Monday, August 18th, 2008

Scenes From An Uprising? Part 1

On Saturday at the Rock The Bells festival in the Bay Area, 20,000 middle fingers were raised against Fox News.

“They are the past. We are the future,” Nas shouted from center stage, before dropping the beat from “Black President”. “We can change the world.”

Hip-hop gatherings seem lately to have been taking on the feel of political rallies or cadre discussions. Could it be that there’s a new wind blowing?

At the Ozone Awards, Davey D asked an artist panel what their role might be in the upcoming elections. Rather than shrug, as rappers have often done in the past, Killer Mike responded like a seasoned strategist, outlining the moment in the context of a history of Black politics. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary.

Backstage at Rock The Bells, folks like De La Soul, Dead Prez, and Immortal Technique had a lot to say about politics, but so did folks like Redman, Wu-Tang producer Mathematics and rapper Streetlife, and many others. They talked about whether or not to vote, and whether, as YZ once put it, a Black President might be the solution or just another question.

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years,” Method Man laughed. “And ever since I’ve been doing this, there hasn’t been this many questions about the election. Nobody has ever asked me that until Obama started running.”

On the grounds at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, hundreds of kids in colorful Obama shirts roamed through the crowd. One kid wore a black tee that altered De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” logo into a statement: “Gas Is High”.

Rock The Bells promoter Chang Weisberg said the tenor of the festival had changed since last year. “People are not happy with gas prices, they’re not happy with the mortgage crisis, they’re not happy with their life in general,” he said.

When the festival comes to Denver next week to informally open the Democratic Convention week there, it will signal the arrival of a number of hip-hop artists the likes of which no political convention has ever seen in this country.

Aside from the RTB lineup, folks like Bun B, The Coup, Rage Against The Machine, Rebel Diaz, Blue Scholars, Wyclef, John Legend, and the Black Eyed Peas will be in town. Celebs like Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson will also be on hand.

Some will come to participate in the Convention, some to protest it, some to party with the party, some to party in spite of the party—most to witness the history they might finally feel like they have a hand in making.

Silhouetted against the sunset on Saturday, Nas looked out into the crowd and said, “I don’t believe in politicians or none of that. I believe in the people.”

And the people roared.

posted by @ 11:21 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Obama Comes Home

It was like almost any other day in a Honolulu waterfront park. Ka’au Crater Boys playing on the sound system. Kids throwing a football around. Tradewinds blowing savory smoke in from the barbecue pits at the far end of the parking lot, and the occasional light rain against a sunny sky.

Except for the line of 4,000 people that stretched all the way around the perimeter of the park.

They had come to witness the first visit by a major presidential candidate to the islands since Richard Nixon in 1960, and the first ever nominee from Hawai’i. When he bounded up with his wife onto the small makeshift stage, threw up a shaka, and shouted, “Howzit!” into the mic, the crowd went crazy. Barack Obama had come home.

The rally was a last-minute addition to what was supposed to be a quiet family vacation. “I didn’t come here to politick,” Obama, dressed in a black polo and pleated khakis, told the crowd in their “One In A Million” and “Obama ‘Ohana” shirts. “I’m going to get a plate lunch. I’m going to go get some shave ice. I might bodysurf at an undisclosed location.”

But after a week of taking a battering from the McCain camp for having the audacity to take a short week-long summer break, Obama campaign staff looked his schedule—which only had a Tuesday $1 million fundraiser at the uber-bougie Kahala Hotel—and hastily added an appearance for the people.

In claiming Ke’ehi Lagoon Park, they displaced the ceremonies for Samoan Flag Day—the biggest Samoan community celebration of the year—and everyone knows you don’t get the clans angry. Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann surely had some roundtable diplomacy to do.

By Obama standards, the rally—which most islanders only found out about when it was announced on the front-page of the morning paper—was ragged. There were no Obama merch vendors, the volunteer staff looked thin, the program was barely over a half-hour from beginning to end.

Obama himself seemed a bit exhausted. He turned his “non-political” speech into a brief version of his stump, but barely touched on the economy and missed opportunities to craft his message to local concerns, like the proposed rapid transit system or environmental issues. This state is bluer than the Pacific; no politicking was necessary.

But the crowd didn’t care. Here was a genuine keiki o ka ‘aina, a child of the land, Hawai’i’s own. Instead of playing to their needs, Obama played to their dreams. Islanders want nothing more than to be respected as equal Americans, but respect is hard to come by when you’ve been reduced to giving leis to haoles from Japan or “the mainland”.

So the local political luminaries who introduced Obama—from Senator Daniel Akaka to old Obama family friend Congressman Neil Abercrombie to Hannemann—spent their few CSPAN minutes talking up Hawai’i’s diversity.

Hannemann, in particular, recalled seeing John F. Kennedy speaking here in 1963, making an impression on the young politico by saying that Hawai’i represented where the rest of the country needed to go. Forty-five years later, the culturally literate Obama is the living proof.

Where Obama’s 20-minute address was thin in details, it was long in history. “A lot of people ask me how Hawai’i has shaped me”, he said. He told them that it was the aloha spirit that taught him the value of empathy, gave him the understanding that everyone needs to be responsible for each other.

He spoke of how his haole grandparents saw the islands as “the New Frontier”, a place where they could still reach the American dream. “Everybody here understands that,” Obama said, “whether they’re coming from east or west. We’ve got to make sure that the dream still lives.”

Lofty, sure, but it’s also what indigenous people call the ‘settler’ narrative. The sad truth is that Hawai’i has never been as racially egalitarian as it likes to make itself out to be. The day before Obama’s speech, Native Hawaiians at Naue on the north shore of Kaua’i blockaded a haole developer from tearing up 30 ancient gravesites to build himself an ocean-front McMansion.

But we do figure out ways to get along. In a small space bounded by water on all sides, you must learn to.

The hope of Obama—whom everyone in the crowd understood was in a hurry to go and see his tutu, his grandma from Kansas—is that he can help make things pono, make things right. The worry is that he won’t find the correct balance.

In Hawai’i, the space where the water meets the land is a place of celebration and gathering or where dreams and histories get paved for parking lots.

Before descending to shake hands and give hugs to the home crowd, Obama grinned broadly and waved.

“I’ll see you on the beach!” he shouted.

posted by @ 10:17 am | 0 Comments

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Bakari Kitwana On Luda & Obama

Bakari Kitwana on Luda-Obama. A worthy read:

“Obama will likely weather this storm even easier than the previous ones. But what the Ludacris controversy reveals for the hip-hop activist community is much more profound: the baggage presented by hip-hop’s public image compromises the hip-hop activist community’s attempts to place its issues on the national agenda.”

posted by @ 8:53 am | 3 Comments

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Luda Could Use Some Education

The hum on the opening day at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention was that Ludacris had played himself. Badly.

Green Party vice presidential candidate Rosa Clemente put it best, “I have no love for Hillary’s politics and what it’s done to our folks, but I could feel her going through all the stuff she’s had to go through as a woman.”

Rap can say whatever it wants, and right now it wants to talk about the elections. That’s cool.

But Ludacris seemed to want to reduce serious politics to stale old battle rhymes. Come on, man. You got a degree from Georgia State. Rap deserves more than that.

We know that these days it’s gangsta to be political. But if you really want to battle on that level, step up your game, else you’ll just become another tool for the right-wing talk-show circuit.

Shoot, even Jeezy came with it when it was his turn.

Oddly enough, all this came on a day that the National Hip-Hop Political Convention focused on the educational possibilities of hip-hop. Hip-hop artists, teachers, professors, grad students, folks from the Hip-Hop Think Tank, and not a few young heads from the street came to UNLV yesterday to get into the ability of hip-hop to open minds.

Among the talks, rapper Asheru presented curriculum he had put together, using hip-hop songs by Nas, Common, Lauryn Hill, and even his own work for The Boondocks. He showed how you could take one song–say Mos Def’s “New World Water”–and break it down for english teachers, social studies teachers, and science teachers, using it to teach lessons about everything from poetry to hydrology. All of this was news we could use.

Listening, Luda?

As Marc Lamont Hill put it in his rousing closing address yesterday re: Lupe, right now is no time to dumb it down.

posted by @ 7:53 am | 4 Comments

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

National Hip-Hop Political Convention Opens

Today, the National Hip-Hop Political Convention opens in Las Vegas.

Thousands are expected to attend the Convention, with some coming from as far as Colombia and South Korea yesterday for the opening b-boy battle, that featured a showdown between Las Vegas’s Knucklehead Zoo and the R16 champs, Gamblerz.

They will be discussing issues like the criminalization of youth, youth violence, the right of return on the Gulf Coast, media justice, sexism in hip-hop, economic justice, Black-Brown solidarity, global warming, liberation theology, and vote disenfranchisement. (I’m speaking today at an all-day symposium on the place of hip-hop in academia. alongside folks like Asheru, Byron Hurt, Marc Lamont Hill, and many others.)

Dozens of skills-building trainings around voter registration, lobbying, organizing, media, film making, and even krumping will be held, showing that the organizers draw no distinction between arts and social justice. Some of the best recent underground films on hip-hop–including “African Underground: Democracy in Dakar” and “Masizakhe: Let Us Build Together”–bring a distinctly global view of hip-hop to the event.

On Sunday Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney will give the closing address and the Convention will revise and update their hip-hop political agenda.

Keep your eye here for reports back over the coming days.

posted by @ 6:01 am | 4 Comments

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Throwback Friday :: Conspiracies & The X-Files After 9/11

In honor of The X-Files opening tonight, here’s a throwback piece I did for the late, great newsstand edition of Punk Planet shortly after 9/11.

It was about the wave of CIA/FBI/Intelligence-themed shows. From a TV perspective, it seems a little dated now. “Alias” jumped the shark really fast, “The Agency” lasted less than a blink, and we now know “24” was the work of a right-winger.

Still, I am pretty proud of this piece for trying to capture the vibe of the time, a vibe that today–after the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Katrina, and more–hardly seems marginal anymore.

It also gets to why I still love Chris Carter’s Mulder and Scully so much.

Enjoy…

NOTES ON THE NEW FACES OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
By Jeff Chang

I.

These are the times that demand entertainment. In this New War, police and fireman continue to recover 4000 bodies, the FBI interrogates a list of 5000 suspects, and countless more (they won’t tell us how many) sit in Federal and INS detention centers. And every week, 5000 resumes arrive at the C.I.A. while 20 million viewers tune in to see the new faces of central intelligence.

These faces are emotionally cold lone gunmen, like “24”’s Jack Bauer on “24”. They are built for speed but haunted by death, like “Alias”’s Sydney Bristow. They fall in love with beautiful, dark-skinned agents of Al-Qaeda, like the hapless, balding Jackson Haisley of “The Agency”.

Sometimes they fight with their daughters or turn in their homework late. In a typical 9 to 5, they might manufacture ancient Buddhist scrolls and dot them with monkey piss to prevent the destabilization of Tibet. They get their coffee and drive their SUVs to work in offices that look like last-year’s dot-com.

They’re your spooks next door. They have emotional attachments and cell phones. They have friends of other races. They hope for somebody to love and trust. They’re no longer the reclusive ROTC recruit in the next dorm room, they’re walking signboards for the 21st Century intelligence agent.

All of these shows reveal a huge debt to “The X-Files” and its exemplars of anti-intelligence, FBI agents Dana Scully and the now-departed Fox Mulder of “The X-Files”. And the timing couldn’t be better. Because of network competition to fill the void soon to be left by the slow-motion exit of “The X-Files” and tragic coincidence, the shows have arrived on network television just in time to run between news clips of the New War.

But while Mulder and Scully fought for their future with rebel hearts under a hopeless rallying cry—“The truth is out there”—the career spooks of “The Agency” adhere to the company line: “Truth is what we make it.” (“Alias” has an even dumber tag: “Sometimes the truth hurts.”) It seems as if the new agents were born to fight for the past—restoring the Old Normal of the Cold War, when intelligence and “failure” weren’t synonymous.

II.

Meanwhile, the New War continues.

Dr. Siddharth Shah, 29, cuts a fine profile—tall, dark, handsome, with chiseled cheekbones and a strong chin. On Monday, September 17, as he was leaving the Kansas City airport, he was stopped by a Missouri state trooper.

