Bakari Kitwana joined us this week for a “debate” on the meaning of “hip-hop activism.” What is “hip-hop” as a community, a generation and what is this “hip-hop activism” leading us toward? To which political genealogy is that community attempting to connect, extend, exemplify? What is the ideology of this community and what methods is it to deploy is achieving its ideological ends? We chopped some of this up and were later joined by Skipp Coon and members of the listening audience.
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I’ve gotten some criticism that I wasn’t strong or clear enough in stating my own position on the matter during today’s show. Here is what I first sent in response to Bakari’s initial question. Perhaps this will help. If not, my deepest apologies.
“There are a number of issues I have with the framing of the question as I understand it. The first includes the labeling or description of the issues and problems. The “Great Recession” is branding and euphemism meant to obscure, for instance, what the EPI had already described beforehand as Black America’s “permanent recession,” or the permanent violence of a capitalist state waged against its working classes (or castes at this point). So I do not see today as “radically different” than 2007-08. Today’s conditions are worse and worsening, both materially and ideologically/politically, but I would not call them radically different.
This leads to another concern of mine. What precisely is a “hip-hop organizer” and just what is “our movement?” I do not like tags like “hip-hop organizer” because, much like my previous point, I think it is branding meant to obscure the need for and existence of actual political activists attempting to organize a much needed mass social movement whose goal is revolution or an entire overthrow of an unjust system. What is a “hip-hop organizer” trying to do? Are they part of a Black liberation struggle? Are they part of a prison abolitionist struggle, or an anti-imperial/anti-capitalist one? Are these organizers socialists, pan-Africanists, down for armed resistance and self-defense? Are they developing alternative political parties or helping strengthen existing alternatives to the Democrats and Republicans? Or are these “hip-hop organizers” as I see them, hustlers for non-profit dollars and sponsorship from soft liberal entities with solely Democratic party politics?
I think those who have allowed for the imposition of these phrases need to have the same squabbles all other groups have had. If “hip-hop” is now somehow a replacement identity – something with which I strongly disagree – then it too needs to have its own “national” ideological struggles and formation. Where is the nationalism in this nation? Where is the recognition of the colonial relationship this nation has to Western empire? Where is the resistance to tyranny and empire? How can hip-hop work for Obama and U.S. empire? A truly liberated hip-hop nation would remember its colonized status and a need to reignite its revolutionary nationalism in order to gain control over and defense of itself. And it would not reduce its struggle to voting for a Democrat or even voting at all. This is what anti-colonial struggles require, this is what liberated communities strive for. And yet we have this thing called a “hip-hop organizer” which seems to me far more a servant to neo-colonialism, a quieting, calming, fire-fighting purpose, when as a cultural expression hip-hop was born out of anti-colonial roots, there to make noise and rile people up to ignite fires in their radical imaginations if nowhere else.
The greatest, most observable difference between now and 2007-08 is in a growing awareness that no one man imposed on us from on high can become president and fix anything. And yet even as some begin to question support for Obama or the system that produced him here comes the “hip-hop organizer” to remind them of the danger in not supporting him, the established order. And of course they would have to after nearly four years of Obama and his blaming Black people and Africans for their poverty; after extending the U.S. military into the African continent and bombing Africa in quite an unprecedented fashion; after his equally unprecedented love affair with Wall Street and military funding; after his lies to unions to support their ability to organize working people; after his refusal to act for Troy Davis or any of the other unjustly incarcerated women and men – those not already elderly and politically backward ivy league professors; after refusing to act on his promise to close GITMO; after his denunciation of his own claim to love single-payer health care; after his support for an increase in predator drone strikes and war crimes against Palestinians; after his extension of the Patriot Act or the signing of his indefinite military detention law; or his deporting more Latinos than any other president in history and his defense of the Mexico border fence; or his being graded as a “D” for his non-action on post-levees New Orleans communities all we seem to get from “hip-hop organizers” is to vote for him.
