Won't Stop for Nothing

By Kristina Rizga, WireTap. Posted April 21, 2006.

Jeff Chang is a nationally acclaimed author, but he's also much more than that. When I met him as a board member for a San Francisco-based association of progressive journalists, he was writing a book and volunteering his time to teach classes and organize fundraisers for several organizations. A year later, when he released Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, he used many of the book release parties to benefit community-based organizations across the country.

Chang will tell you he's not unusual. He sees himself as part of a movement that includes thousands of hip-hop activists, artists and fans for whom hip-hop has grown into both a global lifestyle and a form of political engagement. His work chronicles the diverse history of this movement and aims to show the world that hip-hop is much more than the Sprite, ass, cars, and diamonds you'll see on Viacom-owned MTV and BET.

Chang recently returned from a book tour for the paperback edition of Can't Stop Won't Stop. WireTap Magazine caught up with him to talk about hip-hop and national politics, lessons learned in effective youth organizing and why so many still fail to take notice of the increasing political engagement among young Americans.

WireTap: Now that we have had more than a year to look back on the organizing efforts around the Kerry-Bush battle, what are some of the lessons we learned in organizing young people?

Jeff Chang: Well, there are a few. For one, people couldn't focus at all on the candidates themselves. That kind of stuff just drove people crazy. You know, you'd come and tell people to vote and they immediately say, "What can Kerry or Bush do for me?" and what organizers had to do was deflect that and get it back down to local issues that are happening in people's backyards -- "Are you mad about how people have been policing your neighborhood? Are you mad about the way schools have been underfunded and closed? Are you mad about the fact financial aid has been completely wiped out?" You have to really de-center the presidential election in order to get people to go out and vote.

Photo credit: B+

The other surprising thing was that there was a very big desire for people to be able to express their disgust with the way that the country is going. So the other part of it was to talk about voting within the framework of political change, generally. That this is just one other tool to express your disgust with the war or the way that foreign policy is going. Or even the fact that your friends are coming home wounded and scarred or in body bags.

One of the things I've been working really hard to put out there is that there were like 4 million new voters between the ages of 18 and 29 in 2004 -- out of the 20 million that came out. In other words, here was a surge of 20 percent. Of the 4 million new voters, over 2 million of them were black and Latino, and we can probably presume urban as well. For me, that was evidence that the hip-hop generation was coming to the polls. People should take that as a major victory, but there was such a rush to judge young people because of Kerry's loss. I suspect that young people will be coming out in even bigger numbers and we'll continue to see large numbers of blacks, Latinos and urban folks getting out to vote.

WT: Now that there is more data out there showing increases in political engagement among young people, have you noticed mainstream media talking about it more?

JC: Last winter there were a number of articles that came out saying, "Oh! A lot of young people went out and voted after all!" We heard it literally a year after the fact. It was almost like a correction type of article that came out. For a while I was getting an upsurge of calls from papers because I just blogged about it. The few researchers had issued final reports, and that gave people a news peg. Again, they were interviewing people my age and older. They weren't talking to young people about this stuff.

I think generally the reporting on young people and voting has been incredibly poor. It's not hard to go walk down the street and find somebody who doesn't want to vote. It's also not hard to find someone who did vote, but there's an established frame of "young people who are politically apathetic" that was put in a place 15 years ago and hasn't been shifted. The mainstream coverage of youth voting really disgusts me. It's completely out of step with what is happening on the ground. So hopefully we will try to change that this year.

Jeff Chang is currently working on a book on the aesthetics of hip-hop.

Kristina Rizga edits WireTap — AlterNet’s youth-oriented project.

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