[Marxism] Where politics and hip hop collide

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Where politics and hip hop collide

<http://www.michigancitizen.com/clients/michigancitizen/11-27-2005-1-28-23-P
M-2067010.gif>  
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick  
By Maria Luisa Tucker
AlterNet

Two weeks ago, Kwame Kilpatrick went on a club crawl of Detroit's liveliest
bars and nightclubs. On election night, the 35-year-old African American
ex-football player celebrated his own victory. Kilpatrick, America's first
"hip hop mayor," had won a second term in office.

Despite a first term riddled with "youthful" mistakes - Kilpatrick was
resilient. He relied on his base of young African-Americans, a risky bet
since young people have notoriously low voter turnout rates. But as the
youngest mayor ever elected in Detroit and a member of the so-called "hip
hop generation," he pulled it off.

The hip hop generation that Kilpatrick belongs to is defined loosely as
minorities born between 1965 and 1984 who have grown up within a culture of
hip hop. They are the first generation born in a post-Jim Crow society, and
were raised largely in urban neighborhoods that have exemplified both the
successes and ironies of the civil rights movement.

Like Kilpatrick himself, hip hop's growing presence in electoral politics
has shown itself to be controversial, awkwardly unpredictable - and
incredibly charismatic.

In 2004, it was not clear if the highly publicized hip hop voter
registration drives, such as Sean "P. Diddy" Comb's "Vote or Die!" campaign,
marked the beginning of a political movement, or simply a trend during a
dramatic election year. A year later, it seems that hip hop's place in
politics is continuing to grow.

"The election was really important. It was really the first time you saw
this sort of effort on both the celebrity and the grassroots level," says
Jeff Chang, hip hop journalist and author of Can't Stop, Won't Stop. But he
likens the trajectory of the hip hop's political movement toward disorder
and randomness. "The hip hop political movement is not something that has a
monolithic look to it."

As a political movement, hip hop is finding itself: who its leaders should
be, who the movement represents, and how to harmonize hip hop's historical
resistance against the establishment with a new urge to participate in
mainstream politics. The people who made 2004 such a big year for hip hop
are, in 2005, proposing very different ways to carry forward.

THE GRASSROOTS ORGANIZERS

"Hip hop has always been political," says Rosa Clemente, a New York-based
activist and co-host for radio's Where We Live.

Since its birth in the Bronx, hip hop has certainly welcomed lyrics about
oppression, resistance to the white establishment, and blunt challenges to
government, from N.W.A.'s hit "F--k Tha Police" in 1988, to Jadakiss' 2004
song "Why?" which asked "Why did Bush knock down the towers."

With a history of Afro-centric nationalism, gangsta rap and graffiti art,
hip hop had never been used as a means of assimilation into mainstream
(white) culture. It has always been more likely to dismiss electoral
politics in favor of localized social justice work.

Clemente, who identifies herself as a Black Puerto Rican grassroots
organizer, was part of the surge in the 1990s of activists who tied their
social justice work closely to hip hop culture. She has tackled issues
including youth organizing, prison rights, African-American/Latino
relations, racism in South Africa, and ethnic disparities in health care.

"We need to talk about building an independent party. People of color need
to build their own political party," she says. "I'm no longer interested in
dealing with progressives when they don't allow leadership to look like
people of color."

While white progressives may focus on social justice just as hip hop
activists do, the differences have a lot to do with age, ethnicity and
class. "[White progressives and liberals] will protest the war in Iraq, but
they will not step in when they see cops harassing a Black person in their
neighborhood."

On the West Coast, Youth Speaks has introduced spoken word poetry into high
schools, colleges and juvenile detention centers in the Bay Area. On the
East Coast, the Prison Moratorium Project in 2001 helped prevent New York
City from expanding its juvenile detention jails and urged local officials
to use that money for community youth programs. These are just two small
examples of the hundreds of organizations that have made their imprint on
school board issues, city council decisions and state propositions and laws.

As these types of organizations have worked locally over the years, the
stage has slowly been set for hip hop to make its presence felt in national
electoral politics. Many local organizations have expanded to include
chapters across the nation, or joined their efforts with political groups
such as The League of Pissed Off Voters.