He had just arrived from New York City to visit a terminally ill friend. The trooper told them he was stopping Shah and his South Asian friend for a loud muffler. No, a quick lane change. Finally he simply asked for what he really wanted—their ID’s. “I’m just giving you a warning’”, the cop said. “I don’t mean to give you a ticket.”

Another officer pulled up and together they did a computer check. It seemed to take a long time. When the cop returned to the car, Shah asked why they had been stopped. The cop answered, “I think you’d agree if I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t be doing my job.” Somewhat embarassed, the cop released them and admitted, ‘This is a great lesson in diversity for me.’”

The next day, when Shah tried to depart from Kansas City International Airport, an announcement came over the p.a. system, “There has been an equipment change which will require the shifting of some seats. Would Mr. S-H-A-H please come to the desk?” When Shah went to the desk, he was met by a police officer and an FBI officer who took him to a windowless room and began interrogating him.

They asked where he had been born, if he was a citizen. Shah was born in Houston, Texas. They asked him why he was leaving so quickly. He explained that, as a doctor, he had very little time off. They asked for his physician’s badge, and he produced it. They replied, “We’re very sorry. We’re responding to the airlines’ worries. Your name is on a list of Muslim names.”

Shah laughs at the memory: “My first name points them to me probably being Buddhist, Jain, or Hindu. And I explained to them, ‘Did you know that Shah is the second most common last name among Indian Americans?’” The agent replied, “I’m sorry. We’re very ignorant about your culture. I’m sorry for your inconvenience.’”

III.

On the night of November 5, 2001, M. William Cooper did not die on his knees. One of the two Apache County sheriffs that came for him received a bullet in the head. The other shot Cooper dead on the desolate stretch of Arizona desert where he lived with his shortwave radio, two dogs, a rooster, and a chicken.

In recent months, the author of *Behold A Pale Horse* was being sought for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and charges of endangerment, the result of incidents in which Cooper threatened people who had stopped near his home. He had previously been sought for tax evasion. After he sent his family overseas, he used his popular shortwave and Internet radio broadcasts to boast that he would not be taken alive.

His death did not only raise fears within the Patriot movement for whom he was a hero. In Harlem, at the Universal Zulu Nation’s annual celebration of Hip-Hop Month, Brother Ernie Pannicioli spoke to a gathering about Cooper’s death, placing it alongside New Black Panther Party leader Khallid Abdul Muhammad’s February death by aneurysm. “The sleeping is over,” Pannicioli thundered. “They’re coming for our freedom fighters.”

What made Cooper so compelling to rural white militiamen and street peace-makers in communities of color? His worldview grafted post-COINTELPRO conspiracy onto New World Order paranoia. *Behold A Pale Horse*, which has reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is like an overstuffed folder, 500 pages of autobiography, news clippings, photos, and allegedly top secret documents meant to document the creation of a malign, shadowy one-world government. Armageddon’s already here, Cooper was saying. *Behold A Pale Horse* is your late pass.

The book’s influence remains stunning. South African health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang recently stirred an international outcry when she distributed to fellow African health officials a memo and excerpts of the book that argued that AIDS was introduced into Africa in 1978 by the Illuminati. “Protect your continent now”, the memo said. Cooper’s eclecticism had become a worldview.

While he probably expected his readership would largely be high-plains tax protestors and free-land patriots, the book found a willing readership on the streets as well. For many, it confirmed what they had believed for years, in sometimes prescient fashion. Cooper spoke of CIA ops that smuggled drugs into the ghetto to finance covert political operations. The proof would later be uncovered by reporter Gary Webb in his famous “Dark Alliance” series, and further investigated by Congresswoman Maxine Waters in hearings.

Cooper argued that drug war legislation and the FEMA act was laying the ground-work for the establishment of a police state, reviving memories of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO. But, as further evidence of the New World Order, Cooper also offered up the long-discredited “Protocols of The Elders of Zion” (to which he affixed instructions that “any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’”).

Cooper’s worldview—sans its apparently anti-Semitic leanings—hit the mainstream on September 10, 1993 when “The X-Files” debuted. Fox Mulder’s Cooper-esque rantings about one-world government, master-race plotters, alien abductees, secret torture chambers, and massive Tuskegee-style bioterror experiments felt realer than reality, like a speculative history of the Cold War in which the actual struggle was between the leaders and the people. Set against end-of-history crowing and wwweb ecstasy, the “X-Files” message was subversive and immediate: Evil still walks among us. Governments and nation-states are involved. All of humanity’s survival is at stake.

