This study illustrates a set of learning activities designed from two hip-hop aesthetics and explores their use among a classroom of African American preservice teachers who graduated from urban school districts. Based on the two hip-hop aesthetics of kinetic consumption and autonomy/distance, the specific goal of these learning activities is to enable students to respond to justice-oriented teaching and democratic curriculum. Through an ethnographic and grounded theory approach, this study illustrates that these learning activities are useful for these purposes but that they also create potential barriers to student learning. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)