James Peterson
GET UPDATES FROM James Peterson
 
James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is also the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC, an association of Hip Hop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of Hip Hop, urban, and youth cultures. Peterson has appeared on Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, ABC News, ESPN, and various local television networks as an expert on race, politics, and popular culture.

Blog Entries by James Peterson

RE: Racial Redux in the Republican Presidential 'Race'

Posted January 23, 2012 | 01/23/12 04:12 PM ET

Let's gather up all of the Black children and take them to Niggerhead for a retreat. When we get there we should be sure to share with them the 'fact' that many of them would have been better off being born during the era of slavery.

Back then they...

Read Post

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

2 Comments | Posted December 27, 2011 | 12/27/11 10:55 AM ET

by David J. Leonard, Mark Anthony Neal and James Braxton Peterson

Few university courses generate much attention from mainstream media, but Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson's course "The Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z" has drawn national attention from NBC's Today Show, The Washington Post, The Associated Press,...

Read Post

Awkward Black Republican

Posted November 9, 2011 | 11/09/11 12:57 PM ET

By the time you read this Herman Cain will no longer be the frontrunner amongst the GOP presidential candidates. I will not be the first person to have said this; and many more reports about Mr. Cain's awkward rise and fall will have manifested in/on any number of media platforms...

Read Post

Monumental Matters

Posted September 20, 2011 | 09/20/11 12:15 PM ET

Summer's end always forces me to think -- to take stock of the season's events and reflect on the issues and incidents that mattered most to me. This summer ended with an east coast earth quake that cracked the Washington Monument and a substantial storm named Irene that forced the...

Read Post

Tea Party Tar Babies

Posted August 15, 2011 | 08/15/11 08:23 PM ET

I do not accept Rep. Lamborn's apology for referring to the president of the United States as a tar baby. According to his spokesperson, what he had meant to say was that the president's policies are a quagmire. I don't accept this backtracked admission/apology, either. This "tar baby"...

Read Post

Beats, Rhymes, & Beef

Posted July 27, 2011 | 07/27/11 01:18 PM ET

Twenty years out, I find it difficult to qualify or quantify the formidable and formative impact that A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ) had on Hip Hop culture and its most loyal constituents. In the early 1990s Hip Hop was caught in the throes of what would eventually become a binary...

Read Post

Occupy the Academy (#OTA)

Posted January 4, 2011 | 01/04/11 05:36 PM ET

"Writers write; teachers teach; activists act . . . Good scholars do all of the above"

Universities have had a tough year in terms of public relations. Over the course of 2011 there were multiple full-blown scandals. The Penn State and Syracuse University-coach-as-pedophile/predator scandals rocked the media sphere. The 'exceptional...

Read Post