Bigger Than Hip-Hop

"It's bigger!" roared T.J. Crawford. "It's bigger!" the crowd shouted back, in traditional call-and-response fashion. "It's bigger than hip hop!"

Crawford, chairman of the National Hip Hop Political Convention (NHHPC), deployed the hook of a song by hip hop's iconic "conscious" group, dead prez, to bring home the point: Members of what marketers have labeled the "hip-hop generation" are concerned with much more than just nodding their heads to the beat. Politics is more important -- bigger! -- than music for activists who have felt swept aside and demobilized by black elders whose outlook was forged in the crucible of civil rights organizing. These young crews, along with the elders who hang with them on political issues, aim to seize leadership of what's left of the movement -- although they're not quite sure how to do it.

Hip-hop politics emerged from the musical movement launched in the South Bronx in the late '70s -- itself a reaction to the unfinished business, the arrested development, of black politics. The late-'60s demise of segregation allowed black professionals to escape the inner city, to climb corporate ladders and achieve elected offices. However, budding corporate executives and elected officials have little use for mass movements, except on election days or when corporate careers are threatened by institutional racism. As a class, these "New Negroes" left the rest of the African American population still locked in the ghetto, to their own devices.

"The birth of hip hop, the environment, grew out of the early '70s, police brutality, poverty, unemployment -- all these social ills that were affecting marginalized and oppressed people," says Angelica Salazar, an ethnic studies major at University of California, Berkeley, and an activist in the Coalition for Black-Brown Unity and the NHHPC movement. "One of the reasons that hip hop has been so globally successful -- so critical in reaching our people and crossing borders -- is that every marginalized people who have been oppressed and put into 'reservations' can relate to that experience. You are trying to recreate what was stolen from you."

Looking to put black politics back on track, 4,000 people from across the nation, mostly but not entirely African American, flocked to multiple venues on Chicago's South Side for the convention. They hoped to build on the work of the first NHHPC, which took place in Newark, New Jersey in 2004.

The Chicago affair, like its Newark predecessor, strained to tackle the two fundamental questions that are constantly posed to younger blacks: Is there a generational divide among African American activists, or are the fissures more complicated? And how can the cultural force of hip hop be directed to affect social change?

The old school

Despite the gains that African Americans have made since segregation, social change is still very much needed. But a mass black movement has floundered. According to NAACP chairman Julian Bond, there were 10,000 separate anti-racist actions in the year 1963 alone. In the current era, one is hard-pressed to name a significant anti-racist demonstration in any given year.

While the older generation of civil rights activists is marching on, they're no longer at the front of the action. Last year, 20,000 braved Atlanta's August heat to demand reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in a march organized by the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, black churches and civic groups, and a strong union contingent. But considerably less than half the participants could reasonably be called youthful. "It was a significantly older crowd," says Bruce Dixon, Atlanta-based editor of BlackCommentator.com (of which I am executive editor) and longtime activist. "Back in the days when a real movement existed, the crowd would have been nine-tenths youth."