Never mind the sheer anti-hip-hop, anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-people politics inherent in a vote for Obama. It is the absence of radical analysis or action, an absence of any hint of radical nationalism, an absence of creative radical imagination that is the true shame and tragedy here. As a multi-form cultural expression of colonized people hip-hop has and continues to inspire so much more and yet the imposition of “hip-hop organizers” reduces that imagination to support for its enemy and a denial of even the possibility of alternative political organization or action.
George Jackson remains correct in asking, “what good is vote after the fact of monopoly capital?” Hip-hop desperately needs less “hip-hop organizers” and more political education, organization and activism in order for it to do more to answer Jackson’s question and respond accordingly. “
Jared I couldn’t have said it any better than that my Brother. I just want to add to your comments the extreme irony of Obama’s warmongering; that cat received The Nobel Peace prize. WTF!!!!
Keep doing what you do Brother Ball.
The Noble Peace prize is a joke. If I remember correctly the man who invented it awarded the first one to himself to clean up his image. The reason he needed to clean up his image was because he was the inventor of dynamite. At that point in time dynamite had made many widows in the mining industry and elsewhere in the economy. Henry Kissinger got a peace prize too, so I really don’t know what else to say.
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“Hip-hop activism” and the “hip-hop generation” are both misguided terms, in my opinion.
“Hip-hop activism” seems to revolve around the idea that if you can reach this big mass of people, the “hip-hop generation”, and politicize them, you can do a lot of positive things.
I agree it’s a very alluring idea.
I think the problem with it comes from the term “hip-hop” — it’s a genre of music, but it’s also a culture. I think this leads to the muddying of the term to where certain academics (Kitwana, Chang) imagine this mass of people who are all linked and are all one big family who need to be harnessed.
The big, big problem is – who is this “hip-hop generation” that they are trying to reach?
There is a big group of people who are “hip-hop music fans”, but they often don’t have much in common other than that they like some of the same songs.
Even within hip-hop music fans, you have huge divisions (a fan of A Tribe Called Quest often has little in common with a fan of Lil Wayne and they both have little in common with a fan of Jedi Mind Tricks). They have no particular political ideology and they are interested in “hip-hop” as a form of music first and foremost.
There is a much, much smaller group of people who think of hip-hop as the musical genre, PLUS b-boying and graffiti. The problem is this group has no political ideology either, it is only a few people compared to the hip-hop music fans, and they are not really joined in any way as a group other than through a few b-boy events, etc.
These are the only two groups of people you can really lump under the term “hip-hop” and have it mean anything.
What’s funny is that when they talk about the “hip-hop generation” they’re trying to reach, Kitwana and Chang both use definitions that have little to do with either of these groups.
Kitwana says it’s African Americans born between 65-84, Chang says it’s anyone born after Kool Herc who wants to be a part of it. So why use the term “hip-hop” at all if there is such a minor, tenuous link to hip-hop?
I was writing something similar. I don’t think Hip-hop can be remotely termed as a movement. Hip-hop appears to me to be nothing more than a medium. The fact of the matter is that power to define what Hip-hop is or isn’t doesn’t rest in the hands of people like Mr.Jared Ball. Not because his outlook is wrong but simply because people like him don’t have large enough institutions to promulgate their working definition of what Hip-hop is on an international level. You can say Hip-hop is people like Public Enemy, while people like Clive Davis who are engaged in industry can tell the world every day it’s 50cent. Without the prerequisite of work that needs to be done outside of the Hip-hop arena such as community control and cooperative economics you can’t have any relevant grip on the cultures representation. Hip-hop as a medium can raise awareness but it doesn’t make a movement. Being aware that someone is being robbed doesn’t mean that everyone whom is aware agrees to stop it. Just like being aware of gentrification doesn’t make every perpetrator move because they liked the track you just dropped. (this is the short version)
The above is true –
hip-hop is a medium that can used to spread many different political ideologies, but it is not a political ideology in itself.
You can be, for example, an “anti-capitalist activist” who uses hip-hop music, or graf, or b-boying events to spread your anti-capitalism message, but being a “hip-hop activist” doesn’t describe anything other than being someone who uses it as a medium… it doesn’t describe your politics at all.