New organizations such as the Hip Hop Caucus, the National Hip-Hop Political
Convention and the Hip Hop Summit Action Networkhave been formed exclusively
to build a national presence.

THE CELEBRITIES

In the search of easily identifiable Black leaders, the mainstream media
latched on to Russell Simmons, a 48-year-old millionaire and the founder of
Def Jam Records. Simmons is the chairman and founder of the Hip Hop Summit
Action Network (HSAN), which at its start in 2000.

By forming alliances between businessmen in the industry and civil rights
organizations - including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and the Nation of Islam - HSAN instantly established itself as a
leader in the African-American community.

Of course, most of the nation knows HSAN for its 26 star-studded summits.
The star power enticed millions to attend, and ultimately 2 million young
people registered to vote through HSAN. Dozens of rappers made appearances,
including Reverend Run of Run-DMC, Kanye West, P. Diddy, Beyonce, Lil'
Romeo, Eminem, Busta Rhymes and Erykah Badu. Political figures also made
appearances, of course, and provided voter education. Dr. Benjamin Chavis,
HSAN's 57-year-old CEO, estimates that 1.3 million people who registered to
vote through the HSAN actually went to the polls and voted. Those figures
are backed by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and
Engagement, which reported that "youth voter turnout increased substantially
and much of this increase was driven by an increase in voting among
African-American youth."

The election proves that "there are political consequences to hip hop,"
according to Chavis. "It would be wrong to say that hip hop is just
concerned with bling bling, or hip hop is just music, or it's just fashion,
or that it's just political. People try to put hip hop in one category, but
it is multi-faceted. It's a global youth phenomenon with the ability to
affect political change."

As anyone with a television knows, HSAN is not hip hop's only celebrity-led
political organization. P. Diddy's "Vote or Die!" campaign, founded just
four months before the election, sought to make voting "hot, sexy and
relevant." More of a media blitz than a part of a movement, "Vote or Die!"
got celebrity endorsements from Mary J. Blige, Paris Hilton, 50 Cent, Mya
and others.

THE DIVIDE

Throughout the election year, both the mainstream media and some grassroots
activists criticized celebrity-driven hip hop organizations. To be sure,
HSAN and "Vote or Die!" were not the heavyweights of voter education. This
was most apparent by the faces that fronted the voting campaigns - artists,
not organizers, who were sometimes ignorant about the political issues of
the 2004 election.

At least one organization has managed to bring together both camps: the
biannual National Hip-Hop Political Convention, a national organization
operating in 20 states. The first convention in 2004 was organized by people
submerged in the social justice work of hip hop culture, including Rosa
Clemente, Newark Deputy Mayor Ras Baraka, and Bakari Kitwana, former editor
of The Source magazine.

Grassroots organizers were joined by a handful of celebrities. Together,
about 400 delegates from around the nation, including representatives from
organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Black
Panther Party, created a hip hop agenda.

It focused on education, economic justice, criminal justice, health and
human rights and specifically called for better funding for public schools,
free college education, reparations, full employment, voting rights for
ex-cons, universal healthcare, funding for AIDS prevention/research, and
withdrawal of troops from occupied nations.

The next National Hip-Hop Political Convention, planned for July 2006 in
Chicago, promises to strengthen the national infrastructure. Meanwhile,
individual chapters have gotten involved in local elections. Despite
divisions on methodology hip hop's political movement has a focus on social
justice for historically oppressed people.

THE FUTURE

Now, a year removed from the mania of the Bush-Kerry presidential election,
it seems that hip hop's venture into national politics has, at a minimum,
begun to affect the way voting blocs are imagined.

While white voters are largely defined by their lifestyle during campaigns -
the so-called "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads" -minority voters are usually
defined by their race.

They are viewed by candidates as two monolithic groupings: the Black and
Latino vote. But in 2004, the hip hop vote emerged, as a testament to the
impact of popular culture on politics and an assertion of
self-identification. For the next presidential election, it will be hard to
ignore this new voting bloc.

Antagonisms of the movement will surely continue to play out. The one thing
that is in agreement is the potential power of hip hop to shape national
politics.

Maria Luisa Tucker is an AlterNet staff writer




________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism