Politics of the hip-hop generation
If any one can claim to be authority on whether hip hop will affect the 2008 Presidential election, it’s surely Bakari Kitwana.
The former editor of The Source magazine, the author of The Hip-Hop Generation and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, Kitwana is undeniably one of the country’s best-known “hip hop” intellectuals.
And he’s the 2007-2008 Artist-in-Residence in the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Of the choice to bring Kitwana to Chicago, Waldo Johnson, Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, said: “It’s impossible to understand today’s global youth culture and contemporary constructions of race, gender and sexuality without insight into hip-hop.”
Kitwana believes that hip hop is an emerging political force. In fact, he believes that the pundits and political analysts have the Obama phenomenon backward. It’s not the campaign of Sen. Obama that’s driving the youth voters to polls in record numbers. “Young voters have already been mobilizing. Obama just happens to be the beneficiary.”
Kitwana believes that people of the “hip hop generation” have a different world view. “They’re born in a post-segregation America,” he says, of the hip hop generation. “And their idea of the American dream is radically different from previous generations of Americans.”
Hip-Hop Studies
In addition to hosting a forum on Hip Hop this quarter, “The Hip-Hop Generation: Race, Gender & the Vote,” Kitwana is teaching a class in the “Politics of the Hip-Hop Generation,” which will explain the distinct world view of the hip-hop generation.
“The Politics of the Hip-Hop Generation,” a class that has attracted more than 150 students, is not, though, a music-driven class, says Kitwana.
In the class, which integrates scholarly work in political science, black studies, film, critical race theory, essays on hip-hop culture and global economics, Kitwana will explain his narrative of the origins of hip hop—he believes that the emergence of hip-hop is directly linked to the rise of the urban underclass in the 1970s and the prison crisis that emerged that decade. “You can’t understand the hip-hop generation without understanding global economics,” said Kitwana. “It’s the negative aspects of global economic policy that have shaped public policy toward the hip-hop generation.”
Another goal of the class is to explain the economic and sociological ingredients that have spawned the violence, gang-idolized hip hop genre known as “gangsta rap.” Kitwana will pair readings, such as E.A.R.L, the autobiography of rapper DMX, and Queens Reign Supreme, a chronicle of the rise of hip-hop in the southeastern section of Queens, N.Y., the origin of numerous rappers such as 50 Cent and Ja Rule, with sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy’s Black Picket Fences, a book about the black middle class.
Post Hip-Hop Generation
Though he previously taught classes on hip hop, the native of Long Island, N.Y., is especially excited about his experience at Chicago. It’s the first time, that he has had a chance to teach a class to the post hip-hop generation.
Kitwana grew up with hip-hop as an emerging art form. But his students have come of age with hip-hop as part of mainstream American popular culture. “I’m really interested to hear the perspective of students who grew up with hip hop, who didn’t know a world without it as part of the mainstream.”
By Josh Schonwald
