Hip-Hop from Pop Charts to Politics

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Hip-hop-based movements have had success in organizing around individual issues, but becoming a movement requires a broad-based agenda that grows out of those local victories. In the book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence, Alexis McGill, the former political director for hip-hop entrepreneur and activist Russell Simmons’ campaign to reform the draconian Rockefeller drug laws in New York state, tells author Keli Goff, “I don’t think it’s effective to organize around being black. I think it’s effective to organize around class, education, criminal justice—things that affect us disproportionately because we are black.”

Simmons’ campaign was at least partially successful. The League of Young Voters has chapters in nine states and has lobbied on the local level for everything from re-enfranchising ex-felons in Pittsburgh to preventing cops in New Mexico from wearing guns on school campuses. The Hip Hop Caucus, which lobbies directly on Capitol Hill, received an award from the Institute for Policy Studies for its work on issues related to Hurricane Katrina.

Hip-hop can “help people come to consciousness,” says Rob “Biko” Baker of the League of Young Voters. He points out that the Christian right is supported by a bevy of powerful, well-financed groups, and adds that, for a movement based on hip-hop to be effective as more than just a funnel for social discontent, “we need strong institutions . . . we’re talking about jobs, schools. We’re not trying to throw rocks at tanks.”

Reprinted from the American Prospect(Oct. 2008), “an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics”; www.prospect.org.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print