by Mark Anthony Neal for the New Black Magazine
Bakari Kitwana is of that generation of African Americans that became adults in the late 1980s as blight and economic depression overtook American inner cities and the fiery rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan and a cacophony of black nationalist rap (like Public Enemy and KRS-One) conspired to reclaim the legacy of 1960s-styled black power politics.
A child of hip-hop, Kitwana found his own political grounding working closely with author and critic Haki Madhubuti, eventually becoming the editorial director of Madhubuti’s Third World Press. Kitwana later became executive editor of The Source, in what was arguably the “golden-era” of the magazine’s political commentary.
With the publication of his book ‘The Hip-Hop Generation’ in 2002, Kitwana established himself as one of the most important commentators on race and hip-hop culture. His new book, ‘Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality or Race in America’ explores the telling reality that hip-hop perhaps represents the best chance for cross-racial political mobilization.
There’s a lot of nostalgia these days for the era when groups like Public Enemy, X-Clan, and Boogie Down Productions seemed to be on everybody’s boom-box.
I think that there is a nostalgia that people have for what they call the golden era, which is why I hate the term. I used to say that the only thing that was golden about it, was that the marker of success was the album going gold (500, 000 units). If you look at the evolution of the hip-hop political movement you have to place people like Chuck D, KRS-One, X-Clan and others in that conversation, but at the same time if we are serious about politics, we have to acknowledge that the politics [those artists] were espousing, in those days, was a 1960s politics.
It was a mouthing of 60s rhetoric — sound-bites from Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Khalid Muhammed and Farrakhan. We were in the midst of a holdover of the early 70s movement. Those early artists weren’t yet articulating a hip-hop generation specific politics. Ironically enough, I think that it was NWA that was one of the first groups to start to articulate a hip-hop specific politics, even though they didn’t frame it like that. I think that the evolution of a hip-hop politics in the music comes about haphazardly, not consciously.
So what does hip-hop specific politics look like?
The younger artists that we have emerging now are articulating more of a hip-hop specific politics — people like Immortal Technique, Zion-I, even Jay Z. They are talking about the changes that we’ve gone through as a generation of young people. The fact is: These guys (artists like Eminem, Nas, Jay Z and 50 Cent) are high school dropouts, talking about their lives as young people who are locked out of the economy, who found another way to still make it in America. That is the economic political story of our generation.
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