For the small screen, it was a pretty big picture.

IV.

These days, the picture on the screen is merely pretty, as if to melt the images of September 11 with beauty and quick-cuts.

“Alias”’s Sydney Bristow (played by Jennifer Garner, GQ’s September 2001 “Woman On Our Mind”) is thin as an arrow, and runs like Franka Potente’s Lola around a very short track. Recruited off the UCLA campus before she could legally drink, she came to the agency wide-eyed seven years ago, and now is trapped on a treadmill of fear.

Her fiancé is dead because she revealed to him that she was a C.I.A. agent. She has since learned that she actually works for SD-6, a rogue agency moved by unseen hands. She has become a double-agent, working with the real C.I.A. to bring down SD-6, whom she blames for her fiancé’s murder. She reports to her father, whose own shifting loyalties may have directly led to her mother’s murder (Sydney’s Samantha Mulder).

These are neat circular plot devices, and each episode plays just like the tight loops of driving techno playing beneath. The exotic locales, body-tight costumes, and decent kick-boxing, are softened by intimate interludes of “normalcy” among friends. “Sydney”, wrote Joyce Millman in the New York Times, “is the perfect television heroine for the times.”

The shows display a west-coast 21st century multiculti sheen. Unlike the real C.I.A., affirmative action apparently seems to have worked. Translating Middle Eastern languages will be no problem. Sydney’s best friends and her SD-6 partner are African American. “24” adds a twist.

Its day-in-the-life story arc centers on a plot to kill David Palmer, the first Black presidential candidate, a moderate with a real chance to win the White House (no apologies to Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton). “24”’s Jack Bauer, played by the scruffily handsome Kiefer Sutherland, is runs a federal Counter Terrorism Unit office in Los Angeles. Like Clinton, Bauer is an effective leader, but a personal fuck-up. “24”’s eye-popping split screens capture Bauer’s compartmentalized conscience.

Bauer soon learns that the assassins have ties within the Agency, and that they may be also involved with the kidnapping of his daughter. Jack Bauer’s mission is to keep hope alive—and if he fails, his daughter dies and the country will descend into race riots. “24”, too, is set in Los Angeles.

Unlike most Cold War spy-hero dramas, these stories require the intelligence community to be dirty. (Indeed, “The Agency” sucks because it has no such tension.) But most of the enemies will remain dark-skinned and conveniently foreign. You will probably not see agents providing military and intelligence training to guerillas with dubious political agendas who support their war-making by growing opium or coca. You will not see agents devastating the ghettos by cutting drugs-for-arms deals. You will not see the surveillance and harassment of nonviolent peace, anti-prison, and anti-globalization activists. You will not see dragnet roundups of thousands of innocent Arab, South Asian, and Muslim men and women. They will not be rescued from their indefinite detentions by lock-picking spooks like Sydney.

Sydney and Jack, along with the redundant cast of Cold-War dust-offs in “The Agency”, live in a safely fictional world in which Dark Alliances and COINTELPRO never occurred. The worlds are hermetically sealed, most secure from insecure global realities. A symptomatic theme is the loss of memory. In “Alias”, the Irishman who killed Sydney’s fiancé is a sleeper, remotely programmed by SD-6 to murder during black-outs that he can only recover during dream time. He is therefore completely innocent of his crimes. Sydney efficiently and obediently carries out her dual orders from the C.I.A. and SD-6. Whenever death happens, she is shocked anew to learn that her work has bloody consequences.

The “X-Files” never strayed far from the relationship of knowledge to justice: what you did not know could not only kill you, but millions of other innocents. But “24” and “Alias” operate on a “need to know” basis. Everything you need to know is right there on its shiny, quickly moving surfaces. As Karl Rove and Jack Valenti bring together politicians and entertainment execs to figure out new ways of collaborating in the New War, Sydney and Jack are signs of redemption. They bend “trust no one” into a closed question. They mark the end to Beltway/Hollywood culture-wars. They fight for an undivided America we want to remember, one that never existed. The new faces of central intelligence represent a future without a past, well insulated from the present.

posted by @ 9:30 am | 0 Comments

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Obama’s Award Tour

In Berlin, Germany, Barack Obama had a rally for 200,000 people. They wanted to believe.

