Taking the Power Back, Revolution, and being Open to People, Places, and Ideas

Dr. Neil Graffin, Senior Lecturer in Law, writes about 'Rage Against the Machine' and being Open to People, Places and Ideas.  

I can still remember when I was given the cassette of Rage Against the Machine’s (RATM) first, self-titled album. Listening to the opening staccato bass of ‘Bombtrack’ I was immediately hooked as the cassette started; it was like nothing I had heard before. The whole album was provocative. From the front cover of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death on a Saigon road in 1963, the album touched on issues such as overreach in counter-surveillance, war-driven nationalism, alleged miscarriages of justice, and political activism. It demanded the listener to revolt against the political and economic structures of the time. The album remained a constant for much of my teenage life, and beyond.

Fast forward to 2020, and we are in the process of rewriting the new Bachelor of Laws, where much of the talk is about decolonising, otherwise known as liberating the curriculum. This is not a new movement within education, but it has gained significant momentum in recent years.

The idea of decolonising the curriculum is to seek greater representation of a range of voices within teaching, including drawing on different discourses, should they be feminist, post-colonial, inter alia, as well as grounding scholarly debates within the context of the histories in which they were formed. Law has often been accused to be the domain of ‘old white men’, yet the law affects everyone and is formed as a result of multiple, and intersecting, social, economic, political, and colonial domains. This is what the movement seeks us as legal scholars to represent.  

The RATM song ‘Take the Power Back’, released in 1992, speaks to the process of liberating and decolonising the curriculum in, what was then, the contemporary United States. The overarching theme of the song is that education has power, but it is a dangerous power when It seeks only to portray one voice, to the exclusion of others. To De La Rocha, education gives insight, but a system exists which has ‘dissed us’. This, he means, is that some cultures are not dealt with fairly, or not discussed maybe at all, within the education system of the US:

In the right light, study becomes insight

But the system that dissed us

Teaches us to read and right.

While the focus of the song is generally on decolonising the curriculum, this comes through most powerfully in the bridge:

The present curriculum
I put my fist in 'em
Eurocentric every last one of 'em
See right through the red, white and blue disguise
With lecture I puncture the structure of lies
[…]

We've got to take it back
Holes in our spirit causin' tears and fears
One-sided stories for years and years and years
I'm inferior? Who's inferior?
Yeah, we need to check the interior
Of the system that cares about only one culture
And that is why
We gotta take the power back.

There is a lot to be said about De la Rocha’s verse here. His reference to Eurocentrism is reflective of the fact that other histories of the US are not accounted for, apart from those derived from Europe; ‘Eurocentric’ likely being synonymous here with ‘white’. While the song does not discuss explicitly what other histories are excluded, those of Native Americans are often overlooked in the education system of the US. For example, in a study by Shear et al (2015) of the teaching of Native American history in US law schools found that ‘The narrative presented in U.S. history standards, when analysed with a critical eye, directed students to see Indigenous Peoples as a long since forgotten episode in the country’s development’.

De La Rocha may also be talking about the histories of black Americans, or histories of Africa, which again are overlooked. For a good read on these types of issues, see Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘A Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir’. In it, he talks of his father, a bookseller of out-of-print publications by black thinkers shunned by the education system. In a study of black history in US schools and society, King (2017) has written that ‘The voices and experiences of Black people have often been silenced in favour of the dominant Eurocentric history curriculum’.

De La Rocha talks about the dispiriting effect of not having your culture recognised by those who teach you – ‘Holes in our spirit causin' tears and fears/One-sided stories for years and years and years’, and alludes to accusations that some people are portrayed as inferior, an allusion to white supremacy within the system. This is what the decolonising the curriculum movement seeks to turn on its head, to give voice to something other than a ‘system that cares about only one culture’ and to ‘Take the Power Back’.

When writing the new undergraduate law degree, the Law School is seeking to make a small attempt at helping to redress the balance. It is our aim to give voices to different people’s and views – to help to decolonise, or liberate the curriculum, from the straitjacket of white-centric, patriarchal, European thinking – to seek to fulfil our university’s mission and to truly open to people, places, and ideas which, if conceived correctly, is a revolutionary statement in itself.