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C.O.U.P. News Exclusive
UPTURNING THE CHILDREN'S TABLE: HIPHOP GENERATION ATTEMPTS TO CLAIM LEADERSHIP
But Are Meetings And Agendas Enough?
By Todd Steven Burroughs
June 21, 2004
The members of the HipHop Generation, also known as Generation X's
People Of Color and Progressive Whites Division, are all turning 40 this
year, and next, and next, and to infinity-okay, at least all the way until
2020, when the last ones reach the Big Four-O.
Before Angela Bassett, Oprah Winfrey and Lynne Whitfield, before Bill and Hillary Clinton became White House residents and before the Black Panther Party had regular reunions, turning 40 used to mean you were over-the-hill, ready for irrelevancy. The Baby Boomers, now all between 60 and 40, used to say in the late 1960s and early 1970s that they couldn't trust anyone over 30, because 30 was old-a sellout, a member of the Establishment happily co-opted by the system. Now the formerly Afroed and tye-dyed are running the world, and they don't trust anyone under 40. An interesting concept: A generation who in their 20s and early 30s ran national organizations (Black Panther Party, SDS, SNCC, et. al.) now is explaining that, say, 37, is too young. (Meaning, of course, "too young to take my job, my role.") "Youth" now means under, what, 50?
This new phenomenon particularly is true among Black and Latino Boomers, who think (correctly?) that they created the modern Civil Rights Movement, The Black/Brown Power Movement, modern America and post-modern America. They're just kids, they say of those born between 1964 and 1980. Not ready. Not part of Our Pioneering Club. They Haven't Done The Things We Have. They Don't Know Anything.
The 40-something Chuck D must've observed this, too. Because he felt compelled to remind the 200 or so delegates and observers to the first National Hip Hop Political Convention in Newark, N.J. last Saturday (June 19) that nobody old enough to be there was a "youth" anymore, regardless of what Baby Boomers say. That anyone 18 and older was a legal grown-up, ready to vote and to die in Iraq. And that grown people had to handle their business themselves.
A task easier said than done. The delegates and the observers were sincere, organized, and ready for the-well, they were ready for some kind of change. (There were Juniors and Thirds as well as firsts. Fred Hampton, Jr., meet Ron Rice Jr., son of a New Jersey state senator. Okay, now start arguing.) The city of Newark threw itself behind the event. And as well it should, since the city's Deputy Mayor is Ras Baraka, the son of the great activist/writer Amiri Baraka. (A friend of this writer, Marcus Reeves, told me that Newark Mayor Sharpe James actually welcomed the conferees by sporting serious gear.) Each one reached one and teached one in more than 20 workshops. Business cards seemed to shoot through the air from hand to hand. Alternative media was the mainstream for that weekend. Delegates from the various states waved their placards in the air to the sound of dead prez, one of many groups performing for free. And no, it wasn't about the personality. Contrary to popular belief, Ras Baraka, one of the conveners, wasn't trying to be coronated as the New Black Leader.
Then what was it about?
It was about operating in the model of the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. Gary is considered a highpoint of the Black Power Movement-especially by people who were there. Amiri Baraka, basking in the success of using Black Power ideology to elect Newark's first Black mayor two years previously, did an extraordinary job trying to keep all the groups together. The Black agenda the delegation wrote was one of the most thorough of its time, then and now. But many have chosen not to remember that the agenda, by and large, was neither embraced nor followed by the Civil Rights Movement leadership or the newly emerging Black political leadership. Meanwhile, the National Black Political Assembly, the continuation of the Gary confab, faded by the coming of the now late Ray-Gun, followed by the now-irrelevant Jesse.
Skip the mixtape CD to the 2004 track. A new national agenda has been convened by a new Baraka-this time, though, with the contributions of activists of all colors under the hiphop umbrella. (Not a bad idea; after all, Organized COUP already updated the Gary agenda a couple of years back.) Somewhere, Kwame Ture, the Great Activist Ancestor, is showing those big, white teeth of his. Organization, check. Agenda, check. Funding for an organization to implement said agenda... um, not yet. And Dad won't let any of them drive his leadership car.
The HipHop generation understands that it's not about Captain Jean-Luc Picard replacing James T. Kirk or Static replacing Black Lightning. It's about every generation creating action for itself. Rosa Clemente, a conference organizer, said on Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" that the conference's planners did not ask anyone's permission to hold a national political convention and to represent progressive America. Right. But until the Hip Hop Generation figures out how to carve a non-symbolic niche as the middle child of three (competing?) generations of people of color, its actions are little more than the production of another document, another repeat of that well-known Fanon quote ("Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it"), another well-meaning website and the (sometimes) empty act of waving placards.
It's a challenge, though, not insurmountable to those who single-handedly created a worldwide, billion-dollar culture out of boredom, spray paint cans, cardboard, turntables and some 45s. It's just going to require a difficult, and new, first step: fundraising and buying the park before putting the speakers in place.
Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D. (tburroughs@jmail.umd.edu), 36, is an independent researcher/writer based in Hyattsville, Md. He is a primary author of Civil Rights Chronicle (Legacy), a history of the Civil Rights Movement, and a contributor to Putting The Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching (Teaching For Change/Poverty & Race Research Action Council), a K-12 teaching guide of the Civil Rights Movement. He is writing a biography of Death Row writer Mumia Abu-Jamal.