On this edition of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D speaks with Professor A.D. Carson of the University of Virginia — a scholar, artist, and emcee whose academic work flips the script on what scholarship can sound like. Carson first gained national attention when his doctoral dissertation took the form of a 34-track rap album, Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolution. Now he returns with a new book, Being Dope: Hip Hop in Theory Through Mixtape Memoir — a deep meditation on art, politics, and survival in hostile institutions.
Carson traces his lens back to his years at Clemson University in South Carolina (2013–2017), where he experienced an environment that felt “like going backward in time.” The Ku Klux Klan openly distributed recruitment flyers on campus, wrapped in candy and tossed onto dorm steps. Each time students protested, Clemson administrators defended the Klan’s actions as “free speech.” Yet, as Carson notes, those same administrators later fired Black professors for critical social-media posts, revealing how freedom of speech applies unevenly in the South.
Those years birthed student marches and a nine-day sit-in, during which Carson and others were arrested for protesting racial inequity. It was that same week he interviewed for his first teaching job. He refused to hide his activism, choosing instead to make it part of his professional identity — an act of defiance that would define his career.
Now based in Charlottesville, Carson again finds himself in the crosshairs — this time of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk and his group Turning Point USA, which placed him on its infamous “Professor Watchlist.” The list targets academics deemed “radical” for challenging conservative orthodoxy. Carson’s supposed offense: critiquing Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Tom MacDonald for what he calls “weaponizing white male anger through rap.” He warns that such attacks are designed not to debate ideas but to intimidate educators and stifle dissent — part of a larger campaign to brand critical scholars as “enemies of the state.”
In Being Dope, Carson expands that critique into metaphor. He argues that America treats Black culture like a drug — criminalized when it threatens power, commodified when it can be sold. Hip-hop, he says, is both the target and the cure: a “pharmacy and a trap house.” Through peer-reviewed albums, orchestral collaborations, and new publishing models, Carson reclaims that space — proving that hip-hop can challenge power even within academia.
As Davey D sums it up, Carson’s work shows how the struggle over who gets to speak — and what counts as knowledge — is far from over.
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.