The Hip-Hop Generation Can Call For Peace

This past weekend, as we mourned the countless victims of 9/11 and built with each other in passionate conversations on what to do next, President George W. Bush finally and unequivocally declared war.

He ordered a call-up of 50,000 reservists--the first step towards reinstituting the draft--while preparing Americans for a long, ground war that could leave many innocent Afghanis dead or displaced. Reversing the Powell doctrine to seize upon a desire for vengeance, he warned that there may be no forseeable end to this war, and declared no specific enemy.

This does not bode well for the hip-hop generation. As STORM, the Bay Area hip-hop activist organization says, "Increasingly, safety at home will require justice abroad." Bush's open-ended war could leave us increasingly insecure, subject to more terror not less, with less justice for all in the world.

Because of its history, the global hip-hop generation can play a crucial moral role in the call for peace--peace on the streets where we live, and a global peace free from terror.

At one time, others dissed our generation by saying that we were privileged, that we had never been tested by war. [This was before Bush's father opened the Persian Gulf War.] The fact is that hip-hop was born under the conditions of war. It grew and spread as a global alternative to war.

""Hip Hop" Phat Lip 4.2"

Before hip-hop, during the early 1970s, Jamaica's bloody tribal wars fostered a music and culture of defiance in roots, dancehall and dub reggae. This music and culture--a safe space from the bloody gang runnings on the street--immigrated to the Bronx--a space so devastated by deindustrialization and governmental neglect that when Ronald Reagan visited in 1980, he declared that it looked like London after World War II. In the Bronx, the Universal Zulu Nation, hip-hop's first institution and organization, literally emerged from a peace forged between racially divided, warring gangs.

As Reagan took office, immigration was rapidly browning the face of America. The "culture war" was declared--a way to contain the nation's growing diversity. Culture warriors went after youth in their schools; they fought multiculturalism, ethnic studies, and affirmative action. In Congress, they sought limits on movie and music content.

	"Hip-hop turned out to be everything they detested--it was real, truth-telling, unapologetic, and, worst of all, their kids loved it."

Hip-hop turned out to be everything they detested--it was real, truth-telling, unapologetic, and, worst of all, their kids loved it. Imagine how they felt when Chuck D enlisted millions into the opposition by rhyming, "They'll never care for the brothers and sisters cause the country has us up for a war."

In one sense, hip-hop won the culture war. By the end of the 80s, Public Enemy and Spike Lee, John Singleton and N.W.A., and other brothers and sisters had crashed the lily-white pop culture mainstream. Hip-hop became the single most potent global youth force in a generation.

But the culture war had serious political consequences, too. Right-wingers manufactured the conditions--moving drugs and guns into the ghetto via the wars in Central America--for a resurgence of gang warfare. And they succeeded in stigmatizing inner-city gangs--whose ranks, of course, were swoll with young, poor people of color--as mindlessly, irredeemably violent and evil.

Hip-hop reveled in the young generation's diversity. The culture warriors taught other generations to be afraid of it. When the 90s came, they warned of a coming wave of juvenile crime, one that would crest with the darkening demographic surge.

Their apocalyptic predications began a dramatic shift in juvenile justice, away from rehabilitation towards incarceration. 48 states made their juvenile crime statutes more punitive. Dozens of cities instituted curfews, anti-cruising laws, and sweep ordinances (which were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but have reappeared in many cities).