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It’S “Hip Hop,” Not “Hip-Hop”, Tasha Iglesias, Travis Harris

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

“It’s ‘Hip Hop,’ Not ‘hip-hop’” explains how two Hip Hop scholars, Tasha Iglesias and Travis Harris, collaborated to get the official academic spelling of Hip Hop changed from “hip-hop” to “Hip Hop.” While they were graduate students, they grew frustrated with reading numerous academic texts that did not represent Hip Hop in the same way the culture did outside of academia. Iglesias and Harris are Hip Hop and involved with the culture outside of the classroom. The clash between these two worlds led them to petition the American Psychological Association and eventually speak with Merriam Webster dictionary to change the …