This past Saturday, Kanye West’s mother, Donda West passed away in a Los Angeles Hospital. The cause of her death wasn’t made public. Kanye had just touched down in London when he heard the news. He’s now in Los Angeles with other family members to make sense of her sudden passing. Donda West was 58. A spokesman for the West family released a one-line statement: “The family respectfully asks for privacy during this time of grief.”

As close as Kanye was to his mother, and as emotional he is, I can’t imagine how this will affect him.

After retiring as an English professor in 2005,  Donda West moved to Los Angeles where she was the Chairman of the Kanye West Foundation. The foundation was designed to help blot high school dropout rates across the country.

The first program, Loop Dreams was launched in Fall 2006 at the Accelerated School in Los Angeles, CA. Next Spring it was scheduled to launch in a second school in Kanye’s hometown, Chicago, IL.
Loop Dreams incorporates rap writing and music production, pairing student’s passions with their performance, ultimately hoping to link habits of mind to factors critical to success in whatever area of life they choose to pursue.

Donda West also released a book this year: “Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar.”

There was a cover story in one of those writer’s magazines, can’t remember the name of it, but Talib Kweli’s mother, Brenda Greene, interviewed Donda West. Talib’s mother is an English professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. They did a lil’ back and forth about their sons, the book, education, etc.

Umm. Wow. It was Black Issues Book Review. This isn’t the magazine’s site, but this is the interview.

Here she talks about incorporating hip-hop into the school curriculum.

“One of my favorite philosophers is John Dewey, and John Dewey said one hundred years ago or more, we should start with where the learner is. In our culture, the learner is in hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is a worldwide phenomenon.

The teacher is not so smart if she cannot get the student to be excited about learning. We educators might want to discredit hip-hop when we might be better served to use it to get students excited about learning.

There are so many ways. Brenda, we can use hip-hop as a way to help students understand that there are various dialects, and when it’s appropriate to use them. I’m hooked on Ebonics. I love it. Where would we be if we didn’t embrace the particular way that we speak? I’ve always told my students, language is situational. You don’t speak in a way that doesn’t relate to your audience. If you’re singing the blues, you don’t say, “My baby doesn’t love me anymore.” You say “no more.” If you don’t say that, then you don’t have the blues. We have to build a healthy respect for all cultures. I say to educators, don’t discount the value of a culture that you may not have grown up in. Hip-hop culture at its best is very political. And there’s so many truths being told that our generation just didn’t have the guts to put out there.”

Full interview here: Donda West Meets Brenda Greene: Hip-Hop Mothers Talk Language, Literacy and Creativity.

Hold your head Kanye. Donda rest in peace.