Hip-hop politics must look beyond 2004
At a workshop on hip-hop and politics at a Service Employees International Union conference in Cincinnati earlier this month, one hip-hop generationer told me, "I registered to vote and plan to vote in 2004 because George W. Bush has got to go."
It's a sentiment echoed by many in the hip-hop generation. It's also become a battle cry for many on the left seeking to enlist hip-hop youth in their cause. But those who hope to use hip-hop as a tool in this election cycle should really look beyond 2004.
But first, it's important to make clear why we as a generation identify with hip-hop in the first place. The music and culture of hip-hop have too often been portrayed in the mainstream -- from Dan Quayle to Bill O'Reilly -- as outlaw culture. Of course, many rap artists have participated in this image making. But beyond its talk of pimps and "bytches," hip-hop music speaks to a generation disappointed by public policy that negatively affected urban youth in the late 1970s.
Along with bleak job prospects, young people were saddled with rising incarceration rates and deteriorating education. Conditions for poor, working class, and middle class youth only worsened in the 1980s and 1990s, extending beyond the borders of American cities into suburban and rural communities.
The civil rights establishment -- just as society overall -- has long been ineffective in addressing these critical issues. As a result, black, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American members of the hip-hop generation hope to take up the torch of a fading civil rights movement and renergize it. In organizations such as the San Francisco-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the Chicago Hip-Hop Political Action Committee, Boston-based Critical Breakdown, and the New York based League of Young Voters, we've been asking this basic question: "How can the national infrastructure created by hip-hop's cultural movement be used to bring about substantive social change in the lives of American youth?"
While grassroots "raptivists" have labored tirelessly in the hinterlands, the arrival of hip-hop as mainstream American popular culture has raised the stakes, catapulting our discussions into the national arena.
Some organizations, like the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, are working to register the almost 20 million young people who didn't vote in the last presidential election. If George W. is ousted, certainly they will have played a role. Kudos to them if he is.
But if George W. is reelected, where will that leave amped up new young voters expecting their vote to yield a regime change? Countless young people turned off by the stolen election of 2000 still use it as an excuse to sit on the sidelines. Hip-hop generationers are by nature skeptical of electoral politics. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool them twice? We may lose them forever.
President Bush aside, what would a John Kerry win really mean for young voters? Anti-Affirmative Action Kerry is no more the hip-hop generation's candidate than our current president. The truth is that a vote for either is a vote for politics as usual. This isn't what a true hip-hop political movement should be after.
Rather the changes our movement seeks include living wage jobs, affordable housing and child care, more fair criminal justice policy, and effective education. In short, our ideal candidate would be about correcting where American society went wrong on the youth question.
That's why a multicultural coalition of hip-hop activist organizations, hip-hop generation political operatives, young politicians, and hip-hop artists from across the country will gather in Newark June 17-19 for a National Hip-Hop Political Convention. The aim is to establish a national agenda for the hip-hop generation and become an identifiable political force.
At a minimum such an interest group must be concerned with not being beholden to either political party, nurturing new candidates with fresh vision, and pushing an agenda that matters to hip-hop generationers.
Such a voting bloc won't emerge overnight, but it's an essential first step in convincing the hip-hop generation that they have both a future in this country and a voice that needs to be heard.
Bakari Kitwana is the author of "The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture" and co-founder of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.
