Tina Maschi, Ph.D., an associate professor at GSS, said that Tyson’s work filled a gap in the scientific literature, particularly as it related to African-American young men processing grief.

“He found a way to talk to young men in a language that had meaning to them, and he used quantitative research to validate the work,” said Maschi.

She said that Tyson’s experience of growing up in the projects of Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1980s played no small role in his work. He confirmed as much in a 2011 interview with Inside Fordham.

“One of the key things in social work is having empathy, and an understanding about where a person is coming from,” Tyson said. “By the time I left Paterson, I had seen a lot. My first goal became to work with youth, because I saw too many of them land in jail, strung out on drugs, or dead over a dice game.”

Maschi said that Tyson understood that applying Freudian talk therapy in a classic manner wouldn’t work with his young clients. But he could get them to talk by using rap.

“He was way ahead of his time,” said Maschi.

Tyson’s ability to communicate on an empathetic level went beyond his young clients; it also applied to fellow academics.

“He was a very down-to-earth guy who could speak via the academy using its language and speak to an inner-city youth using hip-hop,” she said. “He just found the humanity in anyone he spoke to, he didn’t seem to have a hierarchy.”

Nevertheless, understanding how to defend an academic argument in academic language didn’t necessarily mean that the academy would immediately accept his theories, said Larry Farmer, Ph.D., director of the doctoral program at GSS.

“He was looking at the impact that race and racism have on individuals, and that tends to be the kind of work where people question the legitimacy, in terms of its focus,” said Farmer. “But clearly his work was not focused on the negative aspects of hip-hop, like misogyny or the promotion of violence—but its ability to contribute to healing and wellness.”

Both Farmer and Maschi noted a “perception scale” developed by Tyson to measure the way the young people understood their experiences through rap, which further shored up the quantitative aspects of his work. His 2006 paper, “Rap Music Attitude and Perception Scale,” that introduced the studies that found a disproportionate amount of media attention accorded to gangsta rap. Tyson wrote that the scale represented a “necessary step toward a meaningful dialogue on how people from different groups, cultures, and countries interpret and construct the meaning of rap music.”

Farmer said the work represented a culturally responsive practice to engage youth within their own experience.

“It was an important kind of strength-based approach,” said Farmer. “It looked at what was valuable within the young African-American male and could be leveraged to help them address their own healing and wellness.”

After 10 years of practicing hip-hop therapy, Tyson began a textbook that outlined interventions using a model he called Hip-Hop Critical Consciousness Circles, or H2C3 for short. His fiancé Millicent Champaign said he was hard at work on the project well past midnight on the night he died.

“He was such a hard worker,” said Champaign.

She said that, in addition to his research and writing, he was a loving father to his three children, he volunteered for workshops at Rikers Island, and he “touched everyone he knew.”

“My nephews would come and visit us in Florida and he’d talk to them about being a young black man in society now, how to carry yourself and how to respect others,” she said. He talked about hip-hop with them, too. “He’d say ‘Some of what’s in the music may pertain to you, but you don’t have to go that route.’”

Flowers and tributes may be sent to First First United Methodist Church, 145 Paulison Avenue, Passaic, New Jersey 07055.  Cards or notes may be sent to Tyson’s sister: Yveles Tyson, 77 Pennington Avenue, Apt. G2, Passaic, New Jersey 07055.

Crime and Punishment, a presentation sponsored by Fordham’s Office of Research, brought together Deborah Denno, Ph.D., the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, Olena Nikolayenko, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science, and Edgar Tyson, Ph.D., assistant professor of social work in the Graduate School of Social Service.

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Edgar Tyson, Olena Nikolayenko, and Deborah Denno, during the question and answer period.
Photo by Patrick Verel

Faculty panelists reported on their recent research around the theme of crime, funded through grants from Fordham.
Tyson detailed the results of his survey of 305 police officers in a Northeastern city. An expert on the use of hip-hop music in social work therapy, Tyson wanted to know if police believed rap artists and their entourages to be more violent than average citizens.

Older officers, he discovered, hold that opinion of both groups, while their younger counterparts less so. This perception is troubling, Tyson said, because a study of 250 rap artists with arrest records revealed that they were less likely to commit a crime after they’d published their first album.

Nikolayenko’s research into hate crime and prosecution in Russia also dwells on misperceptions, in this case in Russia, where she used one court case to illustrate a larger problem involving the prosecution of hate crimes.

In one case, Rasul Mirzaev, a mixed martial artist from the Republic of Dagestan, scuffled with Ivan Agafonov, a native Russian, at a nightclub in Moscow in 2011. Agafonov died as a result. When charges against Mirzaef were downgraded from pre-meditated murder to a lesser charge, there was a backlash by Russian nativists.

“This case reflects the broader trend in Russian society, where the nationalists use these instances of interpersonal conflict between young men to try to frame it as something bigger [and]to provoke anti-migrant sentiments,” she said.

One of the biggest challenges Nikolayenko faced while trying to gather data about the prevalence of hate crimes in Russia are the nation’s laws. One law on the books, she said, allows the police to prosecute anyone as an extremist if the person so much as accuses a police officer of being an “extremist.”

Although official statistics on hate crimes in Russia show they have been dropping since 2007, the trend is more a reflection of under-reporting or misclassification of a hate crime as “hooliganism,” she said, than an actual decrease.
“The focus on hate crimes is important because it can inform our understanding of political stability in the country, and also the challenge of democratization,” she said.

Denno reported on her study of 33 criminal cases between 2007 and 2011, in which  behavioral genetics evidence was introduced by defendants. Alcoholism, substance abuse, and diseases such as schizophrenia are examples of the kinds of evidence that might be used by defense lawyers.

“Criminologists are always interested in what predicts crime and what causes crime, and behavioral genetics evidence is one large facet of that, particularly more recently,” she said.

Denno suggested that not only is much of the controversy surrounding genetics-related evidence unwarranted, but the use of such evidence has been greatly misunderstood. Such evidence, she said, has never been presented as a way to excuse a defendant from having committed the crime; rather, it was used as a way to avoid the death penalty.

Jared Lee Loughner, who pleaded guilty to murder charges for the shooting of Senator Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, is a good example. One way his lawyers kept him from death row was to research his family tree back to the 1800’s and prove his ancestors suffered from schizophrenia.

“When lawyers use behavioral genetics evidence, it’s almost entirely used in the context of a lot of other kinds of factors,” Denno said. “Anyone who does research in these areas would know that behavioral genetics evidence is much more enlightening about what effect environmental factors have on a defendant than anything inherent to that defendant.”