend themselves at work. It’s not just soft skills like, how to do an interview, but how to collectively bargain. What are your rights as a worker under labor law? And not just, oh, now you have the skills to go out and, I don’t know, make $12 an hour as a chef or something like that. These are just a few of the things I believe need to be improved.

Do you think the motivations behind that are less insidiously about making good workers, and more about naively expecting that people don’t need to worry about being exploited in the workplace – just go out and show them what you’re worth?

It’s the American myth of meritocracy: if you work hard in school to become a good carpenter or a nurse or a mechanic – if you put in that effort, you’ll have everything you need. If you don’t ‘work hard’ because actually you’re interested in art or you’re just a good writer or whatever, then, well, that’s a moral failing on your part. You deserve what happens to you. It’s tied into that. It’s tied into the Protestant work-ethic and this myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, by working hard in ways that are valid to the government and to the people that run the economy.

This year you’ve finished the PhD and left your position as County Commissioner. You seem to be devoting that time to activism, from what I’ve seen on your social media. So, I’m wondering what this period is like for you. Are you feeling more like you’re finally being who you really are?

I was recently reminded of this quote: “There are years that asked, and there are years that answered.”

It feels like 2022 was a year that answered a lot of questions that previous years have asked, like: ‘How do we get ourselves out of the situation that we find ourselves in? What is missing in our current political milieu that explains the situation we’re in? What forces are at play that explain the situation that we’re in?’

The answers have been emerging piecemeal to me – laying there as pieces in a puzzle. Finally it’s like “Oh, snap.”

The working class is not organized enough to effectively combat the forces shaping our lives. What food is available, where we can travel because we have a vehicle, how quality of education, what air and water we get, etcetera. All of this is essential to be able move things in a way that is collectively determined and hopefully mutually beneficial.

And so that’s where you are now?

This is where I am at the moment. Rather than being the person to come to who has all the answers and can fix all the problems, I’m actually building a longer table of folks sitting together to figure out what the problems are and really getting used to practicing actual democracy.

Folks kind of conceive of it just like you go and vote every four years, but it’s there are so many decision points at which we can incorporate more voices. If folks are not used to that it’s like you have to learn how to participate, and learn the skills to bring in even more people to make that table even longer.

Now, I am a labor organizer with the United Southern Service Workers. I find my work in helping people grow as leaders very similar to what I did at the University of Georgia in the classroom. I was developing preservice elementary school teachers to become leaders in their classrooms and graduate student tutors who were leaders in creating educational experiences in the reading center that I managed for two years.

And so where I’m at now is focused on that work: really, really organizing.

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The post Dr. Mariah Parker, AKA Linqua Franqa, Diagnoses Schools With A Bad Case Of Prison Conditioning This article was first published on SPIN.