Meanwhile, John McCain ate a bratwurst with businessmen and bored reporters in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio.

For the past week, Obama has been on award tour, and his message has been greeted with the kind of fervor that now makes U.S. reporters–overly sensitive to Clinton/McCain-esque charges that they are giving the guy kid-glove treatment–highly uneasy and eager to downplay.

Obama has modified his two Americas speech to talk about reconciling the world. In Germany, where at the Berlin Wall the First World once ended and the Second began, he said,

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

It was high theater. Obama was being consciously Reagan-like, consciously Kennedy-like, consciously presidential.

Earlier in the week, Iraq Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, despite being pressured by Bushites, signaled his agreement with Obama’s call for withdrawal. Suddenly Obama’s foreign policy didn’t look plagued by inexperience, but blessed with prescience.

Meanwhile, McCain cancelled a visit to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico because of Hurricane Dolly. Then a massive oil spill along the Mississippi River in New Orleans kind of spoiled the whole idea that McCain might be able to steal Obama’s thunder in the Mideast by championing the virtues of domestic drilling.

But for the Obama campaign–now well stocked with images of the true believers in Kabul, Ramallah, and Berlin to match those in Chicago, Boston, and Des Moines–the real battle will still be fought on home soil.

Despite Obama’s award tour, he has not moved the meter much. He still has a slight lead in all national polls, and there are signs that at least one key red state–Florida–is getting grapes.

But with bad news coming down the wire every day on oil prices, mortgages, and the economy, the next month leading up to the conventions will look more like trench warfare than a love parade.

Welcome back Senator Obama. Back to the grind.

posted by @ 7:32 am | 0 Comments

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Nas On Fox And Colbert

Ferentz has the update here.

posted by @ 7:11 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Nas Joins ColorOfChange To Put Fox News On Blast

Tomorrow, Nas, ColorOfChange.org, and MoveOn.org will deliver petitions to Fox News signed by over 600,000 people protesting their racist coverage of people of color, particularly Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle.

“Fox poisons the country with racist propaganda and tries to call it news,” said Nas.

“Watch what you watchin’, FOX keeps feeding us toxins, Stop sleeping, Start thinking.” he raps on his song “Sly Fox”. “I pledge allegiance to the fair and balanced truth/Not the biased truth/Not the liar’s truth/But the highest truth.”

The protest itself is historic, bringing together one of the top rappers with the two most dynamic political netroots organizations.

MoveOn.org launched the netroots revolution after 9/11 and now boasts over 3 million members. ColorOfChange.org is the largest netroots of color organization, with a membership of almost half a million members, and is best known for its national call for demonstrations in support of the Jena 6 last fall. Together the organizations launched protests than prevented Fox News from broadcasting a Democratic presidential debate last year.

ColorOfChange.org gathered the 620,217 signatures over the last month as Fox News’s attacks on the Obamas increased, from the “terrorist fist jab” to “baby mama” comments.

posted by @ 11:20 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

National Hip-Hop Political Convention Opens In 2 Weeks

Like most of the others, this one’s xposted to Vibe.com…

Since the first National Hip-Hop Political Convention was held in Newark New Jersey in the summer of 2004, young voters have come to the polls in big turnouts, driven by a landmark surge of young voters of color. This surprised many long-time political observers, but not the organizers of the Convention—full disclosure: I was there—who had seen the growth of hip-hop activism and organizing around the country.

After the Convention, those efforts continued around the country, joined by high-profile voter registration campaigns by Diddy and Russell Simmons. Those efforts continue today. Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network has taken Hip-Hop Team Vote to a number of campuses. T.I. is joining the Hip-Hop Caucus’s efforts to register and turn out young people to vote in 12 target states, including swing states like Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio.

When the third National Hip-Hop Political Convention opens in Las Vegas on July 30th—in the heart of another swing state, Nevada—it can boast of its role in expanding the field of hip-hop generation elected officials and candidates, including co-founder Rosa Clemente who will be addressing the body as the Green Party vice presidential candidate. Representatives of the Democratic and Republican National Committees will also be speaking. The focus will be the Convention’s political agenda, first forged in Newark in 2004.

2008 Convention Chair Troy Nkrumah took time away from a heavy load of emails, text messages, and phone calls to talk with Vibe.com about the importance of the Convention and its agenda, and what role it hopes to play in this historic election and beyond.

Vibe: This is the third National Hip-Hop Political Convention. Why is it important to hold this convention in 2008?

Troy Nkrumah: The whole idea from the start was to develop a political agenda for the hip hop generation. The political agenda is a living document. It’s not set in stone like the Ten Commandments. So the Convention needs to continue to happen to keep the agenda relevant. This convention is even more important than the last because there is more of a possibility of getting at least parts of this agenda implemented with the change of administration coming up. Now that we have people actually expressing that agenda on the national stage, then it makes the other parties look at it.

It’s a time for us as the hip-hop generation to step up and say, we put this agenda out and now we want to see where people really stand on it and we’re calling you to task. You can’t take us for granted anymore.

Vibe: What are the main issues that you’ll be pushing?

TN: The first one is the Katrina issue. We want to keep it fresh in everybody’s minds that this has not been resolved. There are still people with no right to return because they can’t afford to. We have issues on gender relations, exposing the troublesome sexual politics of the hip-hop generation. Criminal justice is going to be top on the agenda. We have artists and activists—Rebel Diaz, a rap group out of Chicago who were recently abused by NYPD, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, and Regina Kelley out of Texas who was thrown in jail by a drug task force over a confidential informant who lied.

Vibe: Over the last 4 years, there has been a sharp increase in numbers of young people and people of color going out to vote. A number of hip-hop generation candidates, such as Kevin Powell and Rosa Clemente, are running across the country. What role has the Convention played in developing the space for hip-hop generation candidates?

TN: After the first convention, I think a lot of people left Newark, New Jersey, with this feeling like,

‘Why are we depending on these other candidates who will tell us whatever we want to hear, why don’t we start our own people? So what we saw was a lot of people running for office,

running for school board or city council. And now we see people like Kevin Powell who has a really good chance of beating an incumbent. It’s the work of the Convention to show people that it goes beyond demanding people recognize our agenda. If they’re not going to, we have no choice but to run ourselves. This year we’re going to push that a little further and start preparing for the mid-term elections in 2010.

It’s hard to measure how much of an impact hip-hop activism has played. Some people say that it played a really big role, that the work that we did in 2003 and 2004 is the reason Obama can be taken seriously today. Without laying the foundation, a lot of young people would be still saying, ‘The hell with voting. It doesn’t do anything. But we’ve changed that perception.

It goes beyond the presidential elections. We didn’t really take into consideration that the prosecutors and judges who are locking up a lot of Brown and Black people are in elected positions. So I think the 2004 convention educated a lot of the activist community in hip-hop to say we have to take the electoral part seriously. We can’t depend on it as the only outlet. But they’re using it against us, so why not switch it and use it for us?

Vibe: Do you expect we’re going to see big interest in the elections this year?

TN: We know that there are going to be record turnouts at the polls. Now whether or not the elections are going to be fair and whether all the votes are going to be counted is a whole ‘nother story. The question is: If Obama gets the election stolen from him, as did Gore and Kerry, is he going to be willing to fight it? Gore wasn’t. Nor was Kerrey. If the elections are stolen again, if the Democrats don’t step up to the plate, they’re going to lose an entire generation putting their last bit of faith in the electoral system.

However, it’s going to be powerful to see how big of an impact these young, first time progressive voters actually affect this election. If they do decide this election, then they can understand that they can decide every election. It’s up to us—the activists, the organizers who do this year round—to channel that energy to go beyond November and make it a part of hip-hop culture.

posted by @ 2:29 pm | 1 Comment



Previous Posts

Feed Me!

Revolutions

Word

Fiyahlinks


twitter_logo

@zentronix

Come follow me now...

Archives

We work with the Creative Commons license and exercise a "Some Rights Reserved" policy. Feel free to link, distribute, and share written material from cantstopwontstop.com for non-commercial uses.

Requests for commercial uses of any content here are welcome: come correct.

Creative